From the independent market of Pirate Nation, look at the investment ideas for blockchain gaming assets

Author: Cookie

The blockchain game is a very unique track. By the time this year, 2024, arrives, if you are like me, a light blockchain game player (that is, not focusing mainly on following the blockchain game track, and investing a lot of time in actual gameplay every day), your impression of blockchain games may be that they are getting better and more enjoyable to play.

The gold farming model of chain games we were familiar with in the past was probably:

• There is an entry cost. For example, in Wolf Game and StepN, the earlier entry means lower entry cost, and the later entry means higher cost.
• The value of Token depends heavily on its consumption. Or at least it can be said that players are very concerned about this.

Based on the above two points, there has been the much-discussed ‘death spiral’ problem.

However, in reality, many of this year’s profit-making blockchain gaming projects are no longer following the same patterns as before.

Investment Ideas for Chain Game Assets from the Perspective of Pirate Nation

One of the most typical examples is Pirate Nation, where even if you start playing the game one long month before Token issuance, you can still earn hundreds of U in revenue. Recently, Pirate Nation has also gained more followings due to its Non-fungible Token series and Token $PIRATE’s independent market trends.

After the TGE selling pressure, $PIRATE has steadily pumped over the past 1 month

The floor price of the Non-fungible Token series has also reached new highs.

Why can Pirate Nation succeed? There are three main reasons for this:

• The team has a strong background, with large-scale financing support. Its gaming studio Proof of Play announced in September last year that it had completed a $33 million financing round led by Greenoaks Capital and a16z Crypto. CEO Amitt Mahajan was formerly a development engineer at Epic Games, a development director at Zynga, and co-founder of one of Zynga’s flagship games, FarmVille (the prototype of “QQ Farm”).
• The game is updated quickly.
• The regulation of TOKEN acquisition is well done.

So speaking of that, getting back to the main topic of this article, where are the opportunities for light chain players to participate? From the above Floor Price trend of the Non-fungible Token series, we can see that Pirate Nation TGE in June of this year, and its Non-fungible Token series has been hovering around 0.15 ETH for a long month even after announcing a large financing. Buying at that time and holding until now, apart from the $PIRATE shares obtained, has nearly 10x returns.

This is the current train of thought for many Non-fungible Token players investing in blockchain game-related Non-fungible Token assets—looking for blockchain projects with large financing and reliable background teams, and speculating on the future Token. As long as the team keeps updating frequently and the Token expectations become clear after official announcements, many other investors who do not follow the project itself but only follow market news will come in to ‘hype up’.

The current ‘Play 2 Earn’ is more like ‘Play 2 Airdrop’

Why can the Non-fungible Token of Pirate Nation still rise after TGE? This is another place where it is different from the current chain games. The previous chain games usually had a dual token model, an in-game token with no supply limit, a governance token, and the project party had to keep regulating with the surge in the number of players, and in the end, it was out of control. But tokens like $PIRATE in Pirate Nation have a limited supply of in-game tokens, and a portion is uniformly distributed to players as a reward during TGE. Want to go long? Then please continue playing the game.

Moreover, Pirate Nation will also carry out a series of game infrastructure. Currently, staking $PIRATE can earn Proof of Play points. What if another Token is released in the future? Its valuation will definitely be higher than that of a standalone blockchain gaming project. Therefore, from this perspective, we easily think of Blur and Blast. Although Blur is not a blockchain game, it follows a similar pattern - first, there is a mature product (Non-fungible Token market), trading in the market to obtain Tokens, and finally launching a blockchain (Blast) to keep users continuously engaged in the ecosystem.

Playing games, but Token rewards are not settled immediately, but left until a certain time for Nodes to distribute uniformly. This approach has become a trend, resulting in significant changes in investment strategies. Compared to Axie, where players collaborate with studios and invest in Non-fungible Token assets in the ambush chain gaming track, the new path for Light Chain gamers to profit in this track is to play games with a relaxed attitude, treating the game as a game itself rather than a tool for making money.

Last year, Parallel’s PFP series only required a total of 25 victories in various races to be obtained for free, and later the floor price rose to over 1 ETH. This year, The Beacon’s first Token reward event is obtained through playing games and participating in social tasks, and TGE still has to wait for half a year. Moreover, they have put out the Token share for sale in the form of Non-fungible Tokens, and in the future, to obtain this portion of subscription Token shares, one still needs to play games. Nevertheless, with a Token FDV of approximately over 20 million, the subsequent 10,000 Non-fungible Tokens that can obtain Tokens are still sold out at a price of 0.115 ETH, and the price of their pet Non-fungible Tokens has also been driven up by players.

The mindset of QLC Chain players: Observing from the perspective of ‘gaming’ returning to Crypto projects

So the standards for judging whether a blockchain game project can make money have also changed to some extent:

• Playability is of course important, but the quality of the game itself is not the deciding factor in whether it can make money, it is the popularity caused by the quality of the game that is key.
• The project itself cannot indiscriminately issue Non-fungible Token assets to dilute the Token value. The clearer and more decisive the project’s positioning and maintenance of the Non-fungible Token series, the better the empowerment (Token shares) of this series.
• It is best to be able to calculate the FDV clearly, and everyone will compare it on their own. As long as it is cost-effective compared to the ‘PPT project’, there will be no shortage of people willing to take a risk.

The least cost-effective operation is to start playing a blockchain game only when it becomes popular and everyone is discussing it on social media, at which point it’s difficult for casual players to make significant profits. We can choose not to play blockchain games, but we should free ourselves from the mindset of viewing them purely as games and instead adopt a crypto project perspective - Does the project’s fundraising and team situation warrant attention? Does the content (gameplay) presented by the project warrant attention? If the project has a token, does the current valuation present good enough odds in our view?

Even now, there are still many chain game projects whose Token activities can be participated in by completing social media tasks. This kind of project was mentioned in the previous article (related reading: Inventory of 4 projects worth low-intensity play, Inventory of 6 projects worth low-intensity play | E02), among which the Non-fungible Token series of Super Champs mentioned has already risen by about 50%. (This does not constitute any investment advice, and the editor will also try to explore more long similar chain game projects for everyone in the future.)

Overall, the current income in the chain game project is to exchange time for space. Compared with the Solana meme Token or BTC ecosystem infrastructure, the chain game is not at the same level in terms of follow-up degree and the focus of these top markets, but everyone loves Token, so there will be information asymmetry in the chain game assets related to Token. When they are not followed by the market, it is possible to look for targets that are highly probable and relatively cheap to ambush. It is okay to either dump when the market reacts or continue to participate in the game, with both offensive and defensive strategies. Fundamentally, the chain game project is also a Crypto project, so we don’t really need to spend a particularly long time playing games. Playing games itself is more like research on chain game projects, which can help us judge whether the team is reliable and whether the future can generate enough market attention.