This Week in Crypto Games: Notcoin Token Launch Nears, Immutable’s $50 Million Giveaway
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, along with a few other tidbits you might have missed. We also showcase a few of our original stories from the week.
Biggest news
Notcoin token nears: Why was the Notcoin token delayed? Put simply, the team needed more time to line things up. Sasha Plotvinov, co-creator of Notcoin, told Decrypt’s GG that as the launch date approached, the team realized that pushing the date back would be the only way to roll out the token without a hitch.
The viral Telegram-based game originally set a target date of April 20, due to it being a “funny number” and it aligning with the Bitcoin halving event. Now, the team is eyeing up the “end of April,” which means it ought to drop in the next couple days here.
$50M in Immutable rewards: The Main Quest is a rewards program that incentivizes players with up to $50 million worth of token rewards for playing games and interacting with Immutable’s new zkEVM network—a layer-2 Ethereum gaming network built with Polygon zkEVM tech.
Billed as the largest crypto gaming rewards program to date, players can also earn rewards for using decentralized exchanges and other apps on the network, providing liquidity for trading pools, and for trading Immutable NFTs.
Charles Hoskinson’s game: A studio from Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has released a fast-paced, sci-fi shooter on GalaChain—rather than his own network. Hoskinson is a board member of RFLXT, the company behind the newly released game, and the studio is a portfolio company of Hoskinson’s Input Output Global.
Voyager: Ascension is a relaunch of a Web2 game called Overload by some of the creators of old-school classic shooter, Descent. This time, the game is available for free (rather than for $30 on Steam) and will have some Web3 features implemented. While this game launched on GalaChain, RFLXT has plans to work with Cardano games in the future.
ICYMI
- Animoca Brands Japan announced a collaboration with creators of the Final Fantasy franchise, Square Enix, to boost global marketing and adoption of the Symbiogenesis game and its associated NFTs.
- Puffverse, a gaming project that started on BNB Chain, is migrating over to Ethereum scaling network Ronin, and will launch a play-to-earn party game. The project also raised $3 million in a round led by Animoca Brands.
- InfiniGods, the mobile gaming studio behind King of Destiny, secured a $8 million Series A funding round from VC firm Pantera Capital.
- Heroes of Mavia reworked its token unlock schedule after the price fell 65% since its February all-time peak, with way fewer tokens now unlocking by February 2025.
- Ethereum mech shooter, MetalCore, is adding quests that let players earn MON tokens—the native token of Mon Protocol associated with Pixelmon.
- We got a first look at the Ragnarok: Monster World game coming to the Ronin network.
- The Xai Foundation announced that it is bringing the trading card game The Lost Glitches to the Xai layer-3 Ethereum gaming network built on Arbitrum.
- The Machines Arena, an Ethereum-based top-down Overwatch-style shooter, entered open beta on the Epic Games Store, and released its Android mobile app.
- Uncharted.gg, a startup that includes a game studio and crypto infrastructure, raised a $1.7 million seed funding round.
- Decentraland will host a Game Expo within its metaverse world from June 26-29, and put out a call last week for games to participate.
GG spotlight
Here are a few of our original stories from this past week that we think are well worth a weekend read:
Edited by Andrew Hayward