For years, blockchain gaming remained at the forefront of other Web3 novelties, until its potential was finally recognized in 2024.
To explain the reasons behind its success, the article conducts a retrospective journey to GameFi’s roots, unveiling its play-to-earn concept and highlighting the key milestones of a previously niche sector.
CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity: how it all started
Although blockchain-based gaming has gained massive recognition, these efforts did not see any notable success until 2017 – the year it gained prominence CryptoKitties was launched.
Powered by Ethereum blockchain, CryptoKitties fun was put simply: players could buy, breed and trade virtual NFT cats that had different visual characteristics with different levels of rarity. Although the gameplay seemed plain, it has earned the hearts and investments just after its five-day beta launch started in November 2017.
Less than a month later, CryptoKitties shook the community when the in-game cat Genesis was sold for 247 ETH, which equates to approx. $117,000 at the time. Finally, the game’s developer Dapper Labs arrives the following year increased $12 million from several top companies.
This was a literal game changer. In 2018, CryptoKitties had bragging rights 1 million cats are bred with a volume of 3.2 million transactions on its smart contracts. Not to mention the collaborations with celebrities and the German ZKM Center for Art and Media Kalsruhe museum.
However, the success eventually stopped. By 2022, the game overall had fallen to less than 100 sales per dayfor a total value of less than $10,000. And while CryptoKitties showtime faded as quickly as it flared up, but it contributed to a greater achievement: it became a kickstarter for the future of GameFi.
Just around the time CryptoKitties was gaining recognition, one of its creators, Nguyen Thanh Trung, became work on a new project, a game that would give a boost to the crypto-clicker phenomenon: Axie Infinity.
Axie Infinity is designed as a competitive game with an ‘idle battle’ system, inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics and Idle Heroes. But crucially, it presented an extensive in-game economy, an Ethereum-powered virtual market, where players could buy, sell and trade the resources they earn in the game.
At the same time, so was The Sandbox gather throughout the community. Bringing the brand name of an iconic 2021 crafting game, the platform offered to create in-game items via toolbox and then sell them for a game-specific cryptocurrency.
All of these games have struggled through time and some have had dramatic endings, but more importantly they have laid the foundation for the play-to-earn (P2E) concept – a category of blockchain-based games with player-owned economies enabled through in-game assets represented by tokens and NFTs.
The P2E model has become so sought after during the 2021 bull market that it caught the attention of game development giants – from Ubisoft and Electronic Arts (EA) to Take Two (distributor of the Grand Theft Auto series) and Square Enix.
However, such a trend eventually caused a backlash and became one of the reasons why GameFi remained low until 2024. Apart from the declining popularity of NFTs and the bear market from the end of 2021, game dev studios have faced fierce criticism of blockchain games from the players, who advocated ‘Play to have fun’ and ‘Play to contribute’ games.
How TON is breathing new life into Crypto Gaming
As of early 2024, GameFi remained a niche industry. The tide turned. The Open Network (TON) came into the picture. The main feature – facilitated the development of dApps with the interface transfer directly to Telegram – has revealed great potential not only for the applications, but also for play-to-ear games.
The hallmark of TON’s contribution to GameFi turned out to be that Non-coin. Developed by Open Builders, a team specialized in creating viral social games, Notcoin debuted in November 2023 as a Closed beta Available exclusively on Telegram.
The idea of Notcoin was not new or flashy: it worked on a simple concept, where users could earn coins by simply tapping the yellow coin on smartphone screens and receiving a reward. The gameplay was also spiced up with various boost mechanics, including bonuses, backgrounds and coin skins.
Notcoin turned out to be a great success. During the mining (or ‘tapping’) phase, users come together generated more than 8 trillion tapswhich have been converted into over 17 trillion Notcoins in the game.
After the mining phase, players were rewarded with an airdrop of NOT, a real TON-built token. And this too became an absolute success. Strongly catalyzed by the bullish market that started in March, NOT has increased more than 500% since the airdrop.
Whitechain is taking a leap into GameFi with Pocket Rocket
Ultimately, the Open Network and especially Notcoin gave GameFi a second wind. The dApps in the chain started to spring up like mushrooms – from Near’s HOT, Catizen and MomoAI to the infamous but hyped HamsterKombat.
What made the clicker gameplay much more gripping is Pocket rocket – Whitechain powered clicker game in the blockchain of The Open Network. Inside the game, players compete for crystal rocks – a currency of Web3 space. These can be obtained by completing various tasks including tapping the screen, hunting asteroids, upgrading spaceships and testing superpowers.
So do Pocket Rocket players competed for special quest boxes from Whitechain. For completing certain tasks in the chain and playing games, users could win a reward of 500 to 5,555 USDT, as well as six unique NFTs.
Pocket Rocket is the ultimate nutshell from the professionals at The Open Network and its dApps, combining community, gameplay and earning opportunities all in one go.
Why TON Games are getting caught
Although TON-powered games can boast facilitated development and attractive gameplay features, these are not the main reasons for their popularity.
Notcoin, Pocket Rocket and other dApps offer a sense of participation in the community, as players form squads and collaboration groups in the application, designed specifically for such purposes: Telegram.
But crucially, all the above projects play a key role in driving the development and adoption of decentralized applications. While Notcoin provides a comprehensive mechanism for setting up a self-sustaining economy within the app, Pocket Rocket proves itself to be efficient in integrating with other blockchains and protocols. This marks the flexibility that TON proposes – a crucial feature for dApp development.