A little over 24 hours ago, Yuga Labs announced that Legends of the Mara (LoTM), an intermediary title within the Otherside ecosystem, would launch its open Beta sometime in September.

The game, which can be viewed as a (potentially) fun distraction provided to the community of Otherdeed holders while they wait for the full Otherside experience to be built, is being developed in collaboration with Faraway Studios.

I’ll start by filling in some gaps left in my previous breakdown on the game & then briefly touch on some predictions 👇

The Game:

• Browser-based idle RPG

• Players will need 1x Otherdeed Expanded NFT & 1x Vessel NFT to play but 3rd-party NFT collections will also play a role

• Although not necessary, Koda NFTs will provide an advantage

• Players compete on a leaderboard for seasonal prizes

• There will be a number of ways to buy power/progression & most will require APE token

Essentially, Yuga is using a very similar formula to what was before Dookey Dash & HV-MTL: Forge, albeit with a low-skill floor (click-based farm and battle mechanics) with top ranks being fought over by the community’s various whales & guilds.

Predictions:

As is fairly obvious in the chart above, the announcement was frontrun by some “lucky” traders. It is also apparent that quite a few were waiting for this opportunity to sell their bags. The number of sellers has been consistently higher than the number of buyers leading up to the announcement, & on the day of, 230% more people were looking to take advantage of the roughly 77% increase in the average price of Otherdeed Expanded NFTs.

I’ll have to check back in a couple of days to see where prices go, but my guess is that we will see prices drop back down to pre-announcement levels fairly fast. There is still over 50% of Otherdeed NFTs left to be converted into Otherdeed Expanded NFTs (a necessary step to play to game) & similarly, just over 55% of the potential 10k Koda NFTs have been minted.

In terms of APE tokens (we know that it will be used throughout all future games), prices are down 71% since APE-based IAPs were first introduced to Dookey Dash on January 17th. During the entire 3 seasons of HT-MTL, a total of $987,143 worth of APE has been spent, or an average of $455k per month. Even if LoTM saw 10x as much as the average monthly revenue compared to HT-MTL, this would still fall short of the roughly $7.7M spent by the ApeDAO each month. This is still not factoring in several large token unlocks that will occur in September.

I doubt this means that Yuga’s numerous whales will immediately give up & sell their bags, but eventually, unless these games prove to be incredibly fun or the prize money for taking 1st place continues to incentivize spend, we will likely see continued bleeding in the near term.