🎮 Metaproof Gaming

Hey frens, this is Sophia from 🎮 Metaproof Gaming, the weekly newsletter where we update you on how the metaverse and web3 are changing the gaming industry.

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📲 By the numbers

This week the spotlight is on South Korea, which is aggressively gunning for a prime spot in the metaverse via gaming and crypto adoption. (Source)

• It’s the 4th largest gaming market worldwide, with 33M gamers generating $8.3B in revenue in 2021

• Its domestic metaverse is estimated to be worth 400T won ($306.5B) by 2026

• “Metaverse Seoul,” the first virtual public administration platform, already got 3,000 residents playing on the beta, visiting the virtual City Hall and playing games in Seoul Plaza

📫 News & trends

🎵 Animoca Brands secures majority stake in music metaverse gaming platform

In a bid to expand on the integration between gaming and web3 technologies and communities, Animoca Brands has secured a majority stake in the Los Angeles-based music metaverse gaming platform Pixelynx.

The digital entertainment, blockchain, and gamification firm announced the acquisition Dec. 6, implying that it will continue investing in and acquiring digital studios in its ongoing move to integrate the music industry - poised to be a $131B space by 2030 - with web3. Pixelynx is expected to eventually provide artists with more control while creating new ways to develop, share, and monetize music.

More musicians and industry executives are incorporating web3 tools like NFTs to invigorate their audiences, making the bond between web3 and music stronger by the day. Warner Music Group, for instance, announced in September a partnership with NFT marketplace OpenSea to enable artists to build and expand their fanbase into the web3 space.

🎥 MrBeast is joining Fortnite with his own skins and a $1 million challenge

One of the biggest YouTubers joining one of the biggest video games? Hardly surprising. MrBeast, recently becoming the most subscribed YouTube creator, has become the next person joining Fortnite’s Icon Series. After a brief appearance in a new Fortnite season trailer, Epic Games has confirmed the personality is getting his own Fortnite skins along with an on-brand in-game competition with a $1M prize. MrBeast joins the ranks of streamers and creators with Icon Series skins, such as Ninja, TheGrefg, and Loserfruit, along with superstars Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, and LeBron James.

🚘 The Tiny Digital Factory launches Aston Martin NFTs for Infinite Drive Racing

Racing and motorsport game developer The Tiny Digital Factory has teamed up with luxury sports car brand Aston Martin on a blockchain game called Infinite Drive Racing. The game maker is launching a limited-edition range of “digital diecast” Aston Martin NFTs on the Polygon blockchain, some 3,000 NFT cars for the first wave when the collection goes live on marketplace Magic Eden on December 18. If you’re raring to know the NFT cars - Aston Martin’s first ever launch with them - they’re the new Vantage V8 Coupe, the Vantage GT3 racing model, and the 1980 Vantage V8 seen in the 15th James Bond film, The Living Daylights.

🔮 Predicting the future of games is a fool’s errand, but let’s try anyway

A handful of experts speak candidly on where gaming is likely going in the next decade. The general consensus? Cloud gaming won’t be going away, live-service games will be everywhere, and in light of improved graphics there will be better and badder explosions. Of course, the conversation will always steer toward what it means to build a modern-day metaverse in gaming.

🇯🇵 Armed with anime avatars, Japan bids to conquer the metaverse

Japan’s CEATEC tech show, back from its pandemic hiatus, offers a view of things to come: the metaverse, given the sheer popularity of anime, virtual idols, and online technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality in the country’s gaming scene. The government is embracing a metaverse future, promoting efforts to expand relevant services, while private companies, ranging from startups to established multinationals, partake of the action through avatars and virtual worlds incorporated in their offerings.

🎲 10 things you didn’t know about the game industry

Are video games the only successful metaverses? None of the use cases on the metaverse, Polygon argues, have been proven yet except in gaming, which is said to birth the concept in the first place and started developing it with the advent of the massively multiplayer game over two decades back. Think Fortnite, Roblox … will there ever be evidence that metaverses are a mass-market proposition outside of the gaming sphere?

🛡️ The Call of Duty digital asset dilemma

Publisher Activision has released the annual Esports org asset pack, with Home/Away digital assets and jerseys that players can don in the game. However, the releases aren’t without controversy, including the dark outfit Call of Duty issue where Activision was forced to edit the Roze skin and later on the 100 Thieves skin for season 1 patch notes, much to the consternation of current buyers who feel they were deceived into buying an asset pack. A dilemma on the future of digital assets plays out: How should Activision balance the corporate and gameplay sides? In the words of the author, should it “leave the game unbalanced in the vein of a final sale, or irritate what are likely high-skill players through balancing?”

👾 What does the digital future hold in a metaverse-based P2E gaming environment

The P2E gaming zone stands to gain long-term from the metaverse, with the likes of metaverse-oriented GameFi - an integration between gaming decentralized finance (DeFi) - potentially redefining the gaming and blockchain industries. Insights from market analysts show that the majority of metaverse-based gaming organizations have geared up to offer cryptocurrencies and NFTs as incentives, e-gaming has become more interactive with AR and VR, and users are motivated to spend their net income on digital assets-based investments.

🎇 CS:GO player Zeus enters the SIDUS metaverse

Danylo Teslenko, formerly known as “Zeus” in the CS:Go community, has signed a 10-year contract with game publisher SIDUS GATES, a GameFi publisher that’s out to reinvent blockchain esports. With well over 150,000 Twitter followers and a global audience, the Ukraine native serves as a fitting ambassador and spokesperson for SIDUS, which is looking to get more brands and esports personalities on board. On the collaboration, Zeus says he plans to use his "vast experience in esports" to popularize new products, fit them to cybersports standards, as well as attract a global audience for the exclusive game publisher and its ambitious metaverse gaming projects.

🌏 Affyn and the NEXUS World metaverse are on the move

The NEXUS World metaverse by Singapore-based Affyn enters a new phase with upcoming city launches, where you can buy NFT land that’s mapped to the real world. NEXUS World is a P&E and free-to-play metaverse allowing users to buy land and become mayor of their digital NFT land plot. Check out the various ways to earn passive income from Affyn’s Land.

💪 ImmutableX grows from 5 to 100+ games in 2022

ImmutableX, a leading platform for building web3 games on Ethereum, reports expanding from five to over 100 games this year, with more than 50% of them onboarded in the last three months, according to co-founder Robbie Ferguson. On Twitter, Ferguson cites their strategy of sticking it out with IMX games, touted the "most funded" in 2022 next to L1 Eth. "Gaming conforms to power law, though. We only focus on games with sufficient funds to be a 10M+ player hit," he tweets.

💸 Finance buzz

• Web3-based games and metaverse projects raised $748M since August 2022, according to a DappRadar report in September. (Source) This was up 135% from July but still a drop of 16% compared with June. (Source)

• Axie Infinity surpassed $4B in all-time NFT sales while about 36,000 additional players joined the fold in the last three months as of September. (Source)

• 2022 forecast indicates investments could reach $10.2B, a climb of 20% over the $4B of 2021. (Source)

• The Mirror, Balthazar, Dogami, and EXEVerse land crypto gaming funding in December so far. (Source)

🗣️ Quote of the week

All content on this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not aim to serve as or replace expert investment advice.

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