Utility? No, just disappointment for holders of gaming NFTs

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Apr 30, 2025

Gaming Chronicles focuses on curating the latest web3 gaming news every week.

You will find the latest news, educational content, and game reviews.

TLDR :

After a couple of months of silence from the team, Jungle shared the unfortunate news that they’re leaving crypto gaming:
- “In short: we’ll no longer be actively building in web3 and will focus on developing the game as a mobile F2P title only”
The announcement details that the team had to make a pragmatic tradeoff in doing what’s best for the future of the game
- I'd question whether their chances of success are better in the mobile F2P shooter space…
Some messages of João (the founder) highlight how the community made the team “jaded” in a way. Illustrating that as time lapses without noticeable progress, the demands and expectations of your “investors” increase
- This is also the double-edged sword of building in the open
Back in March 2023, Jungle raised $6M for its mobile extraction shooter (at the time) in a round led by BITKRAFT
- If I remember correctly, many of those resources were used to acquire the “underutilized intellectual property” that the game ended up using
At some point, the team pivoted to a BR/hero-shooter model instead. The studio’s title “For the Win” launched somewhere in 2024 and to date has over 500K downloads from the PlayStore
- Unfortunately, the NFT collection launched in Q4 2024, didn’t end up seeing a single piece of utility

MagicBlock (MB) announced its $7.5M seed round last week to accelerate the vision to become the “real-time engine for decentralized games and apps”
- The round was led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Maven 11, and others
- This seed round also follows the $3M pre-seed round led by a16z in September 2024, meaning they raised a total of $10.5M
MB seeks to address blockchain latency challenges. While Appchains may provide a solution, they fragment liquidity, and although L2s lower fees, they compromise composability
- Through their “Ephemeral Rollup Technology” (ERTs), developers get the best of both worlds, including low latency, Solana compatibility, without bridges or L2 tradeoffs
- When comparing MB to another Solana-based infra-provider, such as SonicSVM, MB excels in an onchain experience with Web2-like speed, whereas SonicSVM is better for privacy-heavy or CPU-heavy workloads
In the context of gaming, ERTs are optimized for real-time onchain multiplayer games that need split-second responsiveness
- Supersize is one of the games building on MagicBlock. A title similar to Agar.io, but your blob represents a memetoken, and you eat other players’ blobs to steal their tokens (all happening fully onchain)
Overall, it’s interesting to see funds continue to flow towards infrastructure for onchain games, a rather niche category

If the Pokémon news of last week wasn’t enough, there’s another mainstream IP “entering” crypto gaming: Peaky Blinders
- The goal is to onboard fans of the franchise through interactive storytelling and gameplay
The initiative is coming out of a collaboration between Anonymous Labs and Banjay Rights (the distributor of the IP)
- Anonymous Labs is a studio that merges Web2 brands with Web3 and blockchain
  - They brought the Simon’s Cat IP to crypto through content, gaming, and collectibles. More recently, they shipped a match-3 game called “Simon’s Cat Match!”
    - Furthermore, they launched the CAT token in September 2024, which got a spot listing on Binance
Inside the Peaky Blinder experience, players can go on high-stakes missions, craft their Shelby-style legacy, and engage with the IP. The game is designed as an "AAA title” (lmao)
- The idea of "interactive storytelling and gameplay” using a popular IP, in crypto, has been tried (and failed) before. Remember Square Enix’s Symbiogenesis?
I question the effectiveness of the Peaky Blinders IP trying to convert fans to crypto, I question their supposed game, and I question Anonymous Labs’ intentions. Just why? Oh, it’s probably $$$