March Gaming Roundup

🪩 This Past Month in Web3 Gaming

We have reached the end of the first quarter of 2023! In this month’s edition of the Gaming Roundup, we will take a look at the markets and how gaming assets have performed over the past three months. We will also highlight some standout performances along with your monthly montage of industry news including:

• IMX, MAGIC, GALA, and RON’s standout price performance.
• Funding metrics are down both MoM and QoQ. How long will this downward trend continue?
• ImmutableX and Polygon team up, and Unity adds a ton of Web3 SDKs to its marketplace.
• Pokémon, Nexon, Amazon, and TSM are testing the Web3 waters.
• Disney bins its Web3 team and Gala files a $28M lawsuit.

📈 State of the Market

The total market cap for gaming-related tokens has remained relatively stable compared to February, ending the month at $11.8B. When we look back and compare metrics to the end of Q4 2022, the total market cap is up 86%. Although this is partly due to the upward movement of both BTC and ETH, gaming tokens appreciated from a relatively larger pump in price over the same time period.

The quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) change in price and volume across the top 10 gaming tokens paints a promising picture for the rest of the year. Prices have increased by 109% on average, with average trading volume rising by more than 950%. That being said, monthly performance has been less impressive, with most prices following February’s downward trend and falling by 7% on average. The four standout performers in Q1 were GALA, IMX, MAGIC, and more recently, RON. Each token saw prices pump more than 2x since January and have continued to outperform the remaining top 10 tokens as we end the first quarter of 2023.

The total market cap and combined volume across the top 10 gaming tokens demonstrates how the market has started to recover from Q4. This is not to say that there isn’t further room to fall. However, it is encouraging to see a QoQ increase of 70% in the total market cap and an 82% increase in the average trading volume. That being said, the total market cap did fall 9% from February and we saw a number of large gaming token unlocks throughout the quarter, which had an impact on these metrics.

Despite the relatively bullish QoQ metrics across the top 10 gaming tokens, the total number of unique active wallets (UAW) and transactions with gaming-related dApps has fallen since the start of the year. Although neither metric is a perfect representation of actual Web3 users (as bots still plague the sector), they do provide a high-level look at overall interest.

The number of UAW increased by 5% compared to February but saw a decrease of 11% compared to last quarter. Taken alone, these metrics are n