The crypto and NFT gaming space is busier than ever lately, what with prominent games starting to release, token airdrops piling up, and a seemingly constant array of other things happening at all times. It’s a lot to take in!
Luckily, Decrypt’s GG is all over it. And if you need a quick way to get caught up on the latest moves around crypto video games, we’re debuting This Week in Crypto Games.
Our weekend roundup serves up the biggest news from the past week, along with a few other tidbits you might have missed. We also showcase a few of our original stories from the week.
Biggest news
Portal token launches: You’ve probably heard about this one if you follow the crypto gaming world at all. The long-awaited PORTAL token launched Thursday following a huge airdrop farming campaign across Twitter, and it popped above a $500 million market cap before cooling off. Portal is a cross-chain gaming platform designed to bridge the gap between games and networks, and there’s still a ton of hype around it.
Biggest Crypto Gaming Tokens Launched in 2024—So Far
Huge tokens have been dropping left and right so far in 2024, and gaming projects are getting in on the excitement. Tokens tied to games and networks have been among this year’s biggest launches as the broader crypto market rebounds and airdrops accelerate. From Portal to Pixels, these are the gaming tokens that have made waves so far this year, ranked by peak market cap to date per pricing data at the time of writing. But there are sure to be more big tokens ahead, so stay tuned—we’ll keep upda...
Parallel open beta: NFT card game Parallel, which we picked as our 2023 game of the year, is now available for anyone to hop in and play following Thursday’s launch of the open beta. Think Hearthstone but with added complexity, an appealing space opera vibe, and collectible NFT cards. Now one of crypto’s brightest games is available for anyone to check out.
Dookey Dash cash: We already knew that Yuga Labs plans to bring back last year’s viral crypto gaming sensation Dookey Dash, albeit without NFT gating. And now we know that the free-to-play version—Dookey Dash: Unclogged—will still offer serious prizes, with a prize pool of more than $1 million set to be offered up when the game launches this month.
Speaking of Dookey Dash: Unclogged—Rug Radio creator Gabriele "Orangie" Leyva went hands-on with an early version provided by Yuga Labs and shared the following preview with Decrypt's GG:
Orangie Plays 'Dookey Dash: Unclogged,' the Bored Ape Game With Over $1 Million in Prizes
Rug Radio creator Orangie shares a first look at an early version of Dookey Dash: Unclogged, the new free-to-play version of 2023's crypto gaming sensation. Yuga Labs is releasing the new version of the game this spring with over $1 million in prizes up for grabs.
Ex-PlayStation boss joins READYgg: This news flew under the radar a bit, but former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden was announced last week as an advisor for READYgg, a crypto gaming infrastructure startup. He’s apparently keen on NFT tech being used for user-generated games, for example, and will use his connections and influence to help more game developers embrace the space.
ICYMI
- The original Stormtrooper design from “Star Wars: A New Hope” will be featured in Solana gaming platform MixMob, but there’s an interesting backstory to the deal.
- Arbitrum layer-3 gaming network Xai launched staking rewards last week, which will roll out in phases. Here’s what you need to know.
- Crypto gaming startup Gala launched its GalaSwap decentralized exchange (DEX) last week on its new layer-1 network—and there are trading rewards.
- Telegram game Notcoin will start to purge mined coins from inactive game accounts ahead of the upcoming token drop on The Open Network (TON).
Game On: The Hottest Upcoming Gaming Token Airdrops on Ethereum, TON, Base and Beyond
Airdrop season is in full swing, with apps, protocols, and other projects seizing upon bear market vibes and regulatory shifts to finally drop their tokens—and potentially reward millions of crypto users in the process. What exactly is an airdrop, though? When it comes to crypto tokens, an airdrop is typically a way for a project to reward its early users and contributors by giving them a share of a newly launched token, all while spreading the tokens far and wide for decentralized governance. W...
- Long-running Ethereum NFT card game Gods Unchained has finally gone mobile with last week’s launch of iOS and Android versions.
- The Arbitrum Arcade promotion will showcase games building on the Ethereum scaler and offer up $200K worth of grants to content creators.
- Immutable said last week that it has now onboarded 200,000 users to Immutable Passport, a streamlined wallet designed for non-crypto natives.
- Not crypto, but AI—Google’s DeepMind team revealed a demo for an AI tool that can generate video games on the fly based on a user prompt. Wild.
GG spotlight
Here are a few of our original stories from this past week that we think are well worth a weekend read:
OpenSea Delisted This Game's NFTs—Then the Creators Got Their Revenge
A reference to an NFT marketplace might not stand out in a game like OpenSeason. After all, the Fortnite-like battle royale shooter is drenched in colorful crypto memes, including a Pepe-themed amusement park plus Bored Apes and Milady avatars running around. But when the “tribute” in question is the flaming wreckage of a ship next to a dock labeled “OpenSea”—and you consider the game’s title—then it’s bound to grab attention. And it’s personal, too. The burning effigy to OpenSea, first shared v...
'Otherside' Apes Come Home Event: Was It Worth Buying a $75K Bored Ape?
Yuga Labs is opening the gates to Otherside for a limited-time event called "Apes Come Home," which gives Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT owners another small taste of the long-in-development metaverse game world. Rug Radio creator Orangie hopped into the first session on Thursday with his own Bored Ape avatar in tow, and put together this video to share a look at the Ape clubhouse and other sights—and whether this small sliver of the eventual game makes him feel like his $75,000 was well spent on the...
Minecraft Banned NFTs—So ‘NFT Worlds’ Built Its Own Crypto Game Instead
When Minecraft announced that it would ban NFTs from one of the world’s biggest games in 2022, one blockchain project in particular took the hardest hit: NFT Worlds. Two years later, the rebranded Hytopia is now aiming to make a big splash on its own—and maybe take some of the shine off of the Web2 gaming smash. With a customized Minecraft server as its home world, NFT Worlds had minted and sold scarce chunks of in-game land as NFTs on Ethereum scaling network Polygon. They’d sold for as much as...
How 'Pixels' Guilds Will Massively Change Crypto's Hottest Game
Pixels is undoubtedly the hottest game in crypto right now following last month’s token launch and airdrop, with the Ronin farming game pulling in hundreds of thousands of daily users. Given that success, why then is the gameplay “completely changing” in the coming months? It’s all to do with next week’s initial introduction of in-game guilds, a social finance (SocialFi) feature that takes cues from last year’s crop of buzzy protocols like Friend.tech and Stars Arena. Essentially, players will b...
Crypto Gaming 'Didn’t Deliver Fast Enough' on Token Utility: The Sandbox Founder
The Sandbox founder Sébastien Borget argued at last week's NFT Paris conference that Web3 gamers have “lost patience” with games that deploy token incentive models without actual utility. Speaking in a panel discussion with Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung, Sky Mavis founder Aleksander Larsen, and Dapper Labs co-founder and CEO Roham Gharegozlou, Borget argued that many blockchain games had deployed similar token incentive mechanics, but “didn't deliver fast enough” on utility for in-game tokens an...
