🐻 Will web3 gaming take us mainstream?

Hey friends, welcome back to another issue Web3 Seems Legit. This week, a blue circle (🔵) has been floating around the crypto Twitter timeline. No, it’s not us, but Coinbase just announced Base, a new Ethereum L2 blockchain for dapp builders. What does this mean? Well, you’ll have to find out the next issue 👀.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin continues to hold steady at $24,000, but crypto jobs are still getting slashed. Maybe Elon was on to something 🤔. If you were affected, read to the end of the newsletter for some resources.

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In this issue:

📣The big story of the week. Will blockchain gaming take us mainstream?

🚀The good. The BLUR airdrop craze continues with 300 million more tokens to be distributed and Starbucks NFT sells for $2,000.

🐻The FUD. More layoffs at Polygon and Immutable and NBA TopShot NFTs might be a security.

📣 The big story of the week

🎮 Will blockchain gaming take us mainstream?

The crypto market has taken a huge beating this past year, thanks to our friends FTX, LUNA, 3AC and the like. While we may not be ready to go mainstream with crypto as financial services yet, blockchain gaming is a different story that shouldn’t be slept on 👀.

According to DappRadar’s latest gaming report, on-chain data shows that blockchain gaming made up 48% of dapp activity in January. That’s nearly half of all blockchain activity 🚀!

While the total gaming market cap increased by 122% on average in January, we can’t overlook the fact that it did experience a huge decline in 2022 with the rest of the market. But we also think there is great potential and use case for blockchain gaming 👍️.

So in this issue, we are going to give you a quick overview of the state of web gaming and why we think it’s worth paying attention to.

What is blockchain gaming exactly?

Traditionally, games have marketplaces or in-game assets where you can purchase, exchange or earn “items”, but you don’t actually own them. With blockchain games, items are represented as NFTs, allowing gamers to have full ownership of their assets.

But what’s the point? Well, blockchain games offer a way for players to earn real-world money. This is known as the play-to-earn (P2E) model, which was heavily popularized by Axie Infinity. Gamers would play and earn crypto tokens while levelling up their in-game character to optimize their earning potential. Talk about free money right 💸!

👑 Who are the winners in blockchain gaming?

At the top of the list is ApeCoin from the creators of Yuga Labs, aka Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). The recent launch of the Sewer Pass NFT for BAYC collection holders was a key to playing the game, Dookey Dash. At the end of the game, data showed that 25,525 players accumulated roughly 80 years’ worth of playtime 🔥. Needless to say, the game was a successful use case story.

However, Gala games was the biggest winner last month with a market cap boost of over 218%. This comes after the announcement of their recent acquisition of Ember Entertainment with over 20 million users across 15 games 🙌.

Then there’s Magic ✨, which is quickly on the rise from the hype around TreasureDAO, a web3 gaming platform that provides developers the tools and framework to build their own web3 games. The DAO community members ultimately vote for which games to onboard into the ecosystem, making it a highly community-driven and grassroots project 💪.

🌈 It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though

You might be thinking, wow, this is amazing, I get to play games and earn crypto? While the idea sounds attractive, there are still many challenges that the blockchain gaming industry faces. For one, the novelty of play-to-earn games has kind of worn off. Focusing too much on gamification makes players disloyal and creates an opportunity for mass exploitation. Secondly, retaining users requires the game to actually be…fun.

The good thing is that we think blockchain gaming has tons of potential to onboard the next wave of web3 users. There is an increasing trend of web3 gamers continuing to play their favorite games, despite the token prices 🚀.

With over 3 billion active gamers in the world in an industry that’s worth an estimated $200 billion, the opportunity is massive. We just have to get back to building great web2 games that players love and then add some elements of web3 in a way that’s undisruptive 🔥. Which web3 games are you excited to try?

🚀 The good

💸 The BLUR airdrop craze continues with an extra 300 million BLUR tokens to be distributed to their most loyal NFT traders. OpenSea who?
☕ Starbucks NFTs are selling for nearly $2,000! That’s a win for web3 loyalty programs.

🐻 The big, bad FUD

🏀 Are NBA TopShot NFTs unregistered securities?
📉 Polygon Labs reduces their staff by 20%.
📉 Australian gaming studio, Immutable lays off 11% of staff.

💪 Web3 career resources

You’ve got this! Here are some career resources to help you accelerate your web3 career:

⭐ Talent Protocol helps you build you on-chain resume.
📌 A job board for web3 careers.
📚 A blog article on how to build your on-chain credentials to land your dream web3 role.

📣 Got something interesting to share?

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