This past quarter has seen massive gaming airdrops, millions of players participating in tap to earn gaming and quick play games such as Cosmic Royale, record profits for Tether, Coinbase and Aave, and the continuing growth of web3 technology and blockchain game quality.
All in all, web3 gaming is on a steep, upwards trajectory, and seemingly on the cusp of a full liftoff that will cement its place in the wide gaming world for good!
In this review of web3 gaming in Q3 2024 we’ll cover a few major talking points around the rise of Telegram and TON chain, web3 integrations, the embrace of player creators by the blockchain gaming scene, and other relevant topics
Telegram, TON chain, and Tap and Earn
One of the biggest movers in the space this past quarter has been Telegram – dominating the news with the launch of TON chain, integrated blockchain apps, and the TON token.
Tap to earn has been everywhere with games such as Hamster Kombat and Catizen attracting hundreds of millions of players. And not only have new games generated an incredible amount of buzz, but established gaming developers such as Gala Games and Boomland are even jumping on board. And, in a somewhat extreme example, Everseed has chosen to shelf everything else they were working on to launch Farm Frens, a pretty basic, mostly passive, farming game, on Telegram.
There was a bit of unhappiness among the playerbase with the recent airdrops from Catizen and Hamster Kombat. But that was really due to unrealistic expectations rather than anything wrong with the airdrops themselves.
Ton chain’s numbers have been pretty incredible. Since the start of June 2024, TON chain has seen more than 60 million new accounts registered (100 million in all) and nearly 15 million new wallets created (over 21 million total). With 10 million daily transactions, TON chain has already claimed a spot as one of the most used blockchains.
And all this despite the legal troubles of Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram. Durov was arrested back in September in France, and only recently released, agreeing to provide user data to local government entities, something that is an anathema to the privacy-focused nature of Telegram.
This decision will likely result in a drop in Telegram usage in some areas, but it seems that Telegram’s future will be dominated by web3 gaming – at least for the time being. And with the incredible numbers that we’ve see already, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Invisible Web3 Integrations
Web3 developers and students have known for some time that true integration and acceptance would come when blockchain technology was just part of a background service, something you wouldn’t really know unless you looked into it. Kind of like cloud-server technology. Over 90% of organizations use cloud technology. But the end user never notices because its just a background part of the app. Everything they need to connect to the servers is handled for them,
And this is the goal for web3 tech as well. And we’re starting to see some of this come to the forefront. Not just in web3 gaming, but throughout the blockchain space in general.
Some recent example include Metamask launching a Mastercard debit card that lets users spend directly from their crypto wallet, Telegram’s integration with their own crypto wallet, banks collaborating to use the blockchain for cross-border payments, and inreasing adoption from financial institutes.
As for web3 gaming, the focus has been with onboarding new players, and seamless wallet interactions. Installing a special extension , signing transactions, gas fees for transfers, these have all become generally accepted by current blockchain gamers. But to bring in people who are used to playing on consoles or phones, or through Facebook, ease of access is of prime importance.
As so we have developments such as Immutable Passport, integrated directly into Immutable zkEVM, allowing games and other apps to seamlessly hand out real-value tokens and NFTs to players, without any user interaction. Find an item in-game? It’s now in your personal wallet. Visit the market and sell it to someone else without any upfront fee or gas fee, and you suddenly have an accessible player-driven economy!
Persistent, digital identities that work on multiple platforms are also on the rise. With not only the goal of providing a single login point for numerous apps, but also as an ongoing reputation tool that can be used to reward activity and support of the users.
Expect to see increased adoption of Immutable Passport (already with over 3 million signups) and MOCA ID (over 1.8 million users), as well as the rise of new options such as the Ronin Waypoint and Privado. And also be on the lookout for a digital ID that lets you access apps across chains, because that seems the next logical step, and could be a huge win for whoever can make it work first!
Blockchain’s Growing Acceptance and Usage
A lot of stories have landed these last few months regarding the adoption of blockchain by more traditional companies. It’s pretty clear that real world blockchain usage is here to stay.
Banks are using blockchain for near-instant settlements between each other – a process that normally takes several days with the existing legacy systems. Paypal is hot on blockchain adoption, announcing a new crypto business program as well as recognizing ENS domains, along with Venmo. Both organizations now let users send payments to ENS addresses, Ethereum accounts that have a human-readable identifiers. No need to use those long, alphanumeric addresses.
Lloyd’s of London,considered one of the most premium insurance companies in the world, announced that they will begin backing digital asset protection plans. In short, you can now get insurance on your crypto holdings or ventures, with the insurance backed by Lloyd’s! For the most part, crypto has been an ‘every person for themselves’ kind of space in regards to protecting your funds and assets. Only a handful of platforms offer any sort of security guarantee on your crypto deposits. But with Lloyd’s getting into the scene, that will likely change rapidly in the future.
Sotheby’s, another venerated institution, has seemingly embraced NFTs as art, regularly holding auctions for works including CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, Beeple artwork, and more. They even now have a department specifically for digital art!
Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, has been a crypto proponent for some time, mandating that Bitcoin be accepted as currency within El Salvador, setting up a government fund that regularly invests in Bitcoin, and even planning a geothermal powered town that will be a crypto haven!
We are also seeing increased tokenization of real-world assets. This is still a pretty new industry, but we’ve already seen tokenized real estate, tokenized art, and tokenized commodities. And the financial markets are starting to get into the game as well, dabbling in tokenized money market funds and securities. There are even blockchains purposefully built to focus on tokenized real world assets (Mantra and the Plume Network are two examples)!
The advantages of tokenizing real-life items onto the blockchain include cost reductions, decreased settlement times, and, of course, one of blockchain’s unique features, an unalterable, easily verified, history and chain of custody.
Gala Music and Gala Film, while somewhat under the radar, are building distribution platforms for artists, allowing them to bypass the existing film and music industries and make direct income from their creations. You don’t even need to know anything about blockchain technology to use either platform!
Other instances of blockchain’s adoption include RZR, a digital series released on the Gala Film platform, being nominated for an Emmy award, the tokenization of clinical trials, and the Republic of Palau offering official digital IDs on the Solana network.
The list just goes on and on. And sometimes the real-world integrations come from the other direction. Pudgy Penguins has seen much success with their release of plush toys, and the Apecoin DAO is making plan to launch an ape-themed hotel in Bangkok!
While most of these instances mentioned here don’t directly affect web3 gaming, the growing acceptance of blockchain technology will have a cascading effect on the web3 space in general.
And we have already seen quite a few established gaming-oriented companies testing out the web3 waters. A short list of those includes Ubisoft, Konami, Atari, and Sony.
Create and Earn
Though perhaps not as popular a term, create and earn is at the heart of play and earn. After all, when you’re playing a game, you’re creating content for other players. But create and earn extends beyond the game itself, branching into social media, content creation in the form of guides, videos, and blogs, and even asset creation for the games themselves.
Create and earn is nothing new in blockchain gaming. But, much like play and earn, create and earn seems to have become an expected part of any web3 project. The details can vary, but it generally starts with social engagements – participating in Discord events, posting Tweets, creating how-to videos, that sort of thing.
But there is much more than that. Memes, fan art, story creation, even suggesting new game modes – users can earn for engagement and creativity in a variety of ways. Shrapnel rewarded players through their Insignia creation program, Faraway has built a user-created content system around stickers, and both Influence and Alien Worlds have give prizes to players for creating stories around the game lore. And this is all just the tip of the iceberg. Content creator programs are springing up left and right. Official ambassador programs are moving content creators into their ecosystem. Instead of shouting into the void and hoping that people hear, content creators can now receive guaranteed rewards for focusing on specific games or gaming platforms.
Platforms like Tribally and Fiend3AI are working to combine content creation across multiple games, rewarding users for playing, for posting, for interacting with the community, and even for betting on the results of challenges between other players. Sometimes referred to as SocialFi (Social Finance), these sorts of programs and community engagement projects are expanding rapidly.
Then you have platforms that are built on the idea of user generated content. This includes old souls such as The Sandbox and Decentraland, as well as newer entries into the genre like Nifty Island, Seedworld, and Hytopia. And these aren’t just games that offer customizable player housing. These are projects that let players build worlds, create games within those worlds, and even monetize the experience.
Web3 gaming has already embraced the concept of create and earn, but the past few months have seen a noticeable rise in participation options. But don’t think that we’ve peaked. Create and earn is just getting started. It won’t be long before it just becomes a standard part of web3 gaming!
Play to Earn Will Never Die
You can change the nomenclature. Call it play and earn, play to airdrop, game to earn, whatever. The base concept remains the same. Play a game, earn some income. What form that income takes, and how much you earn can vary quite a bit, the idea remains.
But while play to earn has been around for a long time in the form of tournaments and other prize-awarding events, integrating player earnings directly into everyday gameplay is new ground, and the web3 gaming scene is busting it wide open.
In 2021, during the height of the play to earn hype, players around the world, particularly in the Philippines, were playing Axie Infinity as a job – making enough money to support themselves by playing a video game. And though those heady days were relatively short-lived, play to earn for a living has not gone away. In countries with out of control inflation, players have discovered they could make money farming items in popular MMOs like Runescape and World of Warcraft. But just wait. In a year, the stories will be about RavenQuest and Mirandus and other web3 MMOs that natively support the ability for players to cash out.
Sure, there will always be fallout as some developers discover that they are really bad at designing sustainable game economies (which admittedly, is a whole new beast when you have to factor in real world financials to your game) and greedy players try to find every loophole and exploit they can to extract value from the games.
But over time, this will sort itself out. New tactics will be tried. Best practices will be established. And play and earn will just become an expected part of any multiplayer game. It won’t be next week. Or even next year. But mark my words, it is coming.
Play to Airdrop Summer
Play to airdrop has been the hot buzzword throughout the year in web3 gaming, but the opportunities to join in on play to airdrop campaigns really soared this summer! And though things may have slowed down a little bit, there are still so many play to airdrop programs that you could spend 40 hours a week playing and still not hit them all!
Sometimes the earliest playtests are gated to token or NFT holders, for the most part, many of these play to airdrop campaigns are open to everyone for free. Though many still shy away from the phrase, ‘play to earn’, playing, and earning, are a large part of the web3 gaming scene.
What to Expect in the Future for Web3 Gaming
With the momentum that web3 gaming has, it’s hard to predict exactly where we’re going. But here are a couple of areas I expect to hear more about in the coming months.
Rise of Gaming Blockchains
This is already underway with the launch of new chains such as Immutable zkEVM and Blast, and the expansion of existing chains including Ronin and GalaChain. We also have Treasure, Oasys, Soneium… just to name a few. Web3 gaming has become a driving force in some areas of blockchain adoption.
AI in gaming
The AI frenzy was short-lived, but there is still plenty of hype about this shift in the world. And while we haven’t seen a whole lot from AI in regards to gaming, I expect that to begin changing soon. Whether it be the use of AI to help generate game assets, or AI game assistance, or even full AI NPC characters in-game. Electronic Arts (EA) even wants to build an AI system that will let players develop an entire game from the ground up without any coding knowledge!
We’ll see which of these ideas actually make it into production, but gaming is an area that AI could potentially enhance greatly, so I’m looking forward to hearing more about web3 gaming and AI in the coming months.
NFT projects expanding into gaming
We’ve already seen a number of major moves by NFT PFP collections. Bored Ape Yacht Club with the Otherside and Dookey Dash, Pudgy Penguins, Doodles, Lizard Labs, and just this week, Cryptokitties opened their new Telegram game. People are no longer content to just have a unique PFP. These generative NFTs need to have utility to remain relevant. And what better utility than providing access to a cool game?!
Final Thoughts
It’s been apparent for a while that web3 gaming is here to stay. From mobile to PC to consoles, web3 games are now everywhere. And while the web2 projects still dominate the markets across the board, this year has been a banner year for blockchain gaming. Though it may not be the financial windfall that many web3 gamers seem to be expecting, the space has only continued to expand and improve, and I expect to see a lot more surprises and excitement before the year is done!
Join us here at PlayToEarn while we explore the web3 gaming scene and keep you up to date on all of the latest announcements. With new stories posted daily, a Discord server for chats and discussions, and a weekly newsletter, PlayToEarn is is ready to bring you along for the ride as blockchain gaming is poised to grow exponentially.
