PLUS: Pudgy Penguins above 10 ETH!

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Here’s what we got for you today:

• Gaming airdrop season

• NFTs are back?!

• AI in gaming

Let’s get started!

Gaming Airdrop Season

Market conditions are rapidly changing and teams are capitalizing. This is done mainly through rewarding supporters with an airdrop. We have seen many airdrops recently do extremely well like TIA and PYTH. Now we’re seeing a similar surge in airdrops in the gaming space.

Compared to other sectors, gaming poses more challenges to attract and retain users for long periods of time. This changes when certain incentives are introduced. Games are now launching play-to-airdrop events, where gamers play and complete certain tasks to be eligible for the airdrop.

This is a feature and a bug. It is a feature as users flock to your game to play and retention will increase significantly. On the other hand, it can be a bug if the rewards don’t properly align. So distributing rewards is simply the starting point. What matters is building off that momentum. Now let’s look at some of these play-to-airdrop events.

One of the most popular airdrop campaigns in gaming at the moment is $PORTAL. The multi-chain gaming platform announced Crystal Dash, a SocialFi experience to reward users with $PORTAL. Users simply have to create content about the project and interact with other community members by liking and sharing posts. We don’t know if the airdrop will be worth it but many are farming because it’s free money.

Kuroro Beast is another game that launched an airdrop campaign. $KURO will be the token powering its ecosystem, allowing users to access token-gated products and experiences. Users can earn this token airdrop either through origin staking or reaching in-game milestones.

Besides tokens, there are many projects that are soon going to launch free NFT mints. Champions Tactics by Ubisoft, Castile, and Farcana are among many that announced NFT plans. As markets continue to trend up, we will see more token and NFT launches. Being an early tester and supporter will be rewarding.

NFTs Are Back?! 😲

Remember this headline from a couple months back? Yeah, that absolutely marked the bottom for NFTs. 

We are now witnessing a strong bounce across all top-tier NFTs that have been building throughout the bear market. Leading this rally is none other than Pudgy Penguins. The cheapest Pudgy Penguin is now over $23,000 or 11 ETH. 

In my opinion, this rally for the Pengus is not anticipation that there will be some new token launch. People are buying Pudgies because they all witnessed the growth of the brand outside the Web3 bubble. People genuinely love the toys and social presence is off the charts. More importantly, the IP expansion has just begun for Pudgy Penguins. 

We can say the same for Kanpai Pandas. They have built a great system organically that involves rewarding holders in a multitude of ways. They also collaborate with Karate Combat that has over $1 million in $KARATE token in the reward pool. Few other collections popping off are World of Women, Sappy Seals, Milady, and Cool Cats. 

The repricing of NFTs compared to the broader crypto market will likely continue. Those who are not into NFTs seem to allocate in tokens like $BLUR for exposure. Gaming NFTs are also hitting new highs. Wildcard, Spellborne, and InfiniGods are some of the games with big upticks in the past few weeks.

AI In Gaming 🤖

AI is fascinating for many reasons. In the context of gaming, I am more excited than ever. It might be one of the biggest trends in the coming year. The reason being it can accelerate game development.

For example, AI can redefine avatar generation and 3D game design. After the ideation process is done, AI can help technical artists in reducing the burden of repetitive tasks. One such task is creating textures. It is time-taking and artists can only create a limited selection of styles. With AI, there can be unlimited options via user generated content.

Once the textures are added and the foundation of the art is finished, the game design teams can also use AI to convert their 2D images to 3D models. The next step is avatar generation. While the initial results are promising, they are still not up to the quality most teams would love. 

Besides art, I believe in-game mechanics are going to change drastically. For example, non-playable characters will be more unique in terms of interactions. This has a chance to improve player engagement. 

With that said, I believe AI narrative is far from getting crowded. There will be many games using AI at some stage of development to ship faster.

Game Updates

• Kuroro Beast begins their airdrop hunt, where players can engage in origin staking or in-game quests to earn $KURO token. 

• Illuvium went live on Epic Games Store and players can download for free. 

• Retro MMORPG Defimons rebranded to Spellborne and will soon launch on iOS and Android. 

• Merit Circle introduced a new game in collaboration with DucklandGames called Forgotten Playland, an online party game. 

• Parallel announced pack opening for Planetfall pack will begin from December 13th.

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