This Week in Crypto Games: 'Crypto Valleys' Blasts Off, Immutable and Polygon Plot $100M Fund

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

A tale of two Blast games: Less than a month after the mainnet launch of Ethereum scaling network Blast, we’re starting to see games grab attention—in good and bad ways.

On the upside, DeFi farming game Crypto Valleys is hot right now as players open up randomized NFT seed bags, plant their crops, and pray for some juicy YIELD. That’s actually the name of the token, and it’s the biggest one being traded on Blast as of Saturday.

 NFT Revolution

DeFi Farming Game 'Crypto Valleys' Is Giving Players Juicy YIELD on Ethereum L2 Blast

Gaming activity is bubbling up on buzzy new Ethereum scaler Blast, and while one game has already fallen victim to an exploit on the nascent network, another is yielding rave reviews from players while driving Blast’s most-traded token. Crypto Valleys is the game in question, and it initially appears to tread upon similar ground as Pixels, the popular farming game on competing scaler Ronin. But while Pixels is a relatively robust experience akin to traditional video games, Crypto Valleys—at leas...

Less positive news is that Super Sushi Samurai, a Blast-powered game running in messaging app Telegram, was exploited last week and drained of $4.6 million worth of tokens. The good news is that it ultimately proved to be a white hat hack, and the funds were returned to the team, less a reward fee. The game will be relaunched with a new v2 token.

Ethereum Game on Blast Suffers $4.6 Million Hack—Was It a White Hat Rescue?

The team behind a Telegram-based game said Thursday that it is working with an apparent white hat hacker to return funds to users after $4.6 million worth of tokens was stolen due to an exploit. The hacker hit the newly launched game Super Sushi Samurai, which minted its tokens on Ethereum scaling network Blast. The price of its native token, SSS, plunged to a tiny fraction of a penny on the reports of the hack, which exploited a token transfer bug within the smart contract that powers the game....

Immutable x Polygon fund: Ethereum scaling giants Immutable and Polygon are teaming up yet again, this time to launch a $100 million gaming investment fund led by King River Capital. The fund will invest in crypto games across platforms, though the first few games revealed so far—including Pixelmon and MetalCore—collectively run on their own networks.

Ethereum Scalers Immutable and Polygon Unite for $100 Million Gaming Fund

Immutable and Polygon Labs, the teams behind a pair of leading Ethereum scaling networks, announced Tuesday that they have teamed up with VC firm King River Capital to launch a $100 million blockchain gaming investment fund called the Inevitable Games Fund. The collaboration has already secured an anchor commitment from Abu Dhabi's Alpha Wave Ventures, with additional investments from the likes of crypto gaming community Merit Circle, along with Immutable co-founders James and Robbie Ferguson an...

Saga mainnet nears: Layer-1 blockchain network Saga will launch its mainnet in April following months of play-to-airdrop campaigns, the company said at the Game Developers Conference this week. The token, which eligible wallets can currently claim, should go live then too. The firm is also launching its own in-house game publishing division called Saga Origins.

Saga Network Launches Game Publishing Arm Amid Airdrop Campaign

At the Game Developers Conference on Tuesday, layer-1 blockchain network Saga announced the creation of a new game publishing division called Saga Origins. It also revealed a new mainnet launch target as the recent airdrop claim continues. The publishing arm will offer a "full service and collaborative approach" to bringing games to market, including support for user acquisition, community building, and promotional efforts. No games have been announced for the label yet, though Saga is showcasin...

ICYMI

• Final Fantasy maker Square Enix revealed a strategic investment in crypto-native game shop HyperPlay, and will bring its Ethereum NFT game Symbiogenesis to the platform.
• Crypto exchange OKX has teamed up with Ethereum gaming network Immutable to roll out a GameFi launchpad, along with other integrations between them.
• Xai, a layer-3 Ethereum gaming network built on Arbitrum tech, could get 100+ new games this year via a partnership with The Media Indie Exchange (The MIX).
• Guild of Guardians, a long-in-the-works mobile RPG from Immutable, will finally see a global launch on May 15 on iOS and Android.
• Portal, the cross-network gaming token, rolled out staking features last week, promising exclusive benefits and perks to users who lock up their PORTAL tokens.

• Shrapnel expanded its Epic Games Store early access experience last week with the addition of an in-game marketplace for NFT weapon cosmetics.
• Major crypto exchange Coinbase added Ronin (RON) trading last week, fueling another price pump for the network behind Pixels and Axie Infinity.
• Notcoin has topped 30 million total players as the Telegram-based clicker game nears its upcoming token launch on The Open Network (TON).
• NIM Network, built to power AI gaming experiences, is serving up the first airdrop for Dymension (DYM) stakers—but also holders of Parallel and Pirate Nation NFTs.

GG spotlight

Here are a few of our original stories from this past week that we think are well worth a weekend read:

 NFT Revolution

Axie Infinity's Biggest Guild Is Transforming Into a Protocol for ‘Pixels’ and Beyond

As co-founder Gabby Dizon tells it, Yield Guild Games always aimed to be much more than a guild. The vision was to help other groups of crypto gamers unite, collaborate, and thrive together. It just had to start somewhere. “The biggest problem of any platform starting out is that no one really cares about you, right?” he told Decrypt’s GG. “And for us, the way to reach that goal long-term was to be the biggest guild ourselves. And we were able to achieve that with Axie Infinity.” When Axie Infin...

You Can Earn Bitcoin for Playing This Asteroid Mining Game—Here's How Much

Asteroid mining could be big business in the future, if anyone figures out how to make it economically feasible. For now, at least, you can mine Bitcoin from digital space rocks in the mobile game SpaceY. And yes, you really can cash out the BTC that you earn. SpaceY—no, not SpaceX— is a simple, straightforward idle mining game in which you’ll guide the adventures of a crew aboard a space freighter as it hops across the galaxy, looking for Bitcoin, and sucking dry whatever resources you can find...

How Fighting Game ‘AI Arena’ Turned Its Airdrop Into a Team Sport

Fighting game AI Arena looks very similar to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series, with cartoonish combatants brawling for supremacy. What’s immediately obvious is that, of course, the game doesn’t feature the likes of Mario and Donkey Kong trading blows in iconic locales. What’s less obvious, however, is that there’s nobody mashing buttons to make these characters kick, punch, hop, and occasionally launch foes into the distance. They’re all controlled by artificial intelligence—but each AI has b...