🪩 This Past Month in Web3 Gaming

The year has ended far from the highs of early January, and as this month’s report will go on to highlight, there is little in the way of bullish news when it comes to the current state of Web3 gaming. With that in mind, we’ll go over what happened in the markets and zoom out to look at Q4’s overall performance. We will also look deeper into a number of topics, including:

Planet IX’s growth throughout Q4. Is it sustainable?
How the reveal of new features for Axie Infinity impacted metrics.
The game-related funding landscape in December (the lowest month all year!).
Some noteworthy game updates, drama from Epic and Mythical Games, and more firms and executives joining the Web3 space.

📈 State of the Market

The total market cap for all gaming-related tokens dropped 14% to $6.34B in December. When we look at changes over the past month, all of the top 10 tokens (by market cap) ended on a low, with most dropping more than 50% in price. ImmutableX did see the market cap for its ecosystem token, IMX, increase by more than 60% this quarter. However, this was primarily due to a sizable unlock of tokens allocated to private investors and ecosystem development that occurred on Nov. 5th. Some estimates state the unlock to be more than 200M tokens, or roughly 12% of the total supply. It is worth noting that the ImmutableX team has expressed that many of these freshly unlocked tokens will not be sold, and thus current figures are not an exact representation of actual circulating supply or market cap.

Upon closer inspection, we can see that the FTX collapse that occurred in early November has had a significant impact on token prices across the board. ApeCoin and Axie Infinity’s SLP token were the least affected, but still saw their prices decrease by 34% and 37%, respectively. ApeCoin managed somewhat of a comeback from late-November to early-December, as we dove into in last month’s report.

Although not a perfect representation of the Web3 gaming market, the below chart illustrates the changes in total volume and total market cap of the top 10 gaming projects combined, and can be treated as a rough indication of where the market is heading. Again, in large part thanks to the FTX collapse, the total market cap dropped by 41% and total trading volume dropped by 85% (from Nov. 6th). It should be noted that trading volume for both WAXP and SAND increased 33% and