What’s up, gamers and gm to the boring folks out there.

Like a budding young romance, we are celebrating ONE MONTH of providing all of you with our brain dumps and takes on web3 gaming. The subscriber list is growing, and we’d like to thank you all for joining us on this journey.

To celebrate, we launched our Twitter… sorry, X account, so give us a follow there for memes, smaller takes, and photo evidence for when we actually touch grass.

Enough of the chit-chat. We’ve had a week of funding, FUD, and fuckery. Here’s the slate for today:

• Turbulent Week for Star Atlas

• Change Log

• Adoption Through Competition with Ultra Arena

• Web3 Gets Help From Mobile

• Other News

Turbulent Week for Star Atlas

Solana-based Star Atlas had a week, to say the least.

ATMTA, the company behind Star Atlas, announced that the team would be restructuring and reducing its headcount. The team of 122 was cut down to 45, marking an 80% decrease in headcount since ATMTA’s first round of layoffs post-FTX.

The restructuring is part of an initiative to shift focus on delivering its browser-based title Star Atlas: Golden Era (SAGE) and the Crew Mobile app. Additional changes were shared in the Star Atlas Discord, including anticipated slowdowns in Unreal Engine 5 game development and governance.

The restructuring has unfortunately dominated some otherwise very positive news coming from ATMTA and Star Atlas. Just before the announcement, their scavenger hunt-style game Escape Velocity hit 80 million in-game transactions.

We also got a big partnership announcement with distributed cloud computing infrastructure provider MetaGravity. The partnership will scale Star Atlas’ concurrent player limit from 5k to 30k players.

Finally, Star Atlas unveiled its new Star Atlas Companion app. The app is a STEPN style M2E type game, which lets you train your Crew through exercise and deploy your in-game crew members on mobile.

Change Log

• Raini: The Lords of Light launched on Epic Games.

• Big Time’s latest patch will add social features (chat, party finder) and female character customization.

• Champions Ascension’s pre-alpha patch added player bounties and fixed combat bugs.

• Tearing Spaces launched its open beta.

• Solana-based Aurory is expanding to Arbitrum.

• Nexon integrated Cool Cats into Maplestory Universe.

Adoption Through Competition with Ultra Arena

Web3 gaming infrastructure provider Ultra launched an esports platform for community-led competitions. Dubbed Ultra Arena, the new feature allows players to team up and compete in community-led contests for a chance to win UOS tokens, NFTs, and other prizes.

Starting August 8, Ultra Arena will enable competition for web3 games on the Ultra Gaming store/launcher as well as popular traditional titles like CSGO, League, and Overwatch.

Ultra is building a wide-reaching ecosystem for gaming that’s made it a strong leader in web3 game development. Ultra Blockchain, a game-optimized fork of the EOS blockchain, hit mainnet in June 2021 and announced over 30 titles within its first year. Ultra additionally built its Ultra Gaming game store and launcher, as well as an NFT marketplace for in-game assets and a range of other critical ecosystem infrastructure.

Web3 Gets Help From Mobile

Many Web3 games on the market, particularly in the P2E category, have similar characteristics to freemium and F2P mobile games. In many ways, this is intentional, as blockchain technology is uniquely positioned to thrive in this area.

A report on mobile games found that only 1.5% of active mobile game players make in-game purchases, but in-game purchases bring in $25 billion in revenue for games. The average value of a transaction is $5.94, and almost 70% of transactions are between $1-$5.

The past week has further demonstrated the connection between mobile and web3 gaming, with several announcements and partnerships coming from traditional mobile studios.

This morning, Singapore-based mobile game developer Weracle partnered with Immutable to develop a tower defense game on Immutable zkEVM. EF Tower Defense aims to capture the popularity of tower defense games with the support of a web2 gaming company that’s had games like Endless Frontier produce $80 million in revenue and 30 million downloads.

We also had a partnership announcement from Gamebop and Voodoo today. Once the largest game developer on Snapchat, Gamebop will work with Voodoo to create 14 mobile games for their social gaming platform Super Snappy.

Then there was earlier this week when Legends at War (LAW) developer Solert announced plans to launch a web3 version of the game on its own Avalanche subnet. Bringing LAW onto Avalanche creates an opportunity for the blockchain to capture an audience that’s downloaded the game over 10k times. As a real-time strategy game, LAW fits squarely in a category of mobile games that has produced several titles to exceed $1 billion in revenue.

With the influx of mobile gaming veterans teaming up with web3 studios, the next viral Candy Crush or Clash of Clans game may very well be blockchain-based.

Other News

• Web3 gaming studio Delabs Games raised a $4.7 million seed round led by Hashed.

• Yida Gao and Shima Capital invested in Web3 Gaming Project Pixion Games

• Sky Mavis partnered with Kongz NFT to bring Kongz and a new game to Ronin.

• CeFi platform Solvo rebranded to Qubit and shifted focus to web3 gaming wallets.

• Layer-1 XPLA has teamed with OLA.GG, the largest Web3 gaming community in LATAM.

• Decentraland reiterates social media awareness amid the rise of fake community accounts and phishing airdrops.