DELPHI DIGITAL PERMIUM REPORT
marketplace, the IlluviDEX.
Guild of Guardians aims to ship its playable pre-alpha demo throughout 2022.
2021 was a breakout year for NFTs and gaming, with blockchain games having generated $2.32B of revenue in the third quarter of 2021 alone. Axie Infinity was the first of the lot to surpass $1B in NFT sales. As a result, there has been a flood of capital, founders, developers, and even entire gaming studios now entering into the blockchain gaming space. This has fueled many new projects being built that we’ll see come to life in 2022 and beyond.
This year, not only will we see new games onboarding thousands of players into the crypto ecosystem, but we’ll also see DAOs, Guilds, and identity layers emerge that synergize with these games to make all of web3 more vibrant and valuable.
Each week, the Delphi Gaming team will select a gaming ecosystem to highlight that aims to have playable modules, major drops, or releases happening in 2022.
The Immutable X ecosystem is coming out of the gate strong, riding atop both gaming and ZK rollup narratives. This is especially true after having onboarded Ember Sword last quarter while continuing to achieve significant traction and interest for existing games such as Illuvium and Guild of Guardians.
In 2021, IMX managed to generate $100M+ in L2 NFT trades with zero gas fees. With new and old partnerships like GameStop, Stardust, and OpenSea, alongside all of their Play-to-Earn (P2E) titles, 2022 is shaping up to be an explosive year for Immutable X.
Ember Sword :
We’ve previously touched upon Ember Sword in our 2022 Crypto Year ahead report. Ember Sword is a free-to-play sandbox blockchain MMORPG, which announced its move from Polygon to Immutable X just 2 months ago. The reason for this migration boiled down to features such as accessibility, custodial wallet solutions, and payment via credit cards.
Bright Star Studios, the creators of Ember Sword, aim to open up alpha testing for NFT owners in the first quarter of 2022. They will also announce the second land sale, which will take place around the same time period. Bright Star aims to continue releasing more gameplay-focused alpha versions throughout 2022.
Ember Sword will be released on PC first (browser), or as a stand-alone client, and gradually build mobile cross-play.
Illuvium:
Illuvium is an open-world RPG adventure game featuring deity-like creatures called Illuvials. Even though January was bumpy for the project, with sILV and Discord exploits taking place, the team has bounced back with many releases scheduled for the coming months.
Soon, a small selection of private beta testers will be allowed to get their hands on the first taste of Illuvium gameplay via their “Survival Mode” beta. In Survival Mode, players will have to battle wave after wave of Illuvials to see how many rounds they can endure without being defeated. Alongside this, the Illuvium team is also internally beta testing one of the four regions in “Overworld” (open world) modules of the core Illuvium game.
Besides the Illuvium beta tests, fans can also soon expect the first mini-game of Illuvium to be released called Illuvium Zero. ILV Zero will be a resource management and land-building game where certain earned assets will be interoperable with the core ILV game.
Even before that, we may see the release of another major part of the ILV ecosystem which will be their native marketplace called the IlluviDEX. Here players will be able to purchase ILV assets, the first of which being land for ILV Zero and Illuvitars (ILV’s upcoming PFP release).
Expect more to be shipped from Illuvium as they’ve now grown their team to over 100 strong, and will be conducting another round of funding soon as well — opening up the purchase of locked tokens in order to accelerate their roadmap.
Do also check out our conversation with Kieran and Aaron Warwick, two of the co-founders of Illuvium.
Guild of Guardians:
Guild of Guardians, a play-and-earn multiplayer fantasy action RPG where players build their team of Guardians, is well anticipated by over 150,000 pre-registered players. Developed by Stepico and published by Immutable, Guild of Guardians will initially be available on iOS and Android in 2022. Check out their pre-alpha footage here.
By the first half of 2022, Guild of Guardians aims to ship its pre-alpha demo (no blockchain, limited content, time-limited). Guild of Guardians aims to have a playable alpha on testnet by the 2nd half of 2022 with limited gameplay.
In addition, Guild of Guardians aims to continue developing their offerings, not just horizontally in gaming, but vertically – with a NFT trading marketplace, lending and sponsorship platforms, eSports tournaments / competitions, and metaverse expansions for the Guild of Guardians IP.
Guild of Guardians has already seen $15M of assets traded on IMX as of Jan 31st.
