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 happy to present This Week in Crypto Games.
Our weekend roundup serves up the biggest news from the past week-plus—this is an extended edition due to the holidays—along with a few other tidbits you might have missed.
Biggest news
Hamster Kombat TON layer-2: After the fourth-largest gaming token launch of 2024, the makers of Telegram tap-to-earn game Hamster Kombat revealed plans to create a layer-2 network on top of The Open Network (TON).
This came after a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) vote overwhelmingly voted in favor of the move, with 1.1 billion HMSTR token voting power in favor and just 104,368 against. However, it's worth noting that the top two voters hold over 88% of all voting power as of this writing, giving a couple of whales immense influence.
Prior to this, the devs announced that Hamster Kombat's hotly anticipated (and much-delayed) second season will be “more than just a game,” with three games now in the works to become the core of an entertainment ecosystem using the IP. Called HamsterVerse, a closed beta is already underway for 30,000 community members.
Off the Grid stands tall: As the end of the year dawned, Avalanche-based shooter Off the Grid raked in some media accolades. Not only did it win GG’s Game of the Year, but the battle royale shooter also won Gam3s’ Game of the Year award and made it to a Rolling Stone year-end gaming list.
Gunzilla Games shared its 2025 plans with Decrypt alongside the GOTY honors. Most notably, this includes an estimated Q1 2025 date for its GUNZ network to enter mainnet, which would enable its GUN token to be freely traded. Before then, the studio wants to launch ranked and solo queue modes, and open up the remaining 80% of the map while kicking off the game's storyline.
After that, Gunzilla will be looking to onboard third-party developers to the GUNZ network, and is even eying a possible Telegram mini app for the ecosystem. It should be a big year for one of crypto gaming's biggest success stories to date.
Off the Grid has only been available for a couple months, but it's by far the best crypto game of the year—and it’s not even really close.
If we're talking pure numbers, then Hamster Kombat blew most games out of the water by racking up 300 million players this summer. But the monotonous tap-to-earn mini app ultimately felt like a financialized gimmick thinly veiled as a game, and the resulting airdrop hardly justified the hype.
As for Off the Grid, the game impressed both Web2 and Web3-native g...
Illuvium's next steps: Crypto gaming franchise Illuvium announced how it will be moving forward in the new year. The project previously launched three titles that fed into each other, both through shared resources and a narrative loop—but focusing on all three titles has been too challenging. Going forward, the team will prioritize efforts on one game at a time, starting with the auto-battler Illuvium Arena.
The lengthy blog post also touches on plans to reduce microtransactions, add more content, and raise more funding. Perhaps most significantly, the post ponders the possibility of temporarily shutting down the flagship title Illuvium Overworld until it is a “fully realized experience.” But coming into 2025, improving the Overworld MMO experience is said to be the Illuvium team’s “top priority.”
ICYMI
- Telegram game Catizen distributed rewards to airdrop pass holders on Friday, which saw holders receive three different tokens.
- Iconic gaming brand Atari revealed a new handheld console, the “My Arcade.”
- Zoo, a surging Telegram game with over 12 million players, confirmed that its mining phase will end on January 31 and that one in-game ZOO token will be equal to one future on-chain token.
- Sonic SVM confirmed that players of its TikTok tap-to-earn game will receive a SONIC airdrop on the Solana blockchain.
Sonic SVM, the developer of TikTok tap-to-earn game SonicX, announced it will airdrop SONIC tokens on the Solana blockchain to all users onboarded to its game.
The game features artwork reminiscent of Sega character Sonic the Hedgehog—though it’s not an officially licensed game—encouraging users to repeatedly tap a button on their screen to earn items in-game, purchase power-ups, and refer friends to move up the rankings.
As the first TikTok tap-to-earn game, SonicX needed just over a month to s...
- Crypto trading card game Parallel crossed 6 million games played in the history of its existence, with developers claiming that it currently averages 200,000 games a week.
- Telegram game Cat Gold Miner announced that its token will be listed on Bitget, Gate, MEXC, and other exchanges on Thursday, January 9.
- Someone turned the iconic first-person shooter Doom into a CAPTCHA human verification challenge.
We’ve all been there—trying to access a website, only to face the dreaded CAPTCHA. But what if, instead of matching obscured letters, ducks, or stairs, you could blast demons from hell? That’s the premise of Doom CAPTCHA, a new project that uses the classic first-person shooter Doom to prove a person isn’t a bot.
Doom CAPTCHA is the brainchild of software engineer and CEO of software developer Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, who shared a video of the project on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday.
“Verify...
GG spotlight
Here are a few of our original stories from this past couple weeks that we think are well worth a weekend read:
Look, 2024 was a pretty great year for games, delivering gems like Metaphor: ReFantazio, Astro Bot, Balatro, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Off the Grid, and more. But we’re an optimistic bunch, and we think 2025 could be even better.
That’s the vibe we’re getting from the early batch of games expected to launch this year, spanning sequels and original titles alike, ranging from Grand Theft Auto 6 to (potentially) Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and plenty more in between.
Wait, let's linger on t...
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...
At the start of 2024, the first Telegram tap-to-earn game was a curiosity—an enigma. By the end of the year, the success of Notcoin had spawned a mini-industry that had drawn substantial demand. And yet, as quickly as Telegram gaming came, it also went, and it increasingly feels like its moment has passed.
When Notcoin launched back in January, we barely knew what to make of it. Why were people incessantly tapping a coin within a messaging app on their phones? Would there be a real on-chain toke...
It’s been a wild year for crypto gaming, with some real surprises in the mix.
At the start of the year, who would’ve thought that tap-to-earn gaming—a super-streamlined riff on the play-to-earn model—would become the biggest story of the year? And who thought we’d end the year with a huge crypto game making serious inroads with mainstream gamers?
That’s just the tip of the iceberg for the interesting twists we saw this year, so with 2025 right around the corner, here’s a look back at seven games...
There was a time when you could conceivably play every great game that was released within any year. That time is in the distant past though, and we're now in a time where hundreds of games can be released in a day.
Among the unending deluge of interactive entertainment, though, are games that will pay you back for your time in spades with fun gameplay, unique art, and elements that just wouldn't work in a big studio game release.
There are far too many in that deluge, but we've fished out seven...
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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