117. Pay Attention to this Crypto Sector in 2024

$7.2 billion was raised in Web3 and 60% of that went to gaming.

There is this huge gaming narrative at the moment. The difference is this space is actually executing and delivering games you can play and they're pretty bloody decent.

Some names you might have heard of are like Ubisoft, the platform behind Assassin's Creed, Zynga, who built farmville, and also Square Enix, that built Final Fantasy tripled down on Blockchain.

This is one that you absolutely want to watch if you are a gamer and if you are a crypto investor.

Welcome back to another episod episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scaling a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. Today we are talking about a big sector that you need to be paying attention to in 2024. A narrative that we believe is going to have a lot of capital inflow from new retail investors that's already seen that in November it had a massive, massive month. And that is the gaming sector. Gaming is one of the must watch narratives for 2024. There were some major highlights from individual tokens which we'll talk about that happened in 2024. Plus we're starting to hit the time where a lot of these projects that raise huge amounts of VC capital over the last two or three years are starting to actually launch their projects which is super exciting. So it's a sector that we're very bullish on Bergs and keen to dive into this because wow, there's been some, some winners over the last few weeks, mate.

Looking at this chart there are some impressive numbers. I actually own one of these and the numbers gone up significantly since then. Like at least another it's up 30%. This chart has gone up another 30% since then. This is fantastic to see, mate.

So some of the highlights that we saw in November IMX or immutable X up 100%. Alluvium up 130%. Ron up 150% and prime up 201%. Really this is down to like the narrative of these AAA crypto native games starting to hit the market and the biggest one that happened in the last few weeks was the public beta of Alluvium's first game, Alluvium arena, which was listed on the Epic Games Stores this week. So, you know, Epic Games Stores is like a, you know, a Web2 basically gaming platform where anyone can go and start to play. And this is the opportunity. So we're tapping into not just a Web3 audience, but, you know, the gaming audience themselves. And the impact of this is.

Massive. Right. So the biggest problem that we've seen these gaming projects the last two or three years have is they're just, they're not fun to play. But the numbers that they're starting to see come out now is like a huge increase in like the hours.

So the average hours play time per player, like at the end of the day, like, game. The other success of a game is how fun it is to play. Right. So these web3 games severely lacked in this space and now we're starting to see, after years of development, some of these games really start to hit velocity in players.

Absolutely. So I'm a gamer and I've just looked this up, this alluvium, and it looks legit, man. Like it's got 4.8 stars as well. And you actually need a decent PC, you know, 16 to 32 gigs. You do only need an i5 and a 2070, but we're starting to get there. Like, you don't need absolute burn and graphics card to run it. But the graphics look amazing and it looks legit. Like if you saw this in any store, like you saw it on Steam, wherever, you'd be like, this is what I'd expect from a game. It's not this weird blocky thing where they've kind of, you know, done all this blockchain work and then thrown on some like crappy polygons from 1990 and go, oh, yeah, here's your game. No, this looks like it's made by a proper game studio.

Yeah, amazing. Remember those games that were just purely, you know, basically tokenomics and like, just a. An economy to make money. Like, what was the game that you used to play.

In the web 3 space?

Oh, bridge World.

Yeah, Bridge World.

Yeah. So that was funny where it's like, it's kind of like nft, like relics, cards, all that kind of stuff. And really it's just like very basic graphics. You move stuff around. It's like, it's very odd. You lock things up and it's like a kind of strategy game. You're trying to find the meta. But it's just very basic web browser thing. Then they brought out like, I think it was. Oh, I forget what it was. Like battle something with Butterflies and it's like these butterflies like flying through and you're like oh my God, like you could build better games in uni in like a week. You know, like some of the guys that we had in, when I was working in health that were building stuff in VR in like a couple of weeks just blew my mind and I'm like, look, this ain't it. Like if kids can build this that are just learning it, that actually haven't worked in the gaming industry. And this is what we get from you know, blockchain games now I think we've actually arrived and even like.

You know, Immutable X they have a deal with Amazon to actually with AWS to get people in, create, give them credits, get them started to build on their network, which is just amazing.

Yeah, that's super cool. So the game that they just launched is basically an open world game where players travel through this world to catch alluvial creatures that are representative NFTs and battle them competitively.

It's only one of the games that they plan to release with Alluvium Overworld a companion game for capturing and finding Lose expected to to come out in Q1 2024. So obviously that's just one game. Brawlers, a wrestling theme. NFT game on the wax Blockchain also hit the epic game stores this month. And another gaming chain, Ronin saw activity spike as a new game, Pixels hit 100,000 daily active users which is, you know, massive. There's some other notable games in the space such as Shrapnel on Avalanche which I actually played when I was in the US which is like a Call of Duty style game which is really cool. The graphics were, were pretty epic as well as parallel on Ethereum and Base Blockchain and three additional gaming focused Avalanche subnets will go live in December. So Yeah, this next six or 12 months will be absolutely huge for the crypto gaming space. We're finally starting to see these long awaited games come to to fruition and many people are just shocked to learn that there are actually over 3 billion gamers today. And the gaming industry is now larger than the music and movie industries combined, which is massive. And we talk about the amount of money that was raised in this space over the last 12 months. $7.2 billion was raised for capital. Sorry, $7.2 billion of capital was raised in web3 in total and 60% of that went to gaming, which was massive. So yeah, lots of money going to this space game starting to come out, people starting to play them. It's pretty exciting time for the game and Spacebar.

This is huge. So we're talking about this because it's a narrative that we are now seeing play out. It's something we've had our eyes on for a while. And if you think back in the day, like, let's say, well, 2017 was like, you know, ICOs and then it was metaverse and then it was NFTs and kind of in Metaverse there was a bit of gaming, but it didn't really take off. Like people weren't buying it. But there is this huge gaming narrative at the moment. The difference is this space is actually executing and delivering games you can play, and they're pretty bloody decent. So this is one that you absolutely want to watch if you are a gamer and if you are a crypto investor.

And it's not just Web3 games or gamers. And companies building this space is starting to be bigger crypto traditional studios that are starting to develop crypto games. So some names you might have heard of, like Ubisoft, the platform behind Assassin's Creed, is building a crypto gaming experience with immutable Zynga, who built Farmville, introduced his first crypto native mobile game Sugar Town. And also Square Enix, that built Final Fantasy, tripled down on Blockchain, partnering with a Web3 developer. So there's some more and more, you know, bigger players coming into this space, which is an interesting one in terms of an investment perspective. We, we did a. A research piece a little while ago for our members on ways to get exposure to the gaming sector. So for those members that read that, know, well done, there's some. We listed about seven different ways to get exposure to the gaming sector. And that might be from, you know, buying the underlying asset. It might be buying the blockchain itself, for example. You might want to invest into Ethereum because a lot of these games are being built on Ethereum or Solana or Polygon, for example. You can look at buying indexes. So you can go to something like the Metaverse index and actually get like a basket of currencies. You know, you might invest deeper into the individual gaming token themselves. Like you might back Alluvium, for example, you might back Axie Infinity or, you know, Apecoin or Shrapnel, you know, whatever that might be. You can back the individual token. You can back the gaming studio themselves. You can back the land in all the NFTs with inside the game. So so many different ways to get exposure. We've got a bigger resource there you can check that out. You just search crypto gaming exposure for our members in our platform and you'll get that. But yeah, some awesome ways to get exposure to the space.

And if you are a member, go to your dashboard, fill out your tokens, what you have, how much you have and immediately it'll break it down into categories. See how much you have allocated to gaming. If it is not enough for you and doesn't fit in with your strategy, read our research on it and get exposure. And Ben, you've just reminded me I do have some tokens locked up in a contract. I think it's been staked for like two years. I totally forgot about it when I was, when I was mucking around in, in Bridge world I got some magic locked up, hopefully that hasn't blown up. And I can only get out of that contract.

Because it might be worth a bit now to be with DJ.

Mate locked up something somewhere worth what where it is?

Oh man, I had no idea what contract I was signing. Just like just go for it mate. Who cares? Take all my coins. So filthy.

Crack out the hardware wallet mate and hope I don't get wrecked. Let's, let's hope we can get that out. If not, I'll be carrying that loss forward.

Oh dear. So yeah that's, that's a gap, that's a sector that we, we believe is going to be big in 2024. Keep an eye out for that. You know, if you want some more research on the different tokens and, and assets we're looking at. We're actually hosting a free live masterclass this week. So this is, this is actually going to be on Thursday 14th December at 7pm and Friday 15th of December at 8am Myself and I had a research Matt are hosting this live one hour session to help you fix your portfolio and really position yourselves to profit from this upcoming bull market. So we're going to be going through our strategies, how to create a sales strategy, how to really get out near the top and everything we're doing with our portfolio to navigate this cycle. So if you want some help completely free, we'll leave the link in the description below. We'd love to see you on there. And yeah, as always there's so much opportunity in this space and now is really the time to get together and get organized.

Absolutely. Jump on that webinar, get it right. The same talk Ben did at the Australia Crypto Conference. We've revamped it, made it even better, had some great feedback, get amongst it.

Amazing we'd love to see you there Berg, thank you again. Great session. We'll see you on the next episode thanks, champion.

See you later.