This Week in Crypto Games: PRIME Pumps on ‘Parallel’ Maker’s Solana Game News, Airdrop Mania Continues

The crypto and NFT gaming space is busier than ever lately, what with prominent games starting to release, token airdrops piling up, and a seemingly constant array of other things happening at all times. It’s a lot to take in!

Luckily, Decrypt’s GG is all over it. And if you need a quick way to get caught up on the latest moves around crypto video games, we’re debuting This Week in Crypto Games.

Our weekend roundup serves up the biggest news from the past week, along with a few other tidbits you might have missed. We also showcase a few of our original stories from the week.

Biggest news

Parallel dev’s Colony: The team behind the buzzy Parallel NFT card game on Ethereum and Base isn’t resting on its laurels. On Thursday, Parallel Studios dropped a meaty whitepaper for Colony, its generative AI-driven “survival simulation”—and there’s a twist: It’ll run on Solana. The game will revolve around player-owned AI “agents” that play independently in a 3D world and may or may not respond to your commands. Sounds ambitious.

You can find more detail in our news coverage or via the whitepaper itself, but know this: Parallel’s PRIME token on Ethereum has spiked 33% over the past week as many other gaming tokens have fallen, hitting a new all-time high Sunday afternoon.

Prices rise and cool: Last weekend, many gaming tokens saw skyrocketing gains. In the last week, most of them have cooled down and corrected, as a quick glance at CoinGecko’s GameFi category shows. There's been a lot of red over the last seven days. But in addition to PRIME’s surge, Ethereum gaming network Ronin saw its RON token spike to a new all-time high price midweek after more than two years.

Airdrop mania continues: Another week, another batch of games and gaming projects readying their token drops and asking players to hop in and earn. BlockGames (BLOCK) is arguably the biggest in the last week or so, based on the Twitter momentum, while long-running metaverse games Upland has launched a “Share and Build” campaign around its impending Ethereum token launch.

And the upcoming Overwatch-like Solana hero shooter Nyan Heroes is building buzz for its airdrop campaign ahead of the game’s Epic Games Store early access launch later this month. DappRadar’s February industry report credited the play-to-airdrop boom with helping to fuel a 20% spike in active gaming wallets last month.

MapleStory on AVAX: South Korean gaming giant Nexon revealed early last week that it will release its MapleStory Universe games using Avalanche instead of Ethereum scaler Polygon, as previously announced. MapleStory is a huge online game that has endured for two decades, and now it’s coming to the crypto gaming world via a dedicated Avalanche subnet.

ICYMI

• We got a first tease of the “Ready Player One”-inspired Readyverse last week, thanks to a trailer for “OPEN,” a battle royale shooter experience being built within the platform.
• Ethereum mech shooter MetalCore is planning to launch its open beta in May on Immutable zkEVM, with the game’s token potentially dropping at the same time. Studio369 raised $5 million in fresh funding to help facilitate the rollout.
• Nearly $250 million worth of major gaming tokens—including Pixels (PIXEL), ApeCoin (APE), PRIME, and Immutable (IMX)—will be unlocked before the end of March.
• Mobile NFT shooter MadWorld opened up registrations for its early access period while developer Carbonated announced a $11 million funding round.
• Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard had its Twitter/X account hacked on Thursday to shill an unofficial ATVI meme token. It didn’t find many traders.

• Notcoin, the viral clicker game on Telegram, launched a campaign last week to hand out 100,000 Toncoin (over $400K worth) along with millions of in-game coins.
• Aptos Labs launched the GameStack development suite last week to help make it easier to develop crypto games on Aptos—with help from Google Cloud.
• Meanwhile, the team behind the Polkadot network announced a new software development kit integration with the Unity game engine, plus plans for a game jam/hackathon with the Blockchain Gaming Alliance.
• The Ronin network announced Friday that it has ended its partnership with ACT Games and that Zoids Wild Arena and other ACT IP won’t launch on the Ethereum scaler.

GG spotlight

Here are a few of our original stories from this past week that we think are well worth a weekend read: