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Web3 Market Update – Q3 2023
This quarterly web3 report emerges in the middle of the crypto winter that began in early 2022. There are still a number of first generation web3 games hanging on with a mix of bots and die-hards, but there have been very few impactful game releases for some time. We’ve also seen a pull-back in venture funding, and many ambitious games are still expectedly taking a long time to see the light of day.
The Evolution of Hybridcasual
In January 2019 a notorious article predicted that the then-booming hypercasual genre would eventually become unsustainable. More than a year later, Apple announced IDFA deprecation. The fallout has kept a few of us here at Naavik busy all the way through 2020 and 2021. The clearest way out, especially for the most established hypercasual companies,…
Unofficial Realms: The Rise of Dedicated Game Servers
Gen Alpha’s Gaming
How Honkai: Star Rail Reveals Cracks in the HoYoverse
There are only a few gaming studios in the world that are capable of releasing back-to-back global blockbuster hits. Supercell used to be the Western poster child with five consecutive releases of billion dollar titles — Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars. miHoYo is now on a similar trajectory…
Gaming Marketplace Case Studies
Esport Revenue Growth
How Strategy & Card Games are Surviving Post-IDFA
This mobile F2P genre report is the first of many in Naavik’s Open Gaming Research Initiative. Every alternate month, we will perform a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a certain mobile F2P genre to suss out various current state observations, interesting new subgenre trends, potential future genre predictions, and more. This report was written by…
Gaming X AI Market Map: The Infinite Power Of Play
By Moritz Baier-Lentz & Kishen Patel / Lightspeed Gaming This deep dive was written by our partners at Lightspeed Venture Partners and originally published here. To date, Lightspeed has invested over $350 million into the gaming industry — including with many founders who have led the creation of games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, League…
Mighty DOOMed: How Doom’s Mobile Spinoff Misstepped
Alpha Dog Games, a Nova Scotia-based game studio and subsidiary of ZeniMax Media, is the developer behind Mighty Doom, the only mobile-first rendition leveraging the famous DOOM IP, which turns 30 years old later this year. The title is Alpha Dog’s first game within the Bethesda and ZeniMax family — and therefore also within Microsoft,…
June 2023: Web3 Gaming Monthly Market Update
June marked yet another month of slow downward trends in many areas of web3 gaming, with a degree of resilience persisting within the sector. As a whole, Unique Active Wallets (UAWs) largely remained stable in June compared to May. More specifically, casual games continued to drive more significant increases, while more transaction-driven (and bot-heavy) games…
May 2023: Web3 Gaming Monthly Market Update
This Naavik Exclusive features a comprehensive breakdown of the web3 gaming market for the month of May, including a detailed analysis of notable web3 game releases, unique active wallet stats, transaction trends, and funding announcements.
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