A rethinking of Pokemon and an MMORPG from ex-Blizzard developers: five metaverse games that deserve attention

Metaverse games are one of the web3 industry’s hottest topics. Some projects can gain millions of users in a few months. True, these projects often disappear even more quickly.

To understand this topic, we talked with Matvey Diadkov, the founder of an advertising network for crypto projects called Bitmedia. He is also developing a metaverse game Chainers, that already has over 35,000 Twitter followers.

About metaverse games in general

The first thing I will say is that, in my opinion, no one has been a resounding success in the metaverse games market right now.

Many projects are not a game at all but a scheme to increase the price of a token on a popular topic. An example is Axie Infinity. Not so long ago, the game broke records of popularity. But the game token lost its value and immediately disappeared from the information field.

I want to say that when people have to pump a character around the clock simply because they were promised 2X profit per month on a token — this is a simple financial pyramid. The game is just a beautiful wrapper for this scheme. And such projects are now the majority.

Therefore, in this list, I do not name the games at the peak of popularity. I name projects that may have a great future and can become great games for users. And I am sure that this is the primary function of such projects, to be a game and entertain people.

DeFi Kingdoms

It is one of the trending market leaders and the best gamified DeFi project to date. The game takes place in a fairy-tale fantasy world. It has a well-balanced mechanics of staking (a way to confirm a transaction on the blockchain, a simpler analog of mining) and farming (a type of cryptocurrency investment where you put your coins in a liquidity pool or lend them to others).

I liked how the guys released their game on the new Avalanche blockchain. They also did it playfully; they restarted all the mechanics in the same world but in a different season. It was summer, and now it’s winter.

The whole market has sunk, but DeFi Kingdoms has held its position and continues to work. This top 1 project, according to DappRadar, has been around for half a year.

RollerCoin

RollerCoin is a simple mining simulator. Due to its simplicity, it captivates a massive number of players from all over the world. RollerCoin makes mining easy and user-friendly. It also makes money.

The essence of the game is to get real cryptocurrency by playing mini-games and collecting.

RollerCoin brings together the best aspects of web2 and web3 projects. It can attract hundreds of thousands of players through social media, bringing them to the world of cryptocurrencies.

The project has been running for several years, and I think it will continue successfully.

Sandbox

The essence of the project is a massive sandbox of multiplayer online games in which you can create your mini-games. The project has a convenient and easy-to-understand toolkit, which is particularly interesting to young game designers.

The early Sandbox seasons were very successful. Now everyone is waiting for a full-fledged release: the opportunity to play and publicly launch their projects fully.

Currently, the project is divided into two areas: creation and gameplay. Each of these areas is primarily aimed at entertainment.

In general, I think the project is very promising. But it is not yet successful. Because now, the project lives not because someone needs it badly but because it depends on constant injections in new tokens and NFTs and marketing.

Illuvium

Roughly speaking, this is a new rethinking of Pokemon. A project is created on the Ethereum blockchain and is highly anticipated.

The game’s essence is collecting Pokemon’s analogs, upgrading them, and fighting other players. It is one of the few projects of this scale and quality.

It’s an exciting combination of PvP (a variant of interactive conflict between several users taking place in the game world between two or more characters) and auto battler (a game genre in which the player can bring a figure to the battlefield but cannot control it there) in an open world.

The game is not yet released to a wide range of users. There is only a limited beta version where you can play in the PvP arena.

Big Time

This MMORPG was created by people from famous game studios such as Blizzard, Epic Games, and Riot Games. I think it has every chance to mark a new stage in the development of NFT games. There have been no such projects in this area yet.

Currently, the game is available with the purchase of a special NFT pass. They can be bought on the game’s official marketplace. The pass gives you early access to the current version of the game, which is undergoing a gameplay test. In it, players can loot NFT items in dungeons and sell them on the marketplace.