GameFi projects, the beloved stars of the cryptocurrency industry that captured the attention of investors during the bull run from 2020 to 2022, are making a highly anticipated comeback as Bitcoin (BTC) sets its sights on all-time highs.
On May 15, the Ethereum Web3 gaming studio, Immutable, announced the launch of its flagship game, Guild of Guardians (GOG), on Google Play and the Apple App Store. Guild of Guardians takes players on a journey to Elderym, a world on the verge of destruction by the Dread. To save the world, players must form a team of Guardians and embark on an adventure, battling through dungeons and bosses while earning GOG token rewards.
According to Chris Clay, the director of Immutable Games, the team plans to showcase the Immutable Passport and Immutable zkEVM. “The past fifteen months of development have been a whirlwind of laying the foundation for a game and universe we’ve only just begun building upon,” he said.
As part of the game’s debut, developers have allocated $1 million in GOG tokens and various nonfungible tokens (NFTs) of heroes as additional rewards.
Immutable’s Guild of Guardians gameplay: Source: YouTube
In other news, on April 22, Animoca Brands Japan announced a partnership with Square Enix, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, to develop the latter’s NFT hero game, Symbiogenesis. “Animoca Brands Japan will support Symbiogenesis by providing its expertise in the overseas expansion of Japanese projects, global NFT sales and marketing activities, and by promoting collaboration opportunities to Animoca Brands’ large network of portfolio companies and partners,” the company stated.
In Symbiogenesis, players will explore a devastated high fantasy world and solve riddles through missions centered around monopoly and distribution. The game can be played with any of its 10,000 NFT characters, which also double as personal profile pictures.
On April 19, Cointelegraph reported that the classic ARPG dark fantasy game, Seraph: In the Darkness, built on Arbitrum and developed by Seraph Studio, has recently sold over 11,000 Ether through multiple in-game NFT sales of heroes, in-game equipment, priority passes, and more. The game is continuously being developed and is currently in the preseason phase.
Seraph: In the Darkness gameplay. Source: Steam
Similarly, on May 13, Pixels, a casual Web3 game that offers a limitless world of farming and exploration, has surpassed 1 million daily active players. Over the past month, it has generated $4.4 million in token revenue from VIP subscriptions and in-game transactions. In February, the Pixels game reached a valuation of $2.7 billion after migrating to the gaming blockchain Ronin and listing its token on the crypto exchange Binance.
Unlike the previous cycle, new projects have taken center stage in the current crypto bull market. Two years ago, the fantasy monster battle NFT game Axie Infinity accounted for nearly two-thirds of all GameFi NFT transactions. At that time, Axie Infinity had around 2.7 million players per month, a number that has now dropped to 342,353.
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