GameFi

Deep Dive into The World of Digital Assets

Article by Sixte C. Edits by Lesia M.

Overview

Big names of the gaming industry have taken their first steps into the decentralisation of gaming. Mobile game developer Zynga, gaming giant Ubisoft and Sega all expressed the ambition to build (or have already built) blockchain facilitated games or blockchain based games. 2021 was the beginning of a strong and lasting hype over the metaverse and blockchain gaming. GameFi rapidly raised awareness among venture capitalists and game developers. But what about the gamers? Will the 2.7 billion gamers worldwide transit to a gaming experience based on asset ownership, in-game tokenomics and decentralised governance? The potential growth is colossal, however we are yet to understand how the underlying blockchain technology can revolutionise the gaming industry. For example, World of Warcraft, a MMORPG game released in 2004, already had an in-game economy and a DAO-like community system. By analysing the GameFi ecosystem we will show how a new layer of crypto and web 3 can incentivise adoption.

Frozen by the current crypto winter, the GameFi craze has settled down. According to ChainPlay, 62% of GameFi investors surveyed lost more than 50% of their profit and their average time spent participating to GameFi was cut by 43%. On DappRadar August report, we can see that GameFi accounts for more than half of unique active wallets (UAW) connected to Dapps. But in reality, according to Jigger — a web 3 anti-bot platform — on average 40% of GameFi players are bots. GameFi is now out of the media spotlight and developers are silently building new value. The objective of our research is to identify the major actors of the GameFi ecosystem and how they interact with each other. We will also try to understand the limits of GameFi and what might hamper it from going mainstream.

What is GameFi?

Before diving into the core structure of the GameFi space let’s clarify its main features. GameFi is short for gaming and finance. The financialization of gaming is mostly referring to 3 core components: the play to earn mechanism, asset ownership through NFTs and the in-game cryptocurrency token economics (i.e. tokenomics).

Play to earn

Pioneered by the game ‘Crypto Kitties’, the play to earn mechanism is inherent to blockchain-powered games. It entails giving financial incentives to gamers who keep on playing the game. Earnings can be collected in two different ways. First, gamers can play the game and earn in-game tokens. Depending on the nature of the game (real time strategy, browser-based game, phone games, MMORG, MOBA…) gamers will earn the token in different ways. Gamers can then trade these tokens for fiat or other cryptocurrencies and earn an income. The second way a gamer can yield returns is by earning or trading in-game NFTs on dedicated marketplaces for a higher price than it was initially bought or created. These NFTs may have a cosmetic value and/or can also include in-game utility.

Asset ownership

Historically, gamers have only been able to trade in-game assets on centrally controlled marketplaces. For example, the game World of Warcraft mentioned earlier has created a complete in-game economy based on ‘gold’. Gamers can buy and sell WoW items for gold to other players. Theoretically, gold is only available through a highly regulated centralised WoW token service that takes hours to process transactions. In practise, gold/fiat trading is also available on unregulated websites that are not supported by blizzard, the game developer, and might result in a ban for both parties. Yet, WoW is considered to be one of the most advanced in-game economies in traditional gaming. The picture drawn here is that asset ownership in non-blockchain based games are archaic and with one point of failure, the central entity which is blizzard in this example. In the event of a loss, ban or failure of a player account, all ‘owned’ assets will be lost. Blockchain based games provide an answer to this problem by enabling true asset ownership through non fungible tokens (NFTs). Such games allow gamers to be rewarded for their efforts and attention by tokenising the in-game assets they earned while playing. Gamers can then exchange value easily by trading their NFTs on secondary markets, move them cross chain or transfer them to other games while preserving their value.

Tokenomics

Financialisaton of gaming requires in game currencies, allowing players to exchange value. Their value stem from their use cases that incentivise gamers to accumulate in-game tokens. In most games the native token has 3 use cases: governance, staking and payment to players.

Token holders voting right on key governance issues is proportional to their ownership share, meaning the more in game tokens a gamer holds, the more influential his opinion will be. Governance votes are regularly taking place to give holders a say on how the treasury should be spent. The second use case would be staking: gamers can stake their tokens to receive regular rewards. Finally, in-game tokens are used to reward gamers through the play-to-earn mechanism. However, to reduce the impact of inflation over governance efficiency, games often have another token to reward gamers. Such a token is purposely built to increase in supply as more players join the game. Therefore, it requires a strong deflationary strategy to safeguard the value of gamers’ earnings.

Deep dive into major projects of the GameFi ecosystem

The GameFi ecosystem is essentially made of development studios who build games that are played by guilds. Of course, guilds represent only a tiny proportion of all GameFi players, but their design is worth focusing on as they differ a lot from traditional guilds and have a fundamental role in the space. Like in traditional gaming, blockchain based games can be divided into distinct types with unique features. Since blockchain gaming is at its early stage, a decent portion of the games are card games. They are easy to develop and the need for real ownership over collected cards is straightforward.

With the rise of GameFi, a new sort made its way to the top: metaverses. “Metaverse” became a catch-all term in the crypto space but here we will define it as a blockchain facilitated virtual world where participants are both gamers and game developers. Its unique feature enabling players to create their own game within the game makes them stand out as a distinct noteworthy actor of the GameFi ecosystem. Finally, blockchain game studios do not differ so much from traditional game developers. The only difference would be the additional layer blockchain gaming implies. In fact, in addition to software engineers, artistic designers and marketing teams, GameFi development studios must have reliable blockchain programmers and skilled economists to design games’ tokenomics. The ability to balance all these fields is not a given, especially since GameFi is so young. Therefore, the complexity required to build such game studios gave birth to companies with different priorities and operational strategies.

Game developers

Animoca Brands

We will focus on game studios that only build blockchain based games and have released at least one. The most prominent actor by valuation would be Animoca brands. Valued at $5.5 billion, Animoca is the number 1 player of the GameFi space. Founded by Yat Siu, a serial tech entrepreneur, and David Kim in 2014, the company now employs around 700 people across all its subsidiaries. As of today, Yat Siu remains the main figure acting as a managing director. Evan Auyang, president since October 2021, comes from a more financial background than the founders. In addition to its strong management team, Animoca also benefits from its experience as mobile game developer well before blockchain gaming appeared. Its opportunistic transition to blockchain based games made the company a pioneer of the GameFi ecosystem. Animoca also owes its success to the large panel of licenses within its games including the Snoop Dog metaverse, Disney and the WWE. They yield strong competitive advantages by labelling Animoca as the go to actor of the space for licensing a concept. Animoca developed original games including The Sandbox and Crazy Defense Heroes. The type of video games developed doesn’t seem to follow a pattern as it ranges from defence tower to racing games including open virtual worlds. Animoca might be testing all video game types without following a strict creative DNA to attract as many new players as possible.

The specificity of Animoca is that its activity is not limited to game development but also extends to venture capital investments. In fact, it has invested in the second game developer of our list: Sky Mavis.

Sky Mavis

Unlike Animoca Brands, Sky Mavis is very young. Founded in 2019, its team is almost 10 times smaller than Animoca’s. Sky Mavis’ management team relies on 5 co-founders. Nguyễn, Ho and Masamune oversee operation in Vietnam where most of the employees are based. Jeffrey Zirlin, the growth lead, looks after community empowerment and Aleksander Larsen, the COO, supervises investor relations. Trung Nguyen, acting as CEO, was chosen by CoinDesk as one of the most influential actors of the space in 2021. In October 2021, following a series B led by a16z and including crypto exchange FTX, Sky Mavis was valued at $3 billion. Its latest funding round was a series C, raising an additional $150 million. Still, Sky Mavis is not the biggest developer by valuation, but it has built the most popular P2E game by number of all-time players. In fact, Sky Mavis’ flagship product, the game Axie Infinity, registered more than 10 million players since it launched. As mentioned before, operational strategies between development studios differ a lot. Instead of diversifying its products like Animoca, Sky Mavis focuses on developing one main product to prioritise quality over quantity. For example, the company released a new game, called Axie: Infinity Origin, that takes place in the same universe as Axie Infinity. This strategy is aiming at providing consistency to Sky Mavis’ creative identity to foster player engagement. The particularity of Axie Infinity Origin is that it wasn’t purposely built to be a P2E, and its only apparent utility is to introduce non-crypto gamers to the original Axie infinity. Just like Animoca who is using licenses to gain more exposure to gamers unfamiliar with crypto, Sky Mavis is building games with lower barrier to entry to gain more mainstream adoption. Sky Mavis might be highly focused on game development, but the studio has also built a gaming launchpad and a marketplace to trade in-game assets. Their effort to facilitate transactions on Axie Infinity has culminated with the creation of an Ethereum sidechain named Ronin to lower fees and increase throughput.

To conclude, we can see that these two GameFi giants do not have the same operational strategies and hence are not in direct competition. One could even argue that they are helping each other by increasing adoption of blockchain-based gaming. On one hand, through Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis showed to the average gamer the potential of play to earn. On the other hand, Animoca is working in the shadow by investing with their financial power and expertise in every single key GameFi project.

Games

Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity is the flagship product of game developer Sky Mavis. It achieved to make 10 million gamers actively play their game while offering a completely new type of gaming experience. Yet we shall not be misled, its staggering success is mostly due to the play to earn feature rather than a revolutionary gameplay. Axie Infinity’s adventure mode’s progression resembles a lot the mobile games like Candy Crush. The gameplay, mixing battle arena and card game characteristics, is very simplistic and accessible to all public. Its lack of complexity might be a plus to attract as many new players as possible, but can also weaken player retention.

Axie Infinity’s ecosystem relies on 2 tokens, AXS and SLP. While AXS, used for governance and staking, has a fixed supply, SLP, used to reward players, doesn’t have any hard cap. The SLP token is therefore subject to uncontrolled inflation in the event of high growth of active players. From May to November 2021, monthly new wallet on Axie was over 60%. To start playing it is required to own 3 Axies which are NFTs of little monsters used to battle. Players can then breed their Axies paying with AXS and SLP. Considering that the median cost to build a team was around $862 in November 2021, players revenue relied heavily on new entrants’ growth. However, later in December, along with the crypto market crash player’s growth dropped by 75% leading to a collapse of the overall game tokenomics in the following months. To reward gamers, new SLP issued had to increase significantly which led to a positive supply shock. As the demand increase is not keeping up with supply pressure, SLP lost 96% of its value since November 2021. Gamers are playing to earn SLPs that consistently lost value. As most of the players are low-income individuals from underdeveloped country looking for additional revenue, their interest for the game dropped as well. This situation eventually led to a vicious cycle, pushing Axie Infinity management team to actively work on fixing inflation issues. Even though in February 2021 daily supply of SLP was reduced by 56%, soaring inflation resumed shortly after. SLP supply was multiplied by more than 12 since December 2021 according to Messari.

As Axie Infinity gamers retention rate is too reliant on earnings and earnings are proportional to growth, prolonged periods of new entrants’ stagnation result in in-game economy contraction. Sky Mavis, the developer, is well aware of P2E’s health being dependent on growth. To regain the spotlight, Axie Infinity has a strong roadmap featuring the release of Lunacia SDK, a map editor, which resembles a lot to what Decentraland and Sandbox offer. Axie infinity is also looking gain more mainstream adoption by releasing Axie Infinity on iOS and Android in 2022. Finally, by the end of the year the land gameplay is supposed to be rolled out in 3 phases. However, given that we are entering 2022’s last trimester and Axie infinity has not even release phase 1 yet, one could doubt Axie Infinity developers’ ability to deliver land gameplay in time.

Illuvium

Now we will analyse a GameFi project that has a lot of novel features Axie Infinity is lacking. Illuvium is an adventure open world game mixing auto battles and collectibles ownership. The game development started in 2020 and today the team has around 150 employees. While it is secured by Ethereum, in-game NFTs (the creatures used to battle) are minted and traded on Immutable X (IMX) layer 2 solution. For the same reason Sky Mavis built the Ronin sidechain to scale and lower gas fees on its game, Illuvium chose IMX.

The selling point of Illuvium is that its calls itself the first AAA game built on Ethereum. AAA is a category of games offering advanced graphics and highly engaging gameplays thanks to significant marketing and development budget. Compared to Axie Infinity, Illuvium is more likely to attract gamers from the traditional side as it is more focused on offering a fun gaming experience than Axie Infinity. Moreover, Illuvium is a decentralised protocol where IVL token holders will have governance rights over the game’s future. Also, NFTs will be traded in a trustless manner on a decentralised exchange called IlluviDex. Comparatively, while many people think Axie Infinity is a true blockchain game, Sky Mavis has full control over the game. Here is a selection of Axie Infinity’ rights unaligned with blockchain gaming ethos:

Source: Naavik

Sky Mavis’ centralisation issues culminated with Lazarus hack in March. The Ronin network was secured by only 9 private keys of which 5 were compromised, allowing the hacker to drain a total value of $624 million.

Today, with a twentieth of Axie Infinity marketcap, one could think that Illuvium has great upside potential. However, we should not forget that the public beta is not out yet. Token holders are theoretically only speculating since the game is not available to the general public and governance votes haven’t started. The token has currently no use case expect staking. What’s more, 100% of total supply will be unlocked by March 2023. 25% of total supply is owned by investors currently sitting on a 24x and 8.3% of total supply is owned by investors who saw their initial investment multiplied by 73. If the game launch does not boost growth, just like Axie infinity, Illuvium could witness a complete collapse of its economy.

To conclude, Axie infinity succeeded to show crypto savvy investors and low-income gamers in underdeveloped countries the value behind play to earn gaming. However, Illuvium is on a more ambitious mission. The project is trying to convince the 2.7 billion traditional gamers that blockchain based gameplays seamlessly incorporated in qualitative games can revolutionise their gaming experience. Illuvium, like other AAA crypto games such as Heroes of Mavia, is still at its infancy. It still needs to prove to the gaming community playing to earn can be synonymous with playing just to have fun. Exercise at which Axie Infinity clearly failed since we witnessed that a drop in earnings was followed by a large exodus, proving players were looking for earnings instead of an enjoyable gaming experience.

Metaverses: Decentraland vs Sandbox

Decentraland and Sandbox are the two most prominent metaverse project. Understanding their difference will help us to grasp their respective contribution to the GameFi ecosystem. Metaverses encourage their participants to experience, build and monetise their creations and applications in a 3D digital environment. Both metaverses allow their users to create their own game within the ecosystem. Nonetheless, it is worth noting The Sandbox is more focused on flourishing a true novel gaming community though P2E and blockchain features, whereas Decentraland is much more flexible in its creation spectrum promoting any kind of content in its metaverse.

While Sandbox is much younger, it is showing stronger fundamentals on many aspects. Sandbox alpha version was only released in December 2021, yet it has more significant partnership than Decentraland. In fact, HSBC, the famous rapper Snoop Dogg, Warner Music and even the South China Morning Post all bought lands in its metaverse. Both platforms offer a very limited gameplay. However, The Sandbox has the advantage to be built on an existing game created back in 2010. It has an authentic creative DNA and offers much more enjoyable graphics. In terms of accessibility, Sandbox is more user-friendly as you can create an account using a social media account, email, or a wallet while Decentraland only offers wallet facilitated connections. Finally, Sandbox is owned by GameFi leader Animoca Brands. Their strong leadership, lasting experience in blockchain gaming and increasing funding power are favourable conditions for Sandbox to prosper in.

Nevertheless, Sandbox itself is still at its infancy since only the Alpha of the game is available to players. On the other side, Decentraland’s development started in 2017 and launched in 2020. As a true Metaverse pioneer, Decentraland, is the first project offering a working proof of concept. Sandbox lands’ floor price is slightly lower as well as its volume traded. One could think, SAND’s lower market cap could mean higher growth potential, however, while 84% of total MANAs are circulating, only 50% of SAND’s fixed supply have been released. This means that Sandbox’s fully diluted marketcap is more than twice Decentraland’s current marketcap.

To conclude, Sandbox, mostly designed for gaming, has a chance to gain traction from an existing community of traditional gamers while Decentraland might be prevented from going mainstream due to the arguable inconsistency of what it offers. What is certain is that both projects, being built on Ethereum, will face scalability issues. Looking to build alternative digital realties, both metaverses’ transaction throughput will need to keep up with their staggering ambition in terms of number of users. For now, we have yet to see major metaverses built on more scalable blockchains.

Yield Guild Games (YGG) vs Merit Circle (MC), the two biggest guilds by marketcap

Guilds first emerged in the 90’s with the birth of online gaming on MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). In the beginning, they were only formed by small amount of isolated players looking to coordinate their objectives in order to share quest rewards. Guilds’ complexity of organisation increased as gaming became more diversified. Eventually, guilds made their way to blockchain gaming. As the P2E ecosystem gained more traction, the need to create communities of players pooling their earnings became evident. All in all, a GameFi guild can be defined as a group of people coming together to help each other maximise their returns on blockchain based games. The actual process is a bit more elaborate as it is based on decentralised governance. In fact, both YGG and MC are governed by a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation). This means all decision are not taken by a central entity but rather by the token holders themselves. Token issuance solves the centralisation problem traditional guilds often have, where community leaders promote certain games in exchange for money. The guilds’ DAO shares the same architecture designed around the 3 following components:

• The treasury that manages the guilds’ assets. Its goal is to maximise the DAO asset returns, purchase new valuable NFTs such as land or in-game characters and invest in promising blockchain games through their in-game token. Looking for token appreciation, guilds also invest in games to bridge their communities and expand their ecosystem.
• SubDAOs that each represent a different game or geographical area but still contributes to the main guild DAO. They increase governance efficiency and yield higher returns.
• The vaults where token holders can stake their tokens. Instead of staking their tokens in one protocol or pool for fixed rates, YGG holders can choose across many vaults to stake their tokens. Each vault yields a revenue coming from a different activity within the guild ecosystem. For example, in the YGG guild it is possible to stake tokens in a vault where revenue is solely coming from NFT rentals. Hence, wallets that stake tokens in this vault will only receive a yield proportional to NFT rental total revenue.

Overall, the main activity of guilds would be NFT trading, lending and borrowing. Their input in the GameFi ecosystem is capital. In fact, by lending NFTs to players (scholars) in exchange for a share of their earnings, guilds greatly lower barrier to entry which can be especially high for top tier blockchain games such as Axie Infinity.

YGG and MC governance design are almost identical. The vast majority of newly built guilds adopt the same methods as YGG since it is a working proof of concept. Still, despite its young age the MC guild has proven its value by setting new milestones in the crypto guild space. First, it is the first guild to expand its activity to game development. In fact, in February, MC announced the launch of an in-house world building game named Edenhorde. Second, aiming to engage the community on specific decisions, MC became the first DAO of any sector to hire an employee via a vote. However, while MC’s DAO seems innovative, it suffers from a high degree of centralisation. In the last 5 governance proposals more than 50% of the votes were concentrated in 5 wallets. In terms of tokenomics, YGG seems stronger as its supply schedule is longer and circulating supply is larger. Just like Sandbox with Decentraland, one could think that since MC marketcap is almost half of YGG’s, growth is more likely. However, as only 4% of MC total supply is circulating against 12% for YGG, MC’s fully diluted marketcap is 54% higher than that of YGG. Considering YGG is at a way more advanced development stage, the MC token might be overvalued. YGG’s number of scholars is almost 6 times larger than MC’s.

Source: YGG Community update

Looking at both project teams, YGG seems in better hands. The founding team consists of a fintech entrepreneur, a gaming industry veteran and a blockchain developer. On the other side, MC was launched 11 months ago by a 24 years old with 2 years of experience as a self-employed marketing consultant for blockchain start-ups. Nonetheless, it is worth noting Merit circle is backed by crypto and GameFi giants such as Digital Currency Group and Jeff Zirlin, one of the Axie Infinity Co-founders.

To conclude, the crypto guild ecosystem has such large opportunities that there is well enough space for multiple actors. MC and YGG, that already partnered in the past, may even strategically foster crypto guilds growth together by creating co-funded scholarships or co-developing games. All in all, for risk averse investors, putting money in crypto guilds is a safe way to have exposure in the GameFi ecosystem without taking the risk of investing in one game that could vanish over time.

Why gamers might not adopt GameFi?

Blockchain gaming is a huge untapped market with great growth potential. If the traditional gaming industry — now worth over 300 billion dollars — was to transition to the GameFi ecosystem, we could witness a whole new gaming landscape. It would give birth to games with decentralised governance where players have a say in the game they play, grant true asset ownership and let players earn cryptocurrencies while having fun. So why the 2.7 billion active gamers have not already adopted blockchain games?

The first major reason is that traditional gamers prioritize having fun over yielding returns while playing. Thus, a game that puts in-game economics before gameplay is highly less likely to achieve mainstream adoption. Currently, in the GameFi space players consist mostly of crypto enthusiasts lured into the games by DeFi features like yield farming rather than engaging and genuinely fun gaming experiences. This trend pushes traditional gamers even further away: they end up seeing GameFi and NFTs integration to gaming only as a way to increase shareholders earnings. Yong Yea reaction to Ubisoft NFT integration to its latest game depicts well the general aversion to NFTs that rules in the traditional gamer realm: “The only thing NFTs aim to revolutionize is companies’ and execs’ ability to line their pockets.”

Second, gamers are put off by the complexity to access blockchain games. Here is a comparison of the steps to fulfil to play Axie Infinity and Minecraft:

Axie infinity guide from The Block Research:

1. Set up an Ethereum wallet such as Metamask and securely store the seed phrase (backup password) safely
2. Purchase ETH with traditional currency on a centralized exchange and send it to Metamask, which incurs a fee or, depending on which country the user is based in, purchase ETH via Metamask’s credit card solution
3. Create a wallet on the game’s customized chain or Layer-2 scaling solution and once again store the seed phrase safely
4. Create an account on the game’s website using the wallet
5. Link an email ID to the game account
6. Send ETH or the game token to the game’s wallet which incurs a transaction fee
7. Download the game if necessary
8. Purchase necessary in-game items

Minecraft guide:

1. Buy the game
2. Install the game
3. Register with a Microsoft account

Third, to reach the masses blockchain games urgently need mainstream distribution verticals. However, on PC, the largest distributor, Steam, banned all crypto games. On mobile, the highly centralised distribution platforms Apple Store and Android will most likely avoid games facilitating peer to peer transactions. To top it all, Apple’s cut of 30% on every transaction made on its platform will also represent a huge obstacle to the sustainability of in-game economies.

Fourth, the crypto space has evolved to a consortium of blockchains with their own respective network. Competition might fuel innovation, but it also goes against free flow of digital assets as they are often bound to one blockchain. Thus, blockchain interoperability is greatly needed, especially in metaverses envisioned as an infinite world where imagination should be the only limit. However, freely moving assets cross-chain or building on 100% interoperable blockchain is not currently possible. Once more, we reach the conclusion that user experience on blockchain-based games is not optimal and much more efforts are needed.

Finally, in Asia, where we find the biggest population of gamers, regulators might just completely kill the GameFi industry. In South Korea, where gaming is so important it has its own regulatory code, exchanging in-game currencies for fiat is banned. Japan has yet to ban blockchain gaming, but its future is extremely compromised. Legal experts report states that Axie infinity will be either considered illegal gambling or will be heavily regulated under Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency’s Improper Premiums and Misleading Representations Act (IPMR). Lastly, in China, the overall crackdown on the crypto industry might also hinder the growth of blockchain gaming.

Our take

As long as gamers will be incentivized to play blockchain games by unsustainable tokenomics instead of appealing gameplays, the GameFi ecosystem won’t rise from its foundations. The first blockchain game that will catch traditional gamers’ attention will be built in such a way that players won’t even know they are using NFTs minted on a blockchain. To do so, in addition to offering engaging gameplays, developers must build a transparent front-end that will seamlessly incorporate NFTs.

Blockchain games should mix play-to-earn, free-to-play, play to have fun and not pay-to-win. One could ask how is that even possible? In a nutshell, gamers do not create value since there are no adds to monetize their attention. They only play-to-earn, while their only input is their initial investment. We can see where this is going. Like in any ponzy scheme, if most players cashback their earnings or if the growth slows down, the in-game economy will collapse. The only solution is for the developers to build a game fun and enjoyable enough so that most players will be keen to invest more than they earn, similar to traditional games.

The last stone to build a coherent, healthy and growth-worthy GameFi ecosystem is true decentralization. 3 boxes should be ticked to achieve this goal. First, games should be built on blockchains using fair consensus mechanisms that avoid giving large shares of the network to one or more central entities. Ronin using the proof of authority consensus mechanism to secure Axie Infinity is a perfect counterexample. Second, blockchain games should respect ownership, meaning developers shouldn’t be able to deny users access to the network’s smart contracts or own the intellectual property. Lastly, the game must be governed by players. Developers should build a decentralized governance framework and let the players decide on the game’s future as it grows.

Looking at the traditional gaming market, never-ending sequels signal a lasting creativity shortage. As the space grows older, offering innovative games becomes more and more a financial risk that cannot be made up for. The same way the console war in the 2000’s fostered creativity to capture all these new gamers, GameFi might be the new lease of life gaming greatly needs today.

Appendix

1. Socials Axie Infinity

2. Socials Illuvium

3. ILV token vesting schedule

Source: Messari

4. MANA token allocation

Source: Coin 98 insights

5. MANA token release schedule

Source: Token Unlocks

6. SAND token supply distribution

Source: Binance research

7. SAND token release schedule

Source: Token Unlocks

8. Merit circle token vesting schedule

Source: Messari

9. YGG token vesting schedule

Source: Messari

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