The Hottest News From September

This month, in addition to a blockchain gaming market overview, we will take a deep dive into two gaming projects that have had an incredibly eventful month.

Benji Bananas, a hyper-casual mobile game under the Animoca Brands umbrella hosted on the Polygon Network, saw a more than 1,000% increase in monthly on-chain users since the launch of their latest update.
Gameta, a hyper-casual mobile gaming platform hosted on BNB Chain, took the number 1 spot this month with almost 2M unique users.

This month’s newsletter will also include all the best Web3 gaming news, including updates, drops, and alpha releases from a selection of the most exciting blockchain games in development.

State of the Market

As of September 30th, the total market cap for all gaming-related tokens was $6,155,888,213 – with only four coins making it into the top 100 tokens list. The red figures below are to be expected as most of the market is down, resulting in less attention from retail and institutional investors. That being said, a report from DappRadar states that 52% of all blockchain interactions in the second quarter of 2022 were for gaming dApps.

Most top gaming coins have been on a slow decline since the beginning of the month, but MOBOX, a Web3 gaming platform on the BNB chain with six games and 3.5M registered users, managed to have a good month thanks to some much-needed game updates and a partnership with Coinbase.

Additionally, despite not making it into the top 10, Ultra’s UOS had a nice little pump between September 7th-11th. This >30% increase in price came after a series of bullish announcements regarding the new Ultra wallet and Chrome extension, the launch of the Uniq NFT Marketplace, and several Uniq NFT drops starting on September 6th that were purchasable with UOS. It is important to note that this price jump coincided with an 18% increase in the price of ETH. Although this had little effect on the other top-performing gaming coins, it is more than likely that the short-lived increase in investor confidence had a compounding effect on the price movement of UOS. We are unlikely to see any significant upwards movement in the top-performing gaming projects anytime soon, at least until we start seeing ETH make a run to the upside. However, the recent performance of Ultra demonstrates that projects that can deliver on their road map and effectively engage and excite their community can still do relatively well. The lesson here is to always try and stay up-to-date with your favorite projects!

Top Web3 Games

The total number of users and transactions has remained relatively stable throughout the month, bouncing between roughly 800k-1M, and 15M-25M, respectively. These figures represent wallet interactions within a gaming project’s smart contracts, i.e., every time a user signs a wallet request. These interactions can include:

The deposit or withdrawal of funds
Token trading
Staking
Interacting with on-chain in-game mechanics

It is important to note that this is not a perfect indicator of the number of actual players and doesn’t account for players using multiple wallets or bot accounts. However, it still conveys the overall interest in blockchain gaming projects.

It is encouraging to see these figures remain relatively flat throughout September, demonstrating ongoing activity and engagement from the Web3 player base despite the negative microeconomic outlook. Furthermore, the average total number of users interacting with gaming dApps was 120% higher than users of DeFi dApps, the second largest sector in terms of users.

That being said, this number of Web3 gamers pales in comparison to the more than 3B traditional gamers worldwide. We will keep an eye on this each month to see if the number of highly anticipated Web3 game launches over the next 6-12 months will significantly impact the total number of new users att