Written by: Peking University Blockchain Research.
As the chapter of (Black Myth: Wukong) comes to a close, another journey of acquiring scriptures has quietly entered its midpoint—this is the new generation of Web3 games' quest for scriptures. As one of the most classic narratives of Web3, GameFi is gradually shifting from 'play to earn' to 'play to play', placing greater emphasis on gameplay rather than financial attributes. Just as Wukong grows through storms, facing challenges, these Web3 games are also exploring their own scriptures. This report, as the first in the PKUBA·SectorScan series for this semester, will focus on identifying the most promising Web3 game projects in 2024 that are likely to 'break through' like (Black Myth: Wukong).
Hamster Kombat: A Web3 exploration journey in mouse supremacy.
Hamster Kombat is a 'tap to earn' Web3 game that combines nurturing, battling, and social elements. Players can nurture their mice and participate in real-time battles to earn tokens and unique NFT rewards. The project features governance tokens and in-game tokens, with the former used for community decision-making and the latter for purchasing items and upgrading. On September 26, 2024, Hamster Kombat officially launched its airdrop, with its ecosystem token HMSTR simultaneously listed on more than ten major exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Bybit, achieving the largest airdrop user scale to date with over 300 million users.
Players can enhance the attributes of their mice in various ways, including training, feeding, and upgrading; they can also pit their mice against each other in real-time battles to compete for rankings and rewards. The project's token is $HMSTR, primarily used for community decision-making and voting, purchasing items, and upgrading mice. In Hamster Kombat, a player's trading level depends on their game score balance, with nine levels ranging from Bronze to Master. Notably, the success of Hamster Kombat is an atypical case. In March 2024, the game created a Telegram channel and went live without any investment background. Initially, there was little discussion on Twitter, but with the promotion by Notcoin, it gained considerable traffic. By May, Hamster Kombat's user count reached 15 million, and its Telegram channel ranked third globally. Subsequently, the user count surged to 300 million, with subscriptions reaching 69 million, becoming the world leader. The main reason for the game's success lies in its high playability—its diverse nurturing system, real-time battle mechanisms, and social interaction elements allow players to enhance mouse attributes through training, feeding, and upgrading while participating in thrilling real-time competitions against others. Compared to other games, Hamster Kombat's unique 'tap to earn' mechanism lowers the participation threshold, allowing more players to easily get started and earn rewards. Meanwhile, the team's innovative strategies in promotion and social media interaction enable the game to quickly attract and retain players, allowing it to stand out in the Web3 gaming space.
Additionally, the team has rapidly increased its fan base and viewership through savvy traffic strategies, including daily news programs and social media interactions, thereby gaining recommendations from social media platforms.
However, Hamster Kombat also faces significant challenges in airdrop distribution. As the number of users rapidly increases, how to reasonably distribute airdrops becomes a key issue. Previous large-scale airdrop experiences mainly concentrated on user bases in the millions, while Hamster Kombat did not design effective anti-bot mechanisms early on, resulting in a large number of 'hairy players' participating, complicating the identification of bots and potentially affecting the rights of genuine users. Although the official claim states the user count has reached 300 million, only 131 million users meet the airdrop eligibility, with 2.3 million bot addresses identified. Hamster Kombat emphasizes that due to cheating behaviors, the game has banned participation from these 2.3 million users. In September 2024, Hamster Kombat announced its roadmap for 2025, focusing on the continuous development of the game and community involvement. Plans include launching new features and updates to enhance the gaming experience while expanding the NFT market and game ecosystem.
SERAPH: A dark horse in ARPG.
(SERAPH: In the Darkness) is a dark fantasy style, NFT-based action ARPG Web3 game. Since the official launch of the game on the blockchain in November 2023, SERAPH has maintained a strong popularity. According to DappRadar data, SERAPH's unique active wallets (UAW) exceeded 1 million in the past 7 days, ranking second in the #GameFi sector. Transaction data has also skyrocketed. As a representative of the second generation of chain games, SERAPH has set impressive records since its Alpha test in April 2023, achieving over 10,000 registrations: the average daily active users (DAU) for Season 0 (the 5th test) reached 15,000, with a 14-day retention rate exceeding 30%, generating millions of dollars in revenue and becoming a dark horse in the ARPG sector.
The remarkable success of SERAPH is supported by a strong team. The SERAPH team is incubated by the South Korean gaming giant Actoz Soft (listed on Kosdaq), with over 15 years of experience in developing dark-themed games. After embracing Web3, the team demonstrated impressive iterative capabilities: not only did they quickly learn the concepts, technical frameworks, and token economies of Web3, but they also found a new positioning and angle for SERAPH that transcends the explorations of predecessors. Their rich development experience across Web2 and Web3 ensures that the game can be loved by players from both Web2 and Web3. In terms of funding, SERAPH, backed by resources from a large Web2 gaming company, did not adopt community fundraising but instead self-funded its development, building community trust through the high quality of the game itself, reflecting the team's confidence in its game development capabilities.
In terms of gameplay, SERAPH inherits classic dark-themed equipment enhancement, character development, and dungeon exploration mechanics, while incorporating AI companions and various MMO elements, introducing numerous innovations such as multiplayer teaming, PVP leaderboards, and a player trading market, significantly enhancing the game's playability and sociality. In terms of token economics, players can enter the game for free with the opportunity to acquire rare assets through gameplay. At the same time, players can directly use unique NFT equipment to produce 'Soul Spars.' Soul Spars have a wide range of consumption scenarios in the game and have multiple adjustment mechanisms to combat inflation, ensuring stable economic development. Additionally, SERAPH sets seasonal rewards to encourage players to create exclusive equipment, promoting the circulation and trading of equipment, thereby realizing a diversified and continuously evolving economic ecosystem.
In the design of the game's token economic system, Seraph differs from typical Web3 games that use a 'dual-token' economic model. According to the white paper, Seraph will only launch a single token in the future. Although the current single-token economic model is relatively stable, as the player base grows, how to mitigate the impact of inflation while maintaining economic balance will be a great opportunity for the team to showcase its innovation and management capabilities.
Parallel: A new attempt to break through in sci-fi themed TCG, a powerful competitor to Hearthstone.
As one of the collectible card games (TCG), Parallel empowers players with ownership of their cards and other game assets through the power of NFTs, allowing such assets to be traded between players like in Yu-Gi-Oh! In October 2021, the project raised $50 million at a valuation of $500 million from Paradigm, and in February 2024, it opened beta testing. Subsequently, the company received $35 million in funding in March 2024, with over 20 VCs including Solana Ventures, Distributed Global, and OSS Capital participating. Among the founding team, one of the six co-founders, Sascha Mojtahedi, has nearly 16 years of project development and operational experience, and three members come from the University of Waterloo in Canada, giving the team a strong Canadian background. The main design team consists of former members from well-known studios such as Epic Games, Blizzard, and Riot Games, providing good backing and design experience from major firms.
Compared to existing TCG card games, Parallel has unique highlights in the following dimensions: First, the world lines in the game are based on science fiction themes, which distinguish it significantly from existing themes, generating considerable game popularity in the early stages. Second, regarding gameplay, the game focuses on building card decks, allowing players to concentrate on strengthening their decks and enjoying PVP ranked battles. By designing a large number of cards and synergistic effects between them, Parallel provides players with many possibilities, enabling them to fully utilize the game's complexity to construct the optimal game deck. Despite the large scale of the card pool, Parallel pays great attention to the balance between cards and allows for card decomposition and synthesis to create any card that players need, attracting a sufficient number of free players to participate in building the game ecosystem. In terms of artistry, Parallel emphasizes the texture of the cards and immersive gaming experience. In contrast, most other Web3 TCG card games are AI-generated, giving it a more distinctive game style among blockchain card games. Therefore, Parallel has successfully risen to become the 'catfish' in the TCG card game landscape, posing a significant challenge to the existing TCG game ecosystem.
Although Parallel has successfully gained attention in the TCG card game field, becoming a game with a long life cycle and maintaining a large core player base still presents many challenges. First, based on current player feedback, the game's UI design has some flaws, such as unclear card text, lag, and crashes; second, the game lacks a tiered matchmaking system, with limited compensation for new players after defeats, resulting in a lack of positive feedback; finally, the design of the economic cycle in the game still needs improvement. With the increase in new players and card quantities, how to clear existing cards and how to mitigate the issue of inflation within the game remain core focal points for ensuring game replayability and user stickiness.
As of now, Parallel has completed 8 seasons. With the continuous improvement and optimization of the game, the impact of Parallel on existing TCG card games is eagerly anticipated.
SHRAPNEL: A free creative FPS game.
Shrapnel is a first-person shooter (FPS) game that combines traditional high-quality gaming experiences with Web3 technology. Developed by industry veterans who have contributed to well-known games like Halo and Call of Duty, Shrapnel completed initial funding of $10.5 million in 2021, backed by Dragonfly and Three Arrows Capital, with angel investors including Keith Nunziata (Citadel Global Equities) and Jason Zhao (Kleiner Perkins), followed by additional funding of $27 million.
Unlike many blockchain-based games, Shrapnel emphasizes high-quality graphics and refined gaming experiences that can rival top traditional FPS games. Most chain games belong to the concept of virtual worlds or metaverses, focusing on player creativity and social experiences, with less emphasis on combat elements. In contrast, Shrapnel emphasizes high-intensity combat experiences and strategic thinking, allowing players to earn rewards through high-risk tasks, making it stand out in the chain game market.
Shrapnel also provides powerful user-generated content (UGC) tools, allowing players to create characters, weapons, maps, etc., and mint this content as NFTs for use or trade by other players. The creative tools of Shrapnel are closely integrated with its combat gameplay, ensuring that the content created by players has practical uses in the game.
However, at the end of 2023, the game studio filed lawsuits against several investors, claiming they attempted to seize control of the company and its treasury, leading to much skepticism about this game, which is simultaneously one of the most anticipated games of 2023 and 2024. Currently, the internal issues of the company have been resolved, and Shrapnel has been launched on Epic, receiving continued attention across major platforms and gaming communities, looking forward to more performances in the future under the leadership of a strong team that has developed games for Disney, Ubisoft, and others!
Illuvium: The pinnacle of Web3 open-world adventure and combat.
Illuvium is a 3D open-world game built on Ethereum L2 (Immutable X), where players can explore and actively shape the world. This game was developed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Illuvium. The game primarily focuses on finding and capturing strange beasts known as Illuvials. Players can battle their collected Illuvials against other players' creatures. Additionally, players can earn rewards through their successes in battles.
Illuvium consists of four games within its ecosystem: Illuvium Overworld, Illuvium Arena, Illuvium Zero, and Illuvium Beyond. There are five professions in the game: Guardian, Fighter, Rogue, Psion, and Empath. Additionally, there are five affinities: Water, Earth, Fire, Air, and Nature (e.g., Earth Psion). Furthermore, players can stack and combine up to two affinities for energy boosts. Players store their captured Illuvial NFTs in their blockchain wallets. In the game, they store their characters in Shards. The strength of the shards varies, with stronger shards supporting more powerful Illuvials. Since the project's launch, Illuvium has attracted a lot of attention from Web3 players due to its rich ecosystem and interesting game settings.
The innovation of the game is primarily reflected in two aspects: First, Illuvium distinguishes itself from competing dapps by offering high-quality, continuously evolving NFTs, focusing on gameplay and monetization models. It combines elements of classic RPG collectible games with popular combat techniques from the Auto Battler genre. Furthermore, it provides zero gas fees and sub-second transaction speeds through L2 (ImmutableX).
The game's team consists of 71 members, including 15 core members. Co-founder Kieran Warwick has extensive entrepreneurial experience. He entered Web3 in 2015, serving as the marketing director of an Australian OTC exchange. Later, with the development of DEFI, Kieran re-entered Web3. Co-founder Aaron Warwick majored in computer engineering and physics in college and later became a game designer for Illuvium.
Since 2021, there have been a total of 4 rounds of financing, raising a total of $65 million, including $12 million obtained in March of this year, and the team currently has strong financial capabilities.
The advantages of the token $ILV derived from the game are mainly reflected in two aspects: (1) Efficiency: Immutable X adopts advanced ZK Rollup technology, enabling fast and low-cost transactions on Ethereum, providing significant advantages in transaction speed and fees compared to the Ethereum main chain; (2) Ecological development: With the booming NFT market, the ecosystem of $ILV is constantly growing, with many well-known projects joining Immutable X, providing strong momentum for its ecological development.
Currently, the game primarily faces three risks: (1) Code security risk: Although Illuvium's staking contracts have undergone multiple audits, potential code security vulnerabilities still exist. Additionally, since the codes for Illuvium's various games have not yet been made public, their security cannot be determined, and they may encounter threats from cheating software in the future; (2) Market risk: The current gaming market is exceptionally competitive, with various games continuously emerging; (3) Token risk: As the project's key governance token, if the price of $ILV experiences significant fluctuations, it may adversely impact the project's development and operations.
Only after facing 81 challenges can one acquire the true scriptures.
Just like the 81 trials in Journey to the West, the path to acquiring scriptures has never been smooth. The growth path of Web3 games is equally filled with challenges and opportunities. While Hamster Kombat faces challenges in airdrop distribution, it explores new possibilities in the combination of nurturing, battling, and social elements; SERAPH has room for optimization in token economics, but with its strong team and innovative game mechanics, it stands out in the ARPG field; even though Parallel still needs to address issues with UI and matchmaking systems, its science fiction theme and high-quality artistry have successfully attracted a large number of players; Shrapnel, despite experiencing internal turmoil, continues to gain attention for its exciting combat design and rich user-generated content; and Illuvium, even facing security and market risks, remains highly regarded for its rich ecosystem and high-quality NFTs. Ultimately, how to further enhance the acceptance and participation of traditional Web2 users will become a challenge that all Web3 games face. Just as Wukong's growth is inseparable from trials, Web3 games must also weather storms to find their true scriptures in the vast digital world.
