Infected Move to Solana & Shrapnel Struggles Continue

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🎮️ Top Stories of the Week

🦠 Pandemic Simulation Game Infected Ditches Base for Solana

Infected has announced a complete migration from Coinbase's Base network to Solana, citing performance issues and ecosystem fit. Not without controversy, of course.

Key Points:

• Infected claimed that Base “couldn’t handle the volume of transactions coming in at once”

• Base Co-Founder Jesse Pollak went to X to clarify that this was a frontend issue, and confirmed that Base did not crash

• Developers at Base claimed that the Infected team made miscalculations such as launching 30 tokens at once and launching smart contracts without any anti-bot or limits.

The Gaming Crypto Take:

• It seems highly unlikely that Base, who have millions of active users, crashed during this period. 

• It’s more likely that Infected’s team mishandled the launch technically on the front end. 

• This is likely a marketing play by a team who are inexperienced, had found some traction, and wanted to leverage this attention. 

• This feels akin to NFT launches of 2021 that had buggy contracts and bad frontends. 

• Crypto games that last will be built by developers and studios with rich gaming history, that have the technical expertise to build games onchain.

• We will live in a multichain future, and right now there are a variety of approaches by chains in terms of onboarding developers. Some are looking at the volume of games (Immutable, Arbitrum, Base), some curated (Avalanche, Sui) and others have taken a ‘build it and they will come’ approach, including Solana.

🔫 SHRAPNEL Struggles Continue

Per Kate Irwin (Blockworks) – Shrapnel, once hailed as a potential breakout game in the Web Gaming world is struggling.

Key Points:

• $Shrap, their native token, is down 95%+ since inception, and the token has never been integrated into the game itself.

• According to Blockworks’ findings, the business is now millions of dollars in the red 

• The company has had a total operating expenses burn of $86.9 million since the founding of the company NEON Machine, who are the developers of Shrapnel

• Former CEO Mark Long's departure in January has left questions about leadership direction

• Shrapnel’s team has shrunk from ~80 employees to ~20 over the past 18 months. 

• Recently, Shrapnel made headlines by launching in China, on China’s government blockchain. This has been highlighted as a ‘last-ditch attempt to save the business’ by Blockworks sources.

Gaming Crypto Take:

• This feels like one of the messiest stories in this space right now, with a plethora of things contributing to it. The icing on the cake is the deal with the Chinese Govt, which is reminiscent PE bailout, but by a government. 

• Shrapnel raised at lofty valuations in the peak of the Web3 gaming hype cycle. The company can either continue on their current trajectory, with poor management hindering growth – or it can go the way of Off The Grid and Gunzilla, who have executed their intended roadmap to this point.

• Many have questioned whether or not mainstream adoption of games on crypto rails will come from AAA games that require huge resources and are time-intensive. So far, mobile and browser native games – have better onboarded consumers.

🎲 TRALA and Arbitrum Bring Game of Dice to Web3

TRALA has partnered with Arbitrum to launch their strategic dice game on the layer-2 blockchain. The partnership aims to deliver a high-speed, low-cost gaming experience while bringing traditional dice mechanics to blockchain gaming.

Key Points:

• Originally released in 2015, Game of Dice has achieved over 50 million downloads and generated approximately $60 million in cumulative global revenue

• The game has a large and loyal user base in Korea, Japan, the U.S and Europe.

• Most notably, the game wants to integrate Real World Assets into the game. 

• It will also include NFTs, staking mechanics and more onchain elements.

Gaming Crypto Take:

• The trend of traditional, successful IP coming onchain is continuing – and it makes sense; there is an existing and engaged audience. Although Web3 game funding is down, the amount of existing IP exploring this space has increased over the last 2 years. This trend will no doubt continue. 

• Arbitrum have seen some success over the last 12-18 months, particularly from games leaving other Layer 2 chains such as Polygon. 

• The commercials of something like this are particularly interesting. Did Arbitrum have to spend big to encourage TRALA to build on their platform?