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
Parallel dev’s Colony: The team behind the buzzy Parallel NFT card game on Ethereum and Base isn’t resting on its laurels. On Thursday, Parallel Studios dropped a meaty whitepaper for Colony, its generative AI-driven “survival simulation”—and there’s a twist: It’ll run on Solana. The game will revolve around player-owned AI “agents” that play independently in a 3D world and may or may not respond to your commands. Sounds ambitious.
‘Parallel’ Creator Details ‘Colony’ AI Game on Solana, Pushing PRIME to All-Time High Price
Ethereum NFT card-battling game Parallel only launched its open beta at the end of last month, but Parallel Studios is already charging ahead into its next crypto game—and it’s being built on Solana instead. Colony, which the studio has previously teased, has now been extensively detailed in a whitepaper released late Thursday, offering a deep dive into a game that will build upon the foundations of the Parallel universe with very different gameplay—and on a new chain, too. Described as a “survi...
You can find more detail in our news coverage or via the whitepaper itself, but know this: Parallel’s PRIME token on Ethereum has spiked 33% over the past week as many other gaming tokens have fallen, hitting a new all-time high Sunday afternoon.
Prices rise and cool: Last weekend, many gaming tokens saw skyrocketing gains. In the last week, most of them have cooled down and corrected, as a quick glance at CoinGecko’s GameFi category shows. There's been a lot of red over the last seven days. But in addition to PRIME’s surge, Ethereum gaming network Ronin saw its RON token spike to a new all-time high price midweek after more than two years.
Ronin Hits All-Time High Price as Ethereum Gaming Network Hosts Free ‘Kaidro’ NFT Mint
Ronin, a gaming-centric Ethereum scaling network, continued its recent ascent early Wednesday, setting a new all-time high price to beat its previous record from 2022. The RON token spiked to $4.45 early Monday, though it has since cooled slightly to $4.31 as of this writing, per data from CoinGecko. It’s still up 12% on the day, and the latest surge has pushed its seven-day gains to a whopping 53% following a weekend pump. The previous all-time high Ronin price was $4.29, set in January 2022—be...
Airdrop mania continues: Another week, another batch of games and gaming projects readying their token drops and asking players to hop in and earn. BlockGames (BLOCK) is arguably the biggest in the last week or so, based on the Twitter momentum, while long-running metaverse games Upland has launched a “Share and Build” campaign around its impending Ethereum token launch.
Solana Shooter 'Nyan Heroes' Nearing Early Access With Airdrop Rewards
Singapore-based game studio 9 Lives Interactive announced Thursday that it has secured $3 million in funding to support the global launch of Nyan Heroes, a "hero shooter" game with assets minted on the Solana blockchain. And players will have a chance to test it out very soon. The investment round was led by Mechanism Capital, with participation from Sfermion, Momentum 6, 3Commas Capital, Devmons GG, Kosmos Ventures, and CSP DAO. 9 Lives Interactive previously raised $7.5 million in 2022. Nyan H...
And the upcoming Overwatch-like Solana hero shooter Nyan Heroes is building buzz for its airdrop campaign ahead of the game’s Epic Games Store early access launch later this month. DappRadar’s February industry report credited the play-to-airdrop boom with helping to fuel a 20% spike in active gaming wallets last month.
MapleStory on AVAX: South Korean gaming giant Nexon revealed early last week that it will release its MapleStory Universe games using Avalanche instead of Ethereum scaler Polygon, as previously announced. MapleStory is a huge online game that has endured for two decades, and now it’s coming to the crypto gaming world via a dedicated Avalanche subnet.
MapleStory Universe Moves to Avalanche as Gaming Giant Nexon Splits With Polygon
MapleStory Universe was originally planned to launch on Ethereum scaling network Polygon, as announced this time last year—but on Monday, South Korean gaming giant Nexon revealed that it will use the Avalanche blockchain instead. Spun off from the classic MapleStory massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), MapleStory Universe will embrace blockchain elements like unique in-game items tokenized as NFTs. And it will do so via a dedicated Avalanche subnet, which Nexon will use to la...
ICYMI
- We got a first tease of the “Ready Player One”-inspired Readyverse last week, thanks to a trailer for “OPEN,” a battle royale shooter experience being built within the platform.
- Ethereum mech shooter MetalCore is planning to launch its open beta in May on Immutable zkEVM, with the game’s token potentially dropping at the same time. Studio369 raised $5 million in fresh funding to help facilitate the rollout.
- Nearly $250 million worth of major gaming tokens—including Pixels (PIXEL), ApeCoin (APE), PRIME, and Immutable (IMX)—will be unlocked before the end of March.
- Mobile NFT shooter MadWorld opened up registrations for its early access period while developer Carbonated announced a $11 million funding round.
- Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard had its Twitter/X account hacked on Thursday to shill an unofficial ATVI meme token. It didn’t find many traders.
Activision Blizzard Twitter Account Hacked to Shill Solana Crypto Scam
The official Twitter (aka X) account of gaming giant Activision Blizzard—the publisher of the Call of Duty and Diablo franchises—was exploited Thursday night and used to share an apparently unaffiliated meme coin on Solana, passing it off as an official token launch. Screenshots of since-deleted tweets include an image of gaming icon Crash Bandicoot, which Activision owns, and claim to offer up an ATVI token created with Solana Labs, the main development team behind the Solana network. They also...
- Notcoin, the viral clicker game on Telegram, launched a campaign last week to hand out 100,000 Toncoin (over $400K worth) along with millions of in-game coins.
- Aptos Labs launched the GameStack development suite last week to help make it easier to develop crypto games on Aptos—with help from Google Cloud.
- Meanwhile, the team behind the Polkadot network announced a new software development kit integration with the Unity game engine, plus plans for a game jam/hackathon with the Blockchain Gaming Alliance.
- The Ronin network announced Friday that it has ended its partnership with ACT Games and that Zoids Wild Arena and other ACT IP won’t launch on the Ethereum scaler.
GG spotlight
Here are a few of our original stories from this past week that we think are well worth a weekend read:
Project Awakening Preview: Eve Online Crypto Game ‘Literally Wants to Kill You’
Eve Online players are notoriously hardcore. Fans of the outer space role-playing game have spent the last two decades filling the persistent universe with epic-scale battles, launching in-game corporations with over 10,000 players, and developing community lore so extensive that multiple books have been written about it. They’ve also deployed extensive tools and data platforms around CCP Games’ creation, plugging holes and expanding on the game in ways that the Icelandic studio hadn’t conceived...
Notcoin Review: Should You Play the Telegram Game Ahead of the Airdrop?
I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Notcoin. To be honest, I was pretty dismissive at first. You tap an image of a coin on your mobile device, earn an in-game currency for each tap, and are bound by an energy bar that depletes as you tap (and refills when idle). And in the end, you'll be entitled to an airdrop of an upcoming token based on your tapping abilities. It sounded pretty dull. So imagine my surprise that three weeks after trying the game for the first time, I’m still opening it up every mornin...
You Can Now Earn Bitcoin for Playing Sudoku—Here's How Much
Looking for a chill way to stack some satoshis while killing time? One of the best casual crypto games we’ve played so far is Bitcoin Sudoku, one of many such mobile games from Bling Financial that lets you earn points while you play—and you can then convert those points to Bitcoin or Ethereum. Bitcoin Sudoku, available on both iOS and Android, is built similarly to other Bling games like Sweet Bitcoin, Word Breeze, and Ethereum Blast. It’s a simple take on a familiar, free-to-play mobile puzzle...
