Blockchain Gaming World

John Linden, CEO of Mythical Games and a pioneer in blockchain gaming, discusses the booming success of NFL Rivals, highlighting that 65% of their revenue now comes from NFT trading. He shares ambitious plans for FIFA Rivals and the innovative Pudgy Party game. With a goal of reaching 100 million wallets in 18 months, John also addresses the unique challenges of evolving gaming economies and the impact of blockchain on player interactions. Expect more titles and engaging mechanics in this exciting gaming landscape!

Jon Jordan and BlockchainGamer.biz editor Jenny Jordan ponder the week's news. [0:37] Faraway Games reveals its AI agent platform Rift, and airdrops the RIFT token. [3:14] This follows on from the launch of the J3FF AI agent and token in late 2024. [7:34] The Rift platform is interesting as a way of adding functionality to AI chat agents. [10:21] There's also the potential for these agents to earn crypto i.e. acting as validators. [12:32] Youmio has revealed more details of its Maestro AI agent launchpad. [16:34] NRN Agents promises to launch millions of AI agents for games on Ronin. [18:27] Alien Worlds has launched a LLM to help people create game lore. [23:28] Successful web3 games will not play like successful web2 games. [24:17] Talking to Animoca's Yat Siu about AI agents, memecoins and TON. [29:14] What's going on with the price of game tokens. Are they all really memecoins? [33:52] We could end up without any gaming tokens in the top 100. [37:50] Shrapnel's CEO Mark Long has moved to Unioverse. [38:20] Did Fableborne really raise another $12.4 million? No...

Jon Jordan talks to Animoca Brands' chairman Yat Siu about the rise of memecoins, the value of Telegram and TON as a distribution platform, and how AI agents could shake everything up. [3:56] What's the state of memecoins in 2025? [6:28] "We are narrative, story-telling people - money, democracy, politics are all stories." [8:32] "The part that makes me a bit negative about memes is they are being abused by snipers." [11:02] Is PENGU a pure memecoin? Can a memecoin gain utility? [13:18] Will institutions buy memecoins? There will be memecoin ETFs. But this need narrative. [16:45] "Telegram is still the most powerful distribution platform." [20:50] "TON means that Telegram will survive [22:52] Ronin demonstrates the power of community as Axie was joined by Pixels. [23:22] "In web3, they came for the money but stayed for the social." [27:01] 'AI agents can now create tokens and pay humans to do things for it.' [28:31] How Yat deals with vampire agent IP attacks such AImonica and an AI Yat agent. [29:25] AI agents will make it easier for humans to interact with blockchains and wallets. [31:54] Yat's attitude to the AImonica AI agent project. [34:47] What's next for Mocaverse and the MOCA token? [36:15] Reputation systems don't have to just be for humans, but can be for AI agents too. [37:22] How blockchains and reputation can help student loans. [38:07] Why Animoca isn't as focused on building and investing games as it once was. [38:51] "We think NFTs are going to have a pretty big comeback in 2025."

Jon Jordan and BlockchainGamer.biz editor Jenny Jordan ponder the week's news. [0:52] How Jon came up with the Top 50 Blockchain Game Companies of 2025 list. [8:28] Proof of Play was #1 - Jon explains why. [18:04] Soccerverse now has over 1,000 managers and is about to hit Game Day 3. [21:56] TON is now the only blockchain that can connect to Telegram mini-games. [26:08] LINE NEXT has launched its first mini games using the Kaia blockchain. [27:16] Jon found it complex to find the dapp store and play the games. [31:03] The first games have been announced for the new Abstract blockchain. [34:00] The first token launchpad for memecoins has gone live on Ronin. [37:33] Azuki dropped its ANIME token. [40:36] InfiniGods' GOD token went live today (24th January 2025). [46:55] Today The Game has rebranded as Youmio Worlds with an AI agents' focus.

Jon Jordan and BlockchainGamer.biz editor Jenny Jordan chew through the week's news. [0:23] Sky Mavis has announced a new $10 million grants program for developers on Ronin. [3:22] Is the ease of onboarding users to web3 games still a big issue? [7:08] Mobile basketball game Rumble Kong League is migrating to Ronin. [9:50] What will be most interesting about Ronin going permissionless is new non-gaming apps. [11:55] Axie Infinity added $4 million to its treasury in 2024. [15:31] Axie and Pixels believe they can make play-to-earn work as a sustainable business strategy. [16:20] Wild Forest demonstrates that pure token airdrops still don't. [18:08] Explaining Pixel's 2024 financials. [27:34] AI agents doing a live podcast and soon to be playing poker against each other. [32:44] Blocklords launched its Elisa Revard AI agent; people tried to win her hand in marriage. [36:30] Saga has announced Metropolis, which allows AI agents to launch their own blockchains. [38:50] Mighty Bear Games has announced its AlphaGOAT AI agents, dropping 6th February. [44:06] What's happening with The Sandbox in 2025?

In episode 188, Jon Jordan talks to The Sandbox's Sebastien Borget about what happened in 2024 and what's planned for 2025. [2:49] "The metaverse is far from dead". The Sandbox Alpha 4 had over 580,000 players. [4:25] No matter the market, people see that The Sandbox is building and launching." [5:35] "We will have four seasons in 2025. Alpha 5 is already in production." [7:20] A criticism of seasons is it means The Sandbox is stop-start. There's no flywheel. [10:20] "We are in alpha now but in 2025 we expect to go into beta." [13:10] RE: UGC, The Sandbox is following a similar approach to Fortnite and its UEFN program. [14:00] The mobile client didn't come out in 2024 so what's happening there? [15:30] Part of our new strategy is the Voxel Games Program - standalone games including mobile. [18:01] We have two announced games and over 100 applications for the program. [21:45] Will you release The Sandbox PC client through stores like Epic Games Store? [23:22] "The success of the metaverse requires the product, the content and the ecosystem." [26:32] "Our vision has always been to empower the creators." [29:18] How do AI agents fit into The Sandbox's vision?

Jon Jordan and BlockchainGamer.biz editor Jenny Jordan chew through the week's news. [0:57] In 2024, Limit Break released its ERC721C standard for enforcing NFT creator royalties. [4:55] This level of centralization wasn't controversial with NFTs because the issue was existential. [5:44] Feature include the ability to set maximum and minimum prices for NFTs. [6:23] ERC20 tokens are different to NFTs: will people accept such features for ERC20 tokens? [7:30] Another example is tokens that can't be traded outside of the game application. [10:41] Limit Break's DigiDaigaku game will hopefully demonstrate how these features work. [15:00] iCandy has raised $4 million for its forthcoming ZKcandy gaming L2 blockchain. [16:39] Whatever happened to Laguna Game's Crypto Unicorns? [22:44] What is Laguna Labs' new fully onchain game Neo Olympus? [25:52] Fully onchain football simulator Soccerverse has gone live. [30:45] Planet Mojo launched its WorldWide Agents AI agent token. [33:15] What's the point of AI agents? [36:51] What went wrong with Xterio's XTER token airdrop?

Jon Jordan talks to Laguna Labs' CEO Aron Beierschmitt about leaving behind debut game Crypto Unicorns and moving to new project Neo Olympus, which is a fully onchain game using the MUD engine and running on the B3 blockchain, with assets on Ethereum and Base. [2:45] What happened to Crypto Unicorns? [4:02] 2024 was a rough year. We went from +90 people to 10. But the DAO still exists. [5:27] "I accept all the blame for the failure. But I'm optimist about the path forward." [9:08] What was the spark of inspiration for Neo Olympus? [11:10] Why Aron is bullish on fully onchain games. [12:05] "Crypto Unicorns would still be around today if it was fully onchain." [13:15] Why did you choose B3 as the blockchain for Neo Olympus? [14:12] Neo Olympus will be cross-platform: playable from Arbitrum, from Abstract, from Ronin. [15:20] Most of the Neo Olympus' NFTs will be minted on Base. [18:57] The DN404 standard is "memecoins meets NFTs". [25:49] There's no investor or team allocation for the Olympus token. [28:39] "Time-based token vesting is silly." [31:15] What did your investors think about this approach? [34:20] How do you hope to scale Neo Olympus as fully onchain games can be complex? [35:27] Neo Olympus' gameplay is map-based tactics - Fire Emblem with titans. [37:22] We're building the game on Lattice's MUD engine.

Jon Jordan and BlockchainGamer.biz editor Jenny Jordan discuss all the news from 2024. [2:16] The success of Pixels was an ongoing trend in 2024; but it wasn't always about DAUWs. [2:35] Heroes of Mavia was the first big game and token launch of 2024 but it didn't scale. [4:10] In 2024, we saw a lot of blockchain games launching through app stores but no big hits. [6:10] Browser vs app stores and PC gaming stores remains a key business decision. [8:44] A lot of meme-y game coins such as MON, PORTAL, CARV, XAI launched in Q1. [11:30] There was a lot of news about chain migration - so many new L2 and L3 chains. [13:00] In Q2, there was a big change in sentiment with game token prices tanking. [14:11] The rise of KOLs, who encouraged retail crypto to invest in new tokens with often bad results. [16:05] The rise of Telegram and TON as a strong marketing channel for blockchain games. [17:46] Another nascent year for Immutable: Guild of Guardians was not a success. [22:17] But in Immutable's defence... 4 million Immutable Passport wallet sign-ups. [28:28] In Q3, the issue of bots became a problem esp. in respect to airdrops and token rewards. [30:09] What are you trying to do with your blockchain game when it comes to giving out value? [32:04] Does it matter if bots or AI agents are paying $10 to play your game? [32:30] The other thing in Q3 was the start of successful games on Ronin - Wild Forest, Lumiterra etc. [34:56] Pretty much every game launched on Ronin has got +100,000 DAUWs in testing. [37:19] Should we view console game Off The Grid as a success? [44:22] Whatever happened to The Sandbox? [45:25] CCP Game's EVE Frontier is now in closed alpha testing. [46:59] What's significant is these projects are very serious about the value of blockchain in games. [49:45] More generally, the US presidential election was the clear pivot point for crypto in 2024. [52:51] Investment into the sector was down on 2023 but around $1 billion.

Jon Jordan and BlockchainGamer.biz editor Jenny Jordan discuss the news for the week ending 20th December 2024. [0:31] Pudgy Penguins launches its PENGU token, with a strong community airdrop. [3:22] The launch was very generous with Pudgy NFT holders getting $85,000 of PENGU. [5:34] Surprisingly given the Abstract blockchain is launching, there wasn't a claim+stake option. [11:00] Xterio has announced its AI agent vision for 2025 including Befriend AI chat-to-airdrop. [15:32] Is it a pivot? Maybe but a pivot can be a positive change for a project. [16:35] More generally, the Virtuals AI agent platform is doing very well. [18:28] Planet Mojo has announced its Agents of Poker AI agent game. [19:53] Faraway has announced the first AI agent to be a node validator - J3FF. [26:32] Is the endgame that our AI agents communicate and trade value on their own blockchains? [28:05] Big Time Studios' Open Loot platform has announced a $150 million fund. [33:03] Fableborne's had a successful third test with 149,000 players spending $540,000.