After a difficult year, the encryption market finally ushered in a turning point at the end of 2022. With the recovery of the market value of the entire market and the recovery of the market, the data of the encryption game field in January also showed a small rebound.
What is exciting is that Hong Kong’s promotion of Metaverse legislation means that Asian powers, which represent Eastern forces, will once again invest more in the encryption industry, which is a positive signal for the market and has also responded in terms of market value.
The game giants Unity and MetaMask announced cross-border cooperation and interoperability with SDK, which is believed to bring a new future to blockchain games.
We expect that 2023 will be a small period of explosion in the GameFi field. The emergence of more excellent public chains will bring a more conducive ecology for development, and many game projects that have shown their prominence before will also enter the alpha and beta stages, starting from Web2 to Web3 integration. The market is still looking for the next popular chain game after Axie Infinity and stepn.
In this article, we will summarize and analyze the overall trend and follow-up trend of the GameFi market in February 2023 from the macro level based on the GameFi market performance, financing situation, and the development of different public chains and popular games in February. In addition, the chart data used in this report are provided by Footprint Analytics, PlanckX’s in-depth official partner, and more detailed data dashboards can be viewed on the official website of Footprint Analytics.
key points
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In February, as the price of BTC rebounded, the market value of GameFi has also improved. In February, the total market value of GameFi stabilized in the range of 6.3 billion to 7.2 billion.
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The proportion of GameFi new users to total users has dropped slightly compared to January, reaching only 27.44% of the total, which is also the lowest value since October last year.
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Wax is still the blockchain with the most active transactions. The number of transactions in February is far ahead of other public chains, reaching 556 million, which is 88% of the total, followed by Hive and Flow, with 36.8 million and 2.9 million respectively
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After the impact of the FTX thunderstorm subsided, Solana began to experience explosive user growth in January. In February, the number of new users reached 209,370, accounting for 51.07% of the entire new increase; mainly because its on-chain game LadderCaster continued to maintain high growth in February , the number of new users in February reached 125,477.
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Compared with the sluggish investment in the previous few months, the total value of GameFi’s investment funds exceeded 100 million US dollars again
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A total of 14 projects received funding in February
overall market performance
GameFi Market Cap Performance
Figure 1 (Comparison of GameFi’s market capitalization and the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies)
From the chart data, looking at the market value performance since last year, the market value of the GameFi sector is basically consistent with the total market value of cryptocurrencies, and most of the time the track’s decline is greater than the average value of cryptocurrencies, but the increase is smaller than the average value. As of February 28, 2023, the total market value of cryptocurrencies is 173 times the total market value of GameFi.
Figure 2 (Comparison of GameFi’s market capitalization and BTC’s total market capitalization)
Counterfeit tokens in the cryptocurrency field have always had the characteristics of large market value bubbles and sharp rises and falls. The BTC market value has always been the reference benchmark for market investment and also acts as the actual market. As of February 28, 2023, the total market value of BTC is nearly 446.5 billion US dollars, which is 70 times the total market value of GameFi.
To sum up, the market value of GameFi’s overall track has not been outstanding during this period.
GameFi financing situation
Figure 3 (Overall financing amount of the GameFi track)
Although the performance of the secondary market was not turbulent, after the total amount of financing bottomed out in January, the financing situation in the GameFi market in February exceeded 100 million U.S. dollars, an increase of 395% compared with January. To a certain extent, it shows that investors are optimistic about the prospects of the GameFi track and the overall development in 2023. There is still a lot of room for development in the future.
Figure 4 (financing specific projects)
A total of 14 GameFi projects received funding in February, of which the top three were Kratos Studio, Mino Games, and Yield Guild Games, with a total financing of 20 million, 15 million, and 13.8 million, all of which were first-round financing.
GameFi Fundamentals Performance
Changes in the number of GameFi games
Figure 5 (Total amount of agreements on the chain)
There were 2,390 on-chain games in February, which was basically the same as the 2,394 in January. Compared with December, there was a significant increase in January, but there was a small decline in February. This may be related to the fact that many projects will It was announced at the beginning of the year that it was related to the launch, and February entered the middle of the quarter, resulting in a stagnation of growth.
From the perspective of the distribution of protocols on the chain, BNB Chain and Ethereum are still the same as before, followed by Ploygon and Wax. Since March last year, BNB Chain has been a latecomer and has gradually widened the gap with other public chains. It has maintained its lead until now. However, whether it will become the preferred public chain for new games in the future is worth our follow-up observation.
Changes in transaction volume on the chain
Figure 6 On-chain transaction volume
Figure 7 Number of transactions on the chain
From the perspective of the number of transactions and transaction volume on the chain, compared with the number of transactions in January, the number of transactions has decreased, but the total amount is almost the same. Ronin still maintained a high transaction volume in February, and Wax still accounted for a large part of the number of transactions, which proves that the transaction activity on Axie Infinity and Alien Worlds is still good.
User changes on the chain
Changes in the number of new users on the chain
Figure 8 Monthly User Growth
Figure 9 User growth of each public chain
Figure 10 User Growth Pie Chart
The number of new users continued to decline. In February, only 410,947 new users were added, accounting for only 27.42% of the total number of users, the lowest value in a year. But it is worth noting that Solana’s user growth has exploded in the past two months, and even reached 51.06% of the total growth in February, which is mainly due to the user increase brought by LadderCaster.
Figure 10 GameFi new user growth in February
Changes in active users on the chain
Figure 11 Summary table of active users on the chain
Figure 12 Proportion of active users on the public chain in February
The total active users in February dropped to 1.5 million, mainly concentrated in Solana, Polygon and Hive. This data has dropped for 4 consecutive months from the high point of 2.5 million in October last year. This may be because since the end of last year, the chain There is no such thing as a blockbuster game like StepN in the gaming market, which cannot drive the activity of existing users.
Summary Outlook
Waiting for the dawn in the dark may be our best summary of February, and it will also be the main theme of the GameFi field in 2023. Whether the market has bottomed out or not is yet to be determined, but it can be seen that the confidence of capital has not faded.
Behind the cruel and depressed reality, there is also a turning point.
The increase in capital investment in February proves that market funds are investing in the game field again. Unlike traditional public chains such as DeFi and NFT, which occupy the vast majority of the market share, some specialized game public chains shine in the GameFi field, and in In the competition with the traditional public chain, it will not fall behind. At present, the multi-chain deployment of on-chain protocols has become a trend, and more excellent protocols may be migrated to the game public chain. The public chain is the holy grail of the blockchain field and the engine of the bull-to-bear transition. After years of precipitation, some specialized game public chains may become the driving force for the outbreak of the GameFi track in the next round of bull market.
The downturn in the market will undoubtedly bring pressure to the game team, after all, the decision to release a game in a bear market needs to be more cautious. It bears repeating that game development typically takes years, and diminished upstream funding prospects could put projects that failed to raise enough capital in a bull market at risk. But for high-quality 3A games, waiting for its development and polishing is the only way to go.
Let us look forward to the new bloom after precipitation and polishing.
This article is jointly published by PlanckX and Footprint Analytics.
PlanckX
PlanckX is a Web3 game aggregation platform. We have hundreds of popular chain games, support cross-chain transactions, chain game delivery and chain game community services, and provide marketing for GameFi projects, including game listing, advertising and transaction support. Serve.
Footprint Analytics
Footprint Analytics is a structured data platform linking web2 and web3. We provide the first code-free data analysis platform in the Crypto field and a unified data API, allowing users to quickly retrieve NFT, GameFi and DeFi data from more than 24 public chain ecosystems. The Footprint Growth Analytics launched by the platform helps GameFi and other Web3 projects carry out effective marketing and promotion.
ABGA
The Asian Blockchain Game Alliance (ABGA) is an ecological alliance jointly established by mainstream institutions in the global blockchain industry and outstanding organizations and individuals who are full of vision and enthusiasm for blockchain games, Metaverse, and NFT. Through a wealth of online and offline activities, as well as the analysis and discussion of the latest industry information, the alliance member resources are combined to discover, invest and incubate more potential projects to promote the vigorous development of the industry.