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Sector rotation or fundamental improvement, how did GameFi become popular this round?

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Is the chain game Summer coming?

In November, the cryptocurrency market remained active. Following the surge of ecosystems such as Bitcoin and Solana, many "old tracks" such as meme and GameFi have also begun to receive a lot of attention. Some cryptocurrency communities have noticed that the blockchain gaming sector seems to have entered a "period of intense news", and many cryptocurrency users are very optimistic about the prospects of blockchain gaming.

Cobo co-founder and CEO Shenyu also mentioned GameFi Summer on his social media platform, stating that gaming is a perfect fit for the characteristics of blockchain and has become a typical scenario. In a recent tweet, Shenyu raised questions around "GameFi Summer" to explore the development prospects of blockchain gaming with the community.

Although no one can give an absolute correct answer when facing the market, BlockBeats has indeed found that the discussion on GameFi is not groundless. In fact, since the beginning of this round of market trends, we have been able to see the gradual launch of this sector. Based on recent news and market trends, BlockBeats has compiled the launch process of this round of GameFi craze.

"Refining" Returns

Since the end of the StepN explosion, GameFi has been criticized for token model issues and often referred to as "refining", which has caused many communities to be pessimistic. However, since September of this year, several high-quality GameFi projects such as Matr1x Fire and Mahjong have reappeared in the market and have received excellent feedback from the community. The rise of GameFi has been "beginning to emerge" since then.

Matr1x Fire's event in September. In the cold winter of the encryption industry, even in the highly sought-after field of ZK, few teams can organize such a community event with such an atmosphere.

Old-school blockchain gaming projects are making a comeback

At the beginning of November, two veteran game tokens with "big factory background", IMX and ILV, saw their prices rise, once again attracting attention to the blockchain gaming sector. Immutable X, which was once favored by Tencent's investment arm, saw its native token price rise from $0.6 to $1.12 within a week after announcing a partnership with Ubisoft, an increase of over 80%. Since then, its TVL has continued to rise and has now reached $214 million, an increase of 40.93% in 7 days.

On November 8th, Illuvium, an RPG game built on the ImmutableX Layer 2 network, also plans to be listed on the Epic Games Store on November 28th, with its token price rising by 59%.

Before that, on October 31st, P2E blockchain game Pixels announced its launch on the Ronin Network, and opened up the minting of Pixels Pets (NFTs with instant gaming utility) on the Ronin Chain. They will also be launching the PIXEL token. According to Blur data, Pixels Land NFT is currently priced at 0.88 ETH, with a weekly increase of over 31%.

In the announcement, Pixel stated that "the community has always been our driving force, and Ronin has more Web3 users than any other blockchain network." BlockBeats found that many of the KOLs promoting Pixels are deep players of Axie Infinity. In addition, Ronin and Axie Infinity founder Jihoz appeared in Pixel's NPC. Jihoz himself often promotes Pixels on his official account and says, "Honestly, Pixels has an early Axie feel."

According to Coingecko data, the token Ronin of the Ethereum sidechain Ronin Network has shown a significant increase in the past week, with a weekly increase of 63.3%. As of the time of writing, it is priced at $0.82, with a 7-day increase of 38%. On November 16th, Jihoz stated that the number of daily active addresses for Pixels has exceeded 100,000. Although there is no clear data pointing to it, the community generally believes that this growth comes from the game Pixels, which Ronin has recently promoted.

Ronin token price and network active address count have both rapidly increased after joining the Pixel ecosystem; image source from CoinGecko

Old-school gaming projects and chains were collectively exposed in early November, becoming the first wave of momentum in the chain gaming sector during this round of market upswing. In addition to the landing and efforts of old-school chain gaming projects, the blockbuster games that received a lot of funding in the previous cycle have also recently opened up to the market.

Chain game masterpieces are landing in large numbers

In mid-October, the 3A blockchain game BigTime's token, BIGTIME, was listed on OKX and its price increased nearly 20 times in just two days. Despite the overall bearish market at the time, its wealth effect sparked a small wave of hype and new narratives, with some even shouting the slogan "Follow BigTime into the next bull market of blockchain games."

BigTime is a PC-based multiplayer action role-playing game led by the former founder of Mana. The development team is composed of senior professionals from top game companies such as Epic Games, Blizzard, EA, and Riot. In terms of funding, BigTime has raised over 90 million US dollars through primary market financing and NFT sales.

BigTime Chinese area leader, Dacheng, stated in an AMA titled "Web3 Gaming and KOL Collaboration Discussion: How Ordinary People Can Participate in Web3 Gaming and Profit" that "We are looking for small and medium-sized gaming anchors to invite them to play early games as test officials and provide suggestions. Many people in this model do not take any money and play for us for free, and then invite fans to play together. We will move more and more towards Web 2, and may go on Steam, Apple Game, and also do traditional buying and advertising. If the game quality is high, there is no difference between Web3 and Web2."

Despite the controversy that arose in the community after the game went online, with some claiming that the project changed teams for marketing purposes, others claiming that the market maker relied on KYC to control the BIGTIME token, and still others calling BigTime "BugTime" due to frequent game bugs, it cannot be denied that the market has not discussed a GameFi game like this for a long time.

斗鱼平台主播用 BigTime 做游戏直播，项目的出圈程度可见一斑；图源来自网络

Translation:

Douyu platform anchors use BigTime for game live streaming, which is a testament to the project's popularity; image source from the internet.

In addition, another major 3A work is also being promoted in November. On November 1st, Gas Hero, a large-scale multiplayer online (MMO) game developed by STEPN developer Find Satoshi Lab, announced that it will conduct community testing from November 24th to December 8th and open testing qualifications to 3,000 users. On November 27th, Gas Hero officially launched community testing.

Gas Hero, as the second official game project personally launched by the STEPN team, has become one of the most anticipated game projects in this crypto bear market due to its unique and efficient community operation, KOL linkage mode, and highly competitive gameplay that combines power, influence, and wealth.

STEPN token GMT has risen from a low of $0.17 at the beginning of the month to a high of $0.36, an increase of over 110%. Gas Hero experienced network congestion and inability to receive verification codes after the launch of its beta version yesterday. The official response attributed this to the large short-term traffic, indicating the popularity of Gas Hero.

Yesterday, Lattice's developed real-time strategy game Sky Strife also began testing. Its Season 0 will last from November 27th to December 15th. This is the first continuous game test of Sky Strife on Redstone and the longest game test to date.

Although Sky Strife has undergone multiple trial runs in the past, this test is the first time it has been deployed on the newly released Redstone testnet. The performance of Redstone and its ability to handle a large influx of users is also a point of interest for this test.

According to community feedback, the test token for Sky Strife only costs 0.3 RMB, but now a pass card costs almost 3000 RMB. Users have expressed that "even in a bull market test network, they have never seen anything like this." Many people in the community are also buying ETH from holesky off the market to play the game.