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TLDR :
The Beacon joins Ronin
Gigaverse Raises $2.3M
The Sandbox shakeups
🗞️ NEWS
THE BEACON JOINS RONIN
The Beacon has been fairly silent this year (builder mode?), but just announced they’re joining the Ronin Network. With this news comes the launch of the game’s public test, which was announced at the start of August
The Beacon was one of the flagship games on Treasure. However, it announced its departure after Treasure’s “pivotal transition” back in April this year, in which the ecosystem essentially divested from its gaming efforts
The team said back then their “home remains on Arbitrum”
The studio behind The Beacon, Skillcap Studios, has been building the game since May 2022. In Q4 2022, they released an early demo for the game and managed to gain quite a bit of traction together with its character mint
Over the years, the studio continued to build and managed to maintain a core community. In Q2 2024, it launched one of the more remarkable P2A campaigns, The New Frontiers Quest, followed by the Writ of Passage mint
A controversial, yet very successful mint, which sold 10,000 NFTs at 0.115 ETH (~$3.8M) in “exchange for” 18% of the future token supply
This year, in April, it launched the 2nd Phase of the aforementioned quest
The upcoming public test build will include P2’s features. Later this year, The Beacon will run a series of pre-season events to test key features for Season 1 (launch). And will move to a live seasonal format in Q1 2026
Shortly after S1 ends, the team plans to launch the ecosystem token
With such a heavy allocation to the NFTs, I assume the tokens will be vested over a period of time
The game’s long-term vision is to become a “real-time roguelite with MMORPG elements”. It started with a public demo, and it’s slowly piecing together
A “building blocks approach”, similar to games like Gigaverse and Fishing Frenzy
GIGAVERSE RAISES $2.3M
Just yesterday, Gigaverse announced it raised $2.3M in a round led by 1Confirmation (1C), with participation from Luca Netz, Cyberpunk, Grail, and many other figures in the crypto (gaming) space
BlockchainBrett (from 1C): “Gigaverse has the mix of game design + crypto-native integrations to build worlds people love, and that let players share in the value they create”
1C has invested in various crypto-based companies such as ETH, OpenSea, Worldcoin, Polymarket, Coinbase, Polkadot, and many others
In a post, Dith (the founder) shares some of his reflections on the news. Highlights include:
Gigaverse was bootstrapped to over $1M in annual revenue per employee (kind of a meme, yet impressive)
The last 6 months were “setting the stage” and shaped the core systems of the game, so they can accelerate from here
Dith sees no reason for the game not to break out of the “bubble” of CT
He mentions that at some point in the future, they will focus on onboarding casuals via IP partnerships and grassroots organic community building. From the start, this team has focused on earned WoM
I am quite sceptical of how scalable these efforts are. Plus, when you consider the steep difference between the ARPU of CT natives and traditional casual players, this isn’t an easy task
We broke down this other post by Dith, “111 days of Gigaverse”, in which he spoke on revenue, item sales, shipping, community building, and more in GC ALPHA 53
On the topic of monetization, Gigaverse has been clever with it, especially when it comes to leveraging incentives (e.g., Abstract XP) to generate revenue, as it did with Gigajuice (gameplay power-up). Just yesterday, it introduced Gigaverse Eggs
Eggs will hatch into steeds (mounts) that can be ridden into the open world. An open-edition mint with unlimited supply. 9160 Eggs have been minted so far at ~$30 each (~$275K in revenue)
Here’s a teaser of what that open world will look like
With this raise, it seems Gigaverse is getting close to a token launch, and I am very curious about their approach to TGE in respect of distribution, launch campaign, post-TGE plans, etc.
THE SANDBOX SHAKEUPS
Last week, we received some rumors about shakeups at The Sandbox. This week, the Sandbox rectified some of this information
We also talked about the topic on Sidelined last Friday (starting at 2:17)
So, what’s changing for the OG crypto game company? Let’s get into it:
The original co-founders of the company have transitioned to new strategic roles, and Robby Yung, the CEO of Investments at Animoca and one of the directors at the Sandbox, has been appointed CEO
In 2018, Animoca Brands acquired PixelOwl, the studio behind The Sandbox, with plans to transform the (then) 2D-world builder into a 3D blockchain-based metaverse for $4.875M
The Sandbox is restructuring and has closed five of its (freelancer-based) locations to optimize its global operations and consolidate them into more centralized offices
Staff reductions are mentioned to be triggered by AI advancements, and up to 50%
Plans about its virtual assets, including SAND, land, and NFT collections, remain unchanged
The rumors about the launch of a memecoin launchpad on Base seem true (the most surprising news imo)
Gregory Raymond wrote a piece on the Sandbox from The Big Whale, mentioning that the company has an estimated treasury of $100 - $300M.
Is the team forcefully putting this capital to work by jumping on the most one of the most contested verticals within crypto?
Furthermore, Gregory mentions how $300M was spent on the Sandbox, which now attracts only a few 100 DAUs, largely bots. The SAND token also lost 95% of its value, now trading at ~$700M. At its peak, it was trading at $8B
I imagine this must make the Sandbox one of Animoca’s most profitable investments to date
For perspective, the total market cap of gaming tokens (according to CMC) is only $18.4B today
The Sandbox, among other vision-driven metaverse projects of 2021 (e.g., Decentraland), has been one of the largest liquidity drainers for crypto gaming to date
And it doesn’t seem a launchpad will make the Sandbox a more successful game either…
FLASH NEWS
B3 launches the first gaming chain built on the XRPL EVM sidechain
Fishing Frenzy’s FISH token is launching soon (using “Proof of Contribution”)
Arbitrum refined the proposal to become Ronin’s sequencing partner
🆕ALPHA CORNER
Early Games: None for this week
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