From the independent market of Pirate Nation, we can see the current investment ideas of blockchain game projects

Blockchain games are a very unique track. Now that we are in 2024, if you are a light blockchain game player like me (i.e., you don’t focus on the blockchain game track and spend a lot of time playing blockchain games every day), your impression of blockchain games may be that the current blockchain games are becoming more and more sophisticated and playable.

In the past, the blockchain game gold-making models we are familiar with are probably:

- There is an entry cost.For example, Wolf Game and StepN, the earlier you enter, the lower the entry cost, and the later you enter, the higher it is.

- The value of the token is highly dependent on its consumption.Or at least it can be said that players are very concerned about this.

Based on the above two points, there is the "death spiral" problem that has been discussed countless times.

But in fact, many of the blockchain game projects that made money this year are no longer the same as before.

From Pirate Nation to blockchain game asset investment ideas

One of the most typical examples is Pirate Nation. Even if you play this game more than a month before the token is issued, you can get hundreds of U of income with a single number. Recently, Pirate Nation has also received more attention because of its NFT series and Token $PIRATE's independent market.

After the selling pressure of TGE, $PIRATE has steadily risen in the past month

The floor price of the NFT series has also hit new highs

Why is Pirate Nation successful? There are three main reasons:

- The team has a strong background and is supported by large amounts of financing. The game studio behind it, Proof of Play, announced in September last year that it had completed a $33 million financing led by Greenoaks Capital and a16z Crypto. CEO Amitt Mahajan was once a development engineer at Epic Games, a development director at Zynga, and a co-founder of FarmVille (the prototype of "QQ Farm"), one of Zynga's flagship games.

- The game is updated and iterated quickly.

- The regulation of Token acquisition is done very well.

So, back to the topic of this article, for light chain game players, where is the opportunity to participate? From the above NFT series floor price trend, we can see that Pirate Nation only had TGE in June this year. Even after announcing a large amount of financing, its NFT series has been around 0.15 ETH for more than a month. If you buy it at that time and hold it until now, apart from the $PIRATE share obtained, you will have a return of nearly 10x.

This is the idea of many NFT players investing in chain game NFT assets at present - looking for chain game projects with large financing and reliable background teams, and betting on future Token expectations. As long as the team updates frequently and does not lie flat, when the Token expectations are officially announced, many other investors who do not pay attention to the project itself but only pay attention to market news will come in to "carry the sedan chair".

The current "Play 2 Earn" is more like "Play 2 Airdrop"

Why can Pirate Nation's NFT still rise after TGE? This is another difference between blockchain games now and in the past. In the past, blockchain games usually had a dual-token model, an in-game token with no supply limit, and a governance token. As the number of players skyrocketed, the project party had to keep regulating, and in the end it was out of control. But like Pirate Nation's $PIRATE, it is an in-game token with a supply limit. During TGE, a portion of it is uniformly issued to players as a reward. Want more? Then please continue to play the game.

In addition, Pirate Nation will also build a series of game infrastructure. Now you can get Proof of Play points by staking $PIRATE. What if another token is issued for future infrastructure? Then the valuation will definitely be higher than the pure blockchain game project itself. So from this perspective, we can easily think of Blur and Blast. Although Blur is not a blockchain game, it has the same model - first there is a mature product (NFT market), trading in the market to obtain tokens, and finally issuing a chain (Blast) to keep users in the ecosystem.

Play games, but the token rewards are not settled immediately, but are kept until a certain time point for unified issuance. This routine has almost become a trend now, so the investment strategy has also changed a lot. Compared with Axie, who works with the studio to ambush NFT assets in the blockchain game track, and then seriously treats the game as a game itself rather than a gold-making tool, it is a new path for light blockchain game players to gain benefits in this track.

Last year, Parallel's PFP series only required 25 game wins using various races to get it for free, and then the floor price rose above 1 ETH. This year, The Beacon's first Token reward event was obtained by playing games and participating in social tasks. TGE will take more than half a year, and they also sold the Token shares in the form of NFTs. To get this part of the subscribed Token shares later, you still have to play games. Despite this, with about 20 million Token FDV, 10,000 NFTs that can be obtained later were sold out at a price of 0.115 ETH, and the price of its pet NFTs was also raised by players.

The idea of light chain game players: the observation angle returns to Crypto projects from "games"

So the criteria for judging whether chain game projects can make money have also changed to some extent:

- Playability is of course important, but the quality of the game itself is not the factor that determines whether it can make money. The topic caused by the quality of the game is the key.

- The project party itself cannot abuse NFT assets to dilute the value of Tokens. The clearer and more straightforward the project party's positioning of the NFT series and the actions to maintain the empowerment of the series (Token shares), the better.

- It is best to calculate the FDV more clearly. Everyone will compare it by themselves. As long as it is very cost-effective when compared with the "PPT project", there will be no shortage of people to try it.

The most uneconomical operation is when a blockchain game is so popular that we can see a lot of people discussing it on any social media and then we go to make money. At this time, it is difficult for light blockchain game players to have considerable income. We can not play blockchain games, but we must liberate the idea of observing blockchain game projects from the positioning of "games" and observe from the perspective of Crypto projects - can the financing and team situation of this project attract attention? Can the content (game play) presented by this project attract attention? If this project has a token, does the current valuation have a good enough odds in our opinion?

There are even many blockchain game projects whose token activities can be participated in by completing social media tasks. I have mentioned this kind of project in previous articles (Related reading: Counting 4 projects worth a casual low-intensity rub , Counting 6 projects worth a casual low-intensity rub | E02 ), and the Super Champs NFT series mentioned in it has risen by about 50%. (It does not constitute any investment advice, and I will try my best to discover more similar blockchain game projects for you in the future)

In general, the current benefits of blockchain gaming projects are to exchange time for space. Compared with Solana meme Token or Bitcoin ecological infrastructure, the blockchain gaming track is not at the same level as these top market focuses in terms of attention, but everyone loves Tokens, so there will be information gaps in blockchain gaming assets related to Tokens. When they are not being paid attention to by the market, look for targets with high probability and relatively cheap to ambush, and after the market reacts, you can sell them or continue to participate in the game. You can attack or defend. Fundamentally, blockchain gaming projects are also Crypto projects, so we don’t really need to spend a lot of energy on playing games. Playing games itself is more like investment research on blockchain gaming projects, which can help us judge whether the team is reliable and whether it can gain enough market attention in the future.

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