The most successful "Web3 game" you never heard of...

GAMING CHRONICLES 107

Raiden

and

Memento | Oscar

Feb 19, 2025

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TLDR :

Night Crows’ success
“Cardex” exploit on Abstract
Gamerboom raises $9M

🗞️ NEWS

CARDEX EXPLOIT ON ABSTRACT

Unfortunately, there was a Cardex exploit yesterday that led to people’s wallets on Abstract getting drained
- The problem wasn’t a vulnerability in the AGW wallet, but a security failure by the third-party app itself, related to exposing its private key on the front end of their website
  - I.e. it was a case of negligence by the Cardex team
- In the post-mortem Cygaar said: “A total of ~$400k worth of ETH was compromised across ~9000 wallets”
  - Abstract’s primary focus is now to work with Seal 911 to help Cardex remediate the situation and hopefully refund users
- As mitigation steps, Abstract will tighten its security audits, have existing apps review its session keys, and implement a transaction simulation tool to give users a better understanding of what permissions they’re granting
Cardex is an “onchain fantasy game with tokenized trading cards”, that only went live a week ago. The app was promoted by Abstract’s Discover page
- Although it wasn’t ABS its fault, people still lost funds and trust in the protocol gauging Twitter (remember Munchables on Blast?)
  - ABS has been through a rough start so far, especially because PENGU underperformed people are becoming more critical
- However, this isn’t reflected in the bridged TVL in the chain, which didn’t see a downward swing
Understandably, this has made people shy away from larger liquidity events, like paid mints, and are skeptical OCH’s Heroes Mint this week will do well (trying to raise 600+ ETH)
- I remain carefully positive that apps in demand will lead the way, but it’s hard to argue the conditions are looking optimal right now

NIGHT CROWS ON ITS PATH TO MAKE $200M IN REVENUE

Recently, people have discussed the success of Night Crows (NC); however, CT "couldn't care less" about the game
- Why is that, and how big is the game’s success? Let’s discuss…
  - NC is a Korean MMORPG made by Wemade (the makers of WEMIX) and MDNGINE
    - Wemade is the “world’s largest blockchain game platform”, with a CCU count of 586K at the time of writing (according to them)
  - The game launched in March 2024 (globally), and managed to make an impressive $10M in sales within 3 days after launch, plus generated over $140M in revenue from Feb 24 - Sept 24
    - Out of the $140M, only $700K revenue was generated “from the blockchain”
    - This created the argument, is NC actually a Web3 game?
      - 1mpal shed some light on how the model works:
        Wemade’s games aren’t fundamentally Web3, but they simply allow players to cash out
        Since it changed leadership they have been cutting out P2E and other blockchain features
        “…even when game revenue is climbing, the WEMIX token doesn’t benefit one bit.”
  - Even if “blockchain” accounted for a tiny percentage of the game’s revenue, the blockchain cash-out feature (i.e. P2E) creates an enormous amount of in-game spend (spend-to-earn)
    - Currently, this model is sustained by whales, however, the game has a large-scale botting problem (because it’s profitable). Can it sustain?
- A great counter-argument from Gabe is that this model is still outperforming anyone else and almost every “Web3 game” is going bankrupt
  - Wemade is very successful from a business perspective but doesn’t care too much about its players or the “community”
Furthermore, WeMade has contributed to the negative perception of crypto in South Korea, as it was involved with numerous cases of fraudulent behavior
My take:
- Is there a lot to learn from NC from a monetization and business perspective? Yes.
- Does CT rightfully not care about the game, because of its lack of care of the community? Yes.
- Do we need games like NC to push the adoption of “Web3 gaming”? Yes.

GAMERBOOM RAISES $9M

Last week Gamerboom (GB) announced they raised $9M, making their total funding $11M. Players such as NVIDIA, Solana, Bing Ventures, and others were involved in this round
- “This funding will enable us to scale our AI-driven gaming data solutions and unlock new opportunities for the Web3 gaming space,” ~ Zino, the CEO of Gamerboom
GB is a gaming data layer driven by an AI tagging system. It works as a layer over your Web2 game, which collects your game data and rewards you for completing tasks - “making data labeling both engaging and rewarding”
- This data is then used to train their “Agent-as-a-Service model” (“train to earn”)
- According to their docs as of two months ago, they attracted 955,000 registered users
In the future Gamerboom plans to integrate an entry portal, where users can create their own gaming agents
The company was also part of the Binance Most Valuable Builder Program in Season 8
As “everything AI” continues, good data will make the difference in what creates the best models, so incentivizing users to easily capture data whilst gaming seems an idea with lots of potential
- In 2024, another company called Sapien AI raised $5M in its Seed round, which uses a similar “gamified AI labeling” solution

FLASH NEWS

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