Summer has officially arrived. And with it comes a steady flow of releases, playtests, info dumps, and all that sort of good stuff we love to hear in the web3 gaming community. As always, there is so much to keep track of that one article won’t do it justice. But still we want to call out a few projects we’ll be keeping an eye on this July!
Web3 gaming is spreading. Epic Games, a growing rival to Steam as a gaming distribution platform, is onboarding new web3 games on a regular basis these days. Nike and Fortnite are dipping their toes cautiously into the waters as well.
And meanwhile, those projects who have been here all along keep bringing us something new to play every week! The playtests, betas, and alphas are arriving fast and furious. Some require owning NFTs to join, but many others are free to join for everyone, or provide easily accessible game keys for members of their community. We are also seeing more player governance come into play, with Alien Worlds leading the charge in many ways with their self-running planetary DAOs. The mobile markets continue to expand, and the quality of the game releases continue to improve as well.
And though some projects have failed to launch or continue to struggle with funding, overall the web3 gaming markets are on the rise! Read on for a few of the games we’ll be watching in July.
Heroes of Mavia
The beta test for Heroes of Mavia has finally begun. Many players have been waiting to get their hands on this base building, PvP game. The current beta is only for land owners, and land plots are going for over $700! So there is obviously a lot of interest in this game.
So far, players seem to be having fun raiding each other and trying to find base defenses that can withstand the onslaughts. Clash of Clans has shown that this genre of game can be quite popular. Will Heroes of Mavia be able to carve out a chunk of that player market for themselves?
Yuga Labs
Yuga Labs just made their first game release since Dookie Dash. And though HV-MTL Forge has received a resounding rating of ‘meh’ from their community, the game release is a good sign that Yuga Labs is continuing to develop their ecosystem.
They recently revealed a number of details about their upcoming Otherside connected game, Legends of the Mara. Not only will Otherside deeds be part of this game, but also Kodas and Vessels as well. But deed owners will need to ‘expand’ their deed before they can play. And though we were only given a general release date of Summer 2023, I expect we’ll here some more about Legends of the Mara this month.
Splinterlands
Whereas Splinterlands once vied with Alien Worlds for the most active players, numerous changes made over the past six months to promote human players and discourage bot-nets from extracting too much value from the system seems have shown that a significant portion of the active Splinterlands playerbase were bots!
Splinterlands plans to try and completely block bots from the Modern format matches. And they have an additional controversial change coming up where they will require players to stake SPS to avoid earning penalties. Will this cause another noticeable decline in players? Will the Splinterlands land gameplay manage to renew interest in this OG web3 game? We don’t have specific dates for either of these upcoming features, but I would expect to see something this month. And perhaps we’ll also hear more about their tower defense and football-centric games in development!
Genopets
Genopets has steadily and surely built up their app, releasing updates for feeding and playing with your pet, numerous user interface improvements
The Genopets team recently released an update that tracks all player’s activities and rewards badges for hitting certain milestones and streaks of walking activity. They also have plans on their roadmap for an in-app marketplace, crafting seasons, and even player governance!
The game foundations are in place and the team is moving quickly to add new features and experiences. Pet combat with both PvE and PvP encounters is not too far away!
MMOs
Massive Multiplayer Online games are notorious for the amount of effort involved in developing and creating the worlds and game systems. And while blockchain and NFTs seem a perfect fit, and plenty of web3 MMOs are in development, we haven’t seen a whole lot of playable builds yet. That should start changing soon with games like Treeverse, Mirandus, Ember Sword, and Vulcan Verse giving us ever more polished peeks and updates.
