January Gaming Roundup

🪩This Past Month in Web3 Gaming

In stark contrast to last month’s Web3 Gaming Roundup, January 2023 set the stage for what could potentially be a great Q1 for the sector. Many of the top gaming tokens have seen triple-digit growth over the past 30 days and gaming-related funding is up compared to December. In this month’s report, we will take a look at how the gaming sector has performed and highlight a number of noteworthy topics such as:

• The rise of MAGIC and the TreasureDAO ecosystem.
• Yuga Labs launches a casual F2P game that costs $3k. What’s all the fuss about?
• Funding bounces back from yearly lows, but we’re not out of the woods just yet.
• Gala Games pulls out ahead of the pack thanks to several bullish announcements.
• Voodoo, ESPL, and Amazon look to dip their toes into the Web3 gaming waters.

📈State of the Market

The total market cap for all gaming-related tokens sits at around $11.5B as of writing this report. That represents an almost 82% increase from December. This is largely thanks to the positive price movements seen across the board. However, there were also a number of token unlocks from ApeCoin (APE), Aptos (APT), and Axie Infinity (AXS) that, in combination with increasing prices, have further added to the growth in total market cap for the gaming sector. Notably, we saw standout performances from GALA, MAGIC, & GMT.

On January 9th, ETH broke past $1,300 and continued on a bullish path upwards of $1,600. Around this same time, we saw gaming tokens start to pump. By January 25th, all of the top 10 gaming tokens by market cap had increased in price by 50% or more, with some even seeing as much as 200% growth from the start of the month. It is unlikely that all of these projects had big announcements during this time that could have caused such cohesive movement. As such, we can assume that Ethereum is likely leading the charge here, which is important to note in case we start to see signs of a reversal in the near term.

As illustrated in the graph below, January saw a sizable spike in trading volume across the top 10 gaming tokens. A large portion of this can be attributed to GALA and IMX, which both saw volume increase ~800% compared to the start of the month. This further illustrates the increased interest from investors over the past 30 days.

Another notable mention is MAGIC, the ecosystem token powering the TreasureDAO ecosystem. TreasureDAO aims to become the “Nintendo of Web3” and is focused on helping develop, publish, and support a collection of indie blockchain games. The recent price increase has undoubtedly been helped by the upwards movement of ETH as well as a recent listing on Binance in early December. However, a series of announcements, including a new Game Builders Program (GBP), which aims to “support and incentivize” games building in the Treasure ecosystem, and the launch of TreasureTag, an ENS-like feature that will act as a user’s immutable gamer tag, have both helped to add further buy pressure to the token. This is particularly impressive due to the fact that the DAO recently voted to pass TIP-23, which resulted in roughly 50M MAGIC tokens being unlocked and distributed to users who deposited/staked NFTs in the Atlas Mine.

Despite the favorable market conditions, the number of unique active wallet (UAW) interactions has hovered around the same number we have seen over the past several months. This is somewhat unsurprising, as many of the recent standout game launches (e.g., Illuvium: Zero and Axie Infinity Homeland) d