Chain game is a very unique track. Now, in 2024, if you, like me, are a light chain game player (that is, you don't focus mainly on following the chain game track and spend a lot of time actually playing chain games every day), your impression of chain games may be that they are becoming more and more sophisticated and playable.

In the past, the gold farming mode in blockchain games that we were familiar with was probably:

• There is a cost to enter. For example, Wolf Game and StepN, the earlier you enter, the lower the entry cost, and the later you enter, the higher it is.

• The value of Token is highly dependent 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 "death spiral" problem that has sparked countless discussions.

But in fact, many of this year's profitable blockchain gaming projects are no longer following the same pattern as before.

Investment Ideas for Chain Game Assets from Pirate Nation

One of the most typical examples is Pirate Nation. Even if you enter the game to play long before the Token is released, you can still earn hundreds of U. Recently, Pirate Nation has also received more attention due to its Non-fungible Token series and the independent market trend of Token $PIRATE.

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

The floor price of the Non-fungible Token series also hit record highs repeatedly

Why can Pirate Nation achieve success? There are three main reasons:

• The team has a strong background and is supported by large financing. The game studio Proof of Play behind it announced in September last year that it had completed a $33 million financing led by Greenoaks Capital and a16z Crypto. CEO Amitt Mahajan was a development engineer at Epic Games, development director at Zynga, and co-founder of FarmVille, one of Zynga's flagship games.

• The game updates quickly.

• The regulation of Token acquisition is well done.

So speaking of which, returning to the main topic of this article, where are the opportunities for Light Chain gamers to participate? From the above Non-fungible Token series Floor Price trends, we can see that Pirate Nation only had its TGE in June of this year, and even after announcing a large financing, its Non-fungible Token series remained stagnant at around 0.15 ETH for a whole month. For those who bought in at that time and still hold it now, aside from the $PIRATE shares they received, they have almost 10x returns.

This is the current train of thought for many Non-fungible Token players investing in blockchain-based 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 is frequently updating and not lying low, once the Token expectations are officially announced, many investors who do not follow the project itself but only follow market news will come in to "boost the market".

The current 'Play 2 Earn' is more like 'Play 2 Airdrop'.

Why can Pirate Nation's Non-fungible Token still have a big pump after TGE? Here is another different place from the past blockchain games. Previous blockchain games usually had a dual Token model, an in-game Token with no supply limit and a governance Token. The project team had to keep regulating it as the number of players increased, and in the end, it became uncontrollable. However, $PIRATE in Pirate Nation is an in-game Token with a supply limit. When TGE, it was uniformly distributed to players as a reward. Want to go long? Then keep playing the game.

And, Pirate Nation will also do a series of game infrastructure. Now, stake $PIRATE can also get Proof of Play points. What if another Token is released in the future for the infrastructure? The valuation will definitely be higher than the pure chain game project itself. So from this perspective, we can easily think of Blur and Blast. Although Blur is not a chain game, it is the same model - first, there is a mature product (Non-fungible Token market), trading in the market to obtain Token, and then releasing a chain (Blast) to keep users within the ecosystem.

Playing games, but Token rewards are not settled immediately, but are held by Nodes until a certain time for unified Settlement. This routine has almost become a trend, so there have been significant changes in investment strategies. Compared to the Non-fungible Token assets of Axie, which requires rolling with a studio and ambushing the chain game track, the new path for light chain game players to earn profits in this track is to play games as games themselves rather than treating them as gold-making tools, with a calm but serious attitude.

Last year, the PFP series of Parallel only required a total of 25 wins in various races to get it for free, but later the floor price rose to over 1 ETH. This year, the first Token reward event of The Beacon is obtained by playing games and participating in social tasks, and TGE still has to wait for another half a year. They also sell the Token shares in the form of Non-fungible Token, and you still have to play games to get the subscription Token shares. Nevertheless, with a Token FDV of more than 20 million, the 10,000 Non-fungible Tokens that can obtain subsequent Tokens were sold out at a price of 0.115 ETH, and the price of its pet Non-fungible Token was also pulled up by players' enthusiasm.

The mindset of QLC Chain gamers: shifting the perspective from 'gaming' back to Crypto projects

So the criteria for judging whether blockchain gaming projects can make money has also changed to a certain extent:

• Playability is important, but the quality of the game itself is not the determining factor in making money. The key is the topic generated by the quality of the game.

• The project party itself cannot indiscriminately issue Non-fungible Token assets to dilute the Token value. The clearer and more decisive the project party'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 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 try their luck.

The least cost-effective operation is when a chain game becomes popular and we can see a bunch of people discussing it on any social media platform before we start farming. At this point, it's very difficult for casual chain game players to have substantial profits. We can choose not to play chain games, but we need to liberate our mindset of observing chain game projects from the positioning of 'games' and instead observe them from the perspective of Crypto projects—can the financing and team situation of this project attract follow? Can the content presented by this project (gameplay) attract follow? If this project has a Token, is the current valuation good enough for us in terms of odds?

Even now, there are still many blockchain gaming projects that allow participation through completing social media tasks. I mentioned this type of project in previous articles (Related reading: 4 projects worth a quick and low-intensity check, 6 projects worth a quick and low-intensity check | E02). The Non-fungible Token (NFT) series of Super Champs, which I mentioned before, has already risen by about 50%. (This does not constitute any investment advice, and I will also try my best to discover more long-term similar blockchain gaming 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 and market focus, 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 ambush potential and relatively cheap targets, and it is okay to dump or continue to participate in the game after the market reacts, both attacking and defending. 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 investment research on chain game projects, which can assist us in judging whether the team is reliable and whether the future can gain enough market attention.