In the past three years, the Web3 industry has witnessed the prosperity of the GameFi ecosystem, and the game category and quantity have grown rapidly. As a GameFi developer community, SparkX has been paying attention to the GameFi market with practitioners and enthusiasts for a long time. This time, SparkX and Footprint Analytics, the top Web3 professional data platform, jointly released the "GameFi 2022 Annual List and 2023 Outlook Report", sorting out the GameFi projects in 2022 by various data rankings, player votes, etc. - The 2023 GameFi track is summarized and forecasted from three aspects: project data, ecological development, and project model evolution.
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List details can be found at:data ranking
2022 GameFi Market Review and 2023 Outlook Report
1. Overall review:
2022 is the darkest moment of the GameFi track. StepN became popular, but it could not withstand the downward pressure of the economy. With the occurrence of black swan events such as the collapse of Luna, the bankruptcy of 3AC, the FTX thunderstorm, and the liquidation of DCG, GameFi also ushered in a dark moment, and the market value of the token shrank by 87% throughout the year. The Token of most GameFi projects fell by more than 90%. At the beginning of 2022, the total market value of GameFi tokens accounted for 0.9% of the encryption market, and it accounted for only 0.5% by the end of the year, underperforming the overall encryption market.
85% of GameFi projects have 1000 or fewer users. In 2022, the number of GameFi agreements will increase by 49% year-on-year to reach 2,171, but the number of active agreements with DAU over 100 has been declining. Only 14.5% of GameFi agreements have obtained more than 1,000 users, and 98% of GameFi agreements have an average weekly retention rate of less than To 10%, the decline in ROI in the bear market has caused most games without playability to stagnate and wait for death.
There are still GameFi players who are stubbornly sticking to it. At the end of 2022, DAU will drop by 57% compared to the highest point, but the overall DAU will remain stable at more than 750,000. Affected by the decline in token prices, GameFi's average monthly transaction volume has dropped by 98%, but the number of monthly transactions has stabilized between 130 million and 185 million. Many of the protocols with the highest average DAU are modified from verified Web2 game chains, such as Splinterland (Hearthstone), Galaxy Blocks (Tetris), and Benji Bananas, which reflect that players stick to the playability of the game itself and attractiveness, not deal ROI.
With the increasing attention of capital and the strong influx of Web2 game giants, 2023 may become the year of GameFi Buidl. In the encryption market, GameFi’s financing ratio ranked first for two consecutive years in 2021 and 2022. Although the financing ratio decreased by 2% year-on-year, the financing amount increased by 84% year-on-year to reach 5.4 billion US dollars. It is worth noting that the financing amount in the first half of 2022 accounted for 80% of the whole year, and the extreme market conditions in the second half of the year made investors' attitudes change from positive to wait-and-see. At the same time, Web2 game giants led by Epic Games, Square Enix, and Ubisoft are pouring into Web3. Among them, Epic Games will raise US$2 billion in April 2022 to enter the GameFi field, which is the largest financing of the year. The addition of Web2 game giants will not only enhance the professionalism of the GameFi project, but also break more web2 users. It is foreseeable that rough and unattractive mining games will gradually withdraw from the stage of history.
For more data in 2022, you can read "Footprint Analytics"GameFi Annual Report》。
2. Prospects for infrastructure ecology:
Common public chains such as BNB Chain and Polygon lead the GameFi market. In terms of the total number of GameFi agreements, BNB (747), Ethereum (599), and Polygon (305) rank in the top three, firmly occupying the leading position in the game ecosystem. However, in terms of the number of active protocols with DAU greater than 100, Polygon ranks first and BNB Chain ranks second. Nearly 77% of Ethereum’s games will be launched in 2021. At the end of 2022, there is only one active protocol, Gala Game, Ethereum L1 It is no longer the preferred public chain for game project parties. In terms of the number of protocol growth, BNB Chain and Polygon still rank first and second, and WAX ranks third. BNB Chain is about twice ahead of Polygon in both the total number of agreements and the number of agreement growth. However, by the end of 2022, the number of active agreements of Polygon will exceed that of BNB Chain, which also shows that Polygon has more high-quality games than BNB Chain. In 2023, Polygon, BNB Chain, and Ethereum are worthy of continued attention.
lPolygon Studios will invest in more than 30 GameFi games in 2022, totaling $341 million. In addition to investment, Polygon Studios also cooperates with multiple Web2 brands to seek further development, such as Mastercard Incubation Plan, Starbuck's Odyssey Program, Disney Accelerator Program, Adidas and Prada NFT Launch, etc., further broadening GameFi's growth path.
lBinance Labs announced in June 2022 that it has completed raising a US$500 million investment fund to tap potential projects in DeFi, NFT, GameFi and other fields. Binance Labs will invest in nearly 20 GameFi projects in 2022, with a total of more than 1.91 million US dollars, and its accelerator programs such as Web3 Accelerator Program and Incubation Program have provided powerful assistance to the selected games, including many big names in the current GameFi market, such as Axie infinity, StepN, Ultiverse, Alterverse, Gameta, etc.
lAlthough Ethereum is no longer the preferred public chain for GameFi project parties due to high GAS and low TPS, it is still possible for Ethereum to make a comeback thanks to the strong ecological support and the development of Ethereum 2.0 and sharding technology. Illuvium and Big Time, which are about to be launched on Ethereum, are also worthy of attention.
WAX, Hive and other vertical public chains are making a fortune, while Immutable X and Arbitrum are rising stars. Compared with general-purpose public chains, the vertical public chains WAX and Hive that focus on the game field far exceed BNB Chain and Polygon in terms of average number of active users and average transaction volume, but the current game ecology of WAX and Hive is relatively single. WAX mainly relies on two games, Alien worlds and Farmers world, and Hive mainly relies on one game, Splinterlands. As a game-specific chain, Immutable X completed a US$200 million financing led by Temasek in March 2022. It emerged with two popular games, Gods Unchained and Guild of Guardians, and was established in June with venture capital companies such as Animoca and BITKRAFT. 500 million US dollars ecological fund to promote the development of GameFi. The GameFi ecosystem on Arbitrum mainly benefits from the continuous development of Treasure DAO. Driven by the popular game The Beacon, Arbitrum will become a new trend in the GameFi market by the end of 2022.
More public chain ecological status and future prospects can be found throughto view.to view.
3. Narrative Review and Prospect
1. P2E→X2E→F2O/PlayFi/R2E
Whether it is the P2E craze started by Axie infinity in 2021, or the X2E craze brought by StepN in 2022, after the market cools down, the GameFi projects with Earn as the core have entered the death spiral without exception. DeFi in the game shell The project is bound to be unsustainable. Many teams have begun to explore new economic models from different aspects, such as the Free to own model (Limit break), which provides free airdrops of NFT to precise target users in the early stage, and gradually expands the community group using this as an entry point; another example is the PlayFi model (Nor), The game focuses on playability, and creates an NFT+Token governance economic ecosystem outside the game; another example is the Risk to earn mode (Trident), which allows the winner to earn income from the loser based on the relationship between players, and then Solve the inflation problem of the economic system. The design of the economic model can serve the long-term and stable development of the game. In 2023, teams that make innovations in token design and application scenarios are still worthy of attention.
2. AAA VS. Casual Games
2022 After the market cools down, users begin to pay attention to the quality and playability of games. AAA games appear in the spotlight, and the popularity of Illuvium, Ultiverse, Big Time, Alterverse, Delysium, Metalcore, etc. rises. However, due to the high production cost and long production cycle, few projects have been launched so far. Although the demand for AAA games is still very high in 2023, during the gap period of their development, casual games may become a new focus with the help of fast and interesting designs, such as the on-chain version of matchmaker Umi'Friends, Anger The bird Merge Bird. At the same time, the Casual GameFi platform is gradually taking shape, such as GameSpace, due to the high efficiency of on-chain, and it is basically a popular Web2 game, a large number of product matrices can be formed in a short period of time, and the fun and richness it brings is also very high. In addition, the combination of multiple games also makes the economic model of the entire platform more robust, reducing the risk of a single game's short life cycle in the Play-to-Earn era.
3. GameFi → DeGame
At present, almost all GameFi projects adopt the Web2 Game + token incentive model, and its core logic is still running on the central server, only tokens and NFT are on the chain. The project party has unrestricted power, and in the absence of supervision, it faces serious moral hazards. It is inevitable that Rug Pull will occur in many GameFi projects. On the other hand, On-Chain Game puts the core logic and game assets of the game on the chain, which is more in line with the basic attributes of blockchain decentralization, license-free, and combinable. The project party cannot unilaterally change the rules of the game, but allows players to have the dominance of the game. Players can create props and assets in the game under the constraints of the basic rules. Roles or props between different full-chain games can be interoperable and combined. However, full-chain games have very high requirements for network performance. The computing speed and cost of the existing public chain limit the development of full-chain games. As various Rollup solutions gradually mature, it is expected to gradually break through the performance bottleneck of full-chain games in the future. . The On Chain Game teams currently being explored, such as Dark Forest, Lattice, MatchboxDAO, Topology, etc., will continue to pay attention in 2023.
4. Land → Metaverse
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clickthis article, you can read about the development of the GameFi model.
Summary and thanks
From the data point of view, 2022 is a year of ups and downs for the encryption market. However, judging from the proportion of on-chain transactions and the proportion of Web3 investment and financing, GameFi is still a strong industry driving force in the crypto winter. Aside from superficial data, the joining of Web2 game giants and game professionals, focusing on the construction and development of ecological infrastructure related to Web3 games, and the interoperability and integration of projects in the GameFi field are still signs of optimistic development in this industry. With the improvement of the infrastructure of each public chain, new gameplays and innovative economic models have emerged one after another, and the highly anticipated AAA games that focus more on the gaming experience will gradually go online after intensive research and development in 2021 and 2022. In 2023 2019 was a year to look forward to in the GameFi space.
On March 15, 2023, SparkX will hold a Twitter Space with Footprint Analytics, inviting well-known project parties and KOLs to chat about GameFi's 2022 and the highly anticipated 2023! Wonderful not to be missed! Welcome to click the link below to make an appointment!
2022 GAMEFI Annual List Review:Click to make an appointment Space
Sponsor introduction:
SparkX: Based on mainland game developers, DAO for overseas and Web3 developers. The core contributors come from T 1 Internet company + Web3 background, and are committed to being a bridge from Web2 to Web3, empowering high-quality developers in all aspects.
Footprint Analytics: The first Crypto field to support no-code data analysis platform. The platform also provides a unified data API, allowing users to quickly retrieve NFT, GameFi and DeFi data of more than 24 public chain ecologies.
contact us:SparkX Twitter、Footprint Analytics
Special thanks:
Thanks to Degame, CARV, VIP 3, ABGA, Wlabs, and GMA partners for their support for the voting list, and thanks to Jinse Finance, Foresight News, Odaily, Web3 Caff, and Deep Tide TechFlow for their support in announcing the list!
