What's next for gaming NFTs?
GC ALPHA 28
Disclaimer: None of this information should be taken as financial advice. DYOR + I will hold some of the assets that are spoken of in this newsletter.
(P2A) EVENTS & SOCIALFI
The Forgotten Runiverse announced a 3-day event, starting on Dec18
This stress test comes with a new Omen system, exclusive mintable cosmetics, and auto-leveling features
Nine Chronicles x Ragmon Dungeon collaboration event (Dec 20 - Jan 9)
Make sure to verify your event participation by filling out the Google Form
XAI Games airdrop season is joined by Valeria, Planet-X, Riftstorm, and more to come
Note: you need a Key to participate
Footium is launching Season 3 on Dec 19th (pre-season starts on Dec 17th)
The season comes with training improvements, academy boosts, legendary auctions, and a prize pool of 24 ETH (minimum)
Treasure DAO launched its 2-week NFT mint celebration event
Until Dec 24 users can mint a Cartridge daily to win MAGIC prizes
Swords of Blood launched its P2A campaign on Dec 15
Prizes include $50K in token drops and exclusive NFTs
Domi Online launched a public playtest last weekend (Dec 14 - Dec 21)
Unfortunately, due to performance issues, the event prize pool has been postponed
MARKET TALK
“THE $500K P2A CAMPAIGN“
Figuring out the earning model is a continuing process in Web3, and so last week King of Destiny published the results of the Journey of Olympus: "THE $500K P2A CAMPAIGN”.
Let’s discuss the highlights:
$500K revenue was generated across 2 events
A couple of mobile teams are working on crypto-based webstores (i.e. PWAs) to bring crypto payment rails to Web2 players. However, making Web2 users into Web3 payers continues to be very difficult
Figuring out how to convert these players on a scale will be a major unlock (as the data shows), which will be the team’s focus moving forward
$500K revenue was generated by ~1,000 qualifying users ($60K was spent by the #1 player Grail)
The average revenue per paying user was $700, the average revenue per qualifying user was $502, and the average revenue per user was $3.55
Leading ARPQU countries included: Canada ($2,647), Australia ($1,090), and the US ($827), but also T3 countries showed very high numbers: Vietnam ($320), Indonesia ($301) Bangladesh ($299), India ($139)
These metrics display the power of ROI-driven spending from a small set of Web3 users, as players expected a higher return in GOD in exchange for their IAP spend (i.e. “pay to airdrop”)
Revenue increased by 228% from Event #1 to #2
This was driven by the crypto webstore, as it drove 69% of all revenue
I also believe the success of Event #1, which was shared by a couple of the whales, who signaled a potential positive return on spending, led to more (spending) players
Gating rewards can work on a scale
KoD employed an approach wherein existing players and players would have the largest advantage
Gating rewards to progress, ownership, and contribution (in $) is an effective way to weed out farmers, bots, and sybils
Only 0.7% of the players received an airdrop in GOD, however, the expectations were clear from the start, and we didn’t see post-P2A FUD of low allocations
The last day of Event #2 was the highest day of revenue ($87K) as they turned the leaderboard “blind”, bringing this element of uncertainty made whales spend hard to secure a top-leaderboard position
Their gaming guilds and community activation showed that they have a sizeable effect on the acquisition of VIPs, whales, and power users
Overall, there were a bunch of other interesting insights for builders, so I highly encourage anyone designing a P2A campaign to study it
Lastly, in Web3 one project will often set the standard and others will follow, so I expect lots of other games to replicate this strategy
However, only the projects that built a community over time and have a strong product will have the necessary conviction power to make users spend $100s or $1000s on their P2A campaigns
GAMING NFT SZN IS BACK?!
December continues to be another key period for gaming NFTs, is “gaming szn” truly back?
Last year, the Overworld success of the Overworld mint kicked off gaming euphoria, which led to a good gaming NFT run until around mid-January
This month, we see Onchain Heroes surpass everyone’s expectations with the OCH mint, climbing to the 2+ ETH range, over 10x of its 0.2 ETH mint price
The accomplishment of 1000+ ETH volume in one day for a gaming NFT mint was another strong indicator of demand
The demand seemed largely driven by a game appealing to the speculator/trading crowd, but more importantly the expected speculation of the Abstract airdrop. Yet, funnily enough, nobody has seen gameplay yet
OCH’s success is indicative of the hype for Abstract, which seems in line with a take we pulled from Delphi’s show last week:
Areas of interest include mobile and high-stakes on-chain games (convergence of trading and gaming) on new ecosystems such as Abstract, Monad, and Bera Chain
However, if we zoom out and look at the volume of the top 5 collections (see image), compared to the same period the previous year, we are still far away from the last cycle hype (somehow, OS doesn’t include the volume of the OCH Rings)
Additionally, overall NFT sales volume is much lower than the previous year
We do see a spike in FPs for gaming NFTs in the past 7 days across the board (e.g. Nexus Nodes, RG Bytes, Chimpers, and many more)
Predictions for the coming months:
NFT sale models are moving to more developer-powered, meaning paid NFT mints will become more prevalent when we see bidding/auction-based mints succeed, we will be closing into the top (think AoD and Skyark)
Flagship games on the new chains will gain the most attention, because of the expectancy of ecosystem token airdrops and “new = better”
I foresee some of the long-term builders either migrating to get in the spotlight or more of the scrappy degen games (DeFi with game loops) to gain mindshare
I believe this NFT cycle will be longer due to gaming being better positioned than last year and a multitude of potential catalytic events in Q1 and Q2 2025
