DappRadar: Interest in Blockchain games continues despite the bear market

The decentralized applications (dApps) industry has, like the rest of the crypto space, been hit by the impact of a prolonged bear market. As the crypto market’s total valuation fell from highs of $3 trillin in 2021 to below $1 trillion – a multi-year low going back to 2020 – the same scenario unfolded in the dApps sector.

But despite daily Unique Active Wallets (UAW) falling to 2.22 million, the bear market did not really keep gamers off the market. In fact, 1.15 million daily UAW were registered in May, marking just 5% downturn month-over-month from April.

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Details from DappRadar’s latest report on the industry shows that blockchain games have largely defied the bear season. 

What happened in the blockchain gaming industry in May? Here are the key trends.

Splinterlands saw 350,000 daily UAW despite bear market

As markets recoiled from the downturn, Splinterlands set a record in daily unique active wallets, with its dynamic trading cards attracting 350,000 daily UAW. The leading game only lost 4% of the UAW registered over April. 

Notably for Splinterlands was also the SPS validator node licenses sale. On 26 May, the game’s 2000 licenses sold out in 15 minutes, with 14.5 million SPS burned and nearly $4 million sent to the game’s DAO. 

Illuvium’s $72 million land sale

This was another big event in the blockchain game space in May. Illuvium, a highly anticipated game, sold 20,000 land plots for 4,018  ETH, generating $72 million.

Illuvium is set to run on Immutable-X (IMX), the Ethereum layer-2 solution that seeks to make it easy for developers to launch blockchain games and other Web3 projects.

Move-to-Earn with STEPN

It was almost business as usual within the Move-to-Earn ecosystem as over 2 million monthly users hit the STEPN platform. The project’s governance token GMT also saw increased adoption, with increased participation bringing the total holders to over 262k unique wallets.

Over $1.3 billion invested in gaming and metaverse by a16z and Dapper Labs

Investors continued to show their bullish outlook for blockchain gaming and the metaverse in May, with total investments rising to $4.9 billion in 20222.

a16z’s  Games Fund One added $600 million in May and Dapper Labs poured $725 million into the Flow ecosystem.

Top games during this bear market

DappRadar and BGA Game’s latest report shows that the top blockchain games not to cave in to the market crash as seen in May were: 

• Splinterlands
• Farmers World
• Upland
• Sunflower Land
• Arc8

Here is how the top games stood in terms of daily average active wallets.

Notably, BNB’s Bomb Crypto and Mobox saw their UAW shrink by 50% and 28% respectively while Harmony’s DeFi Kingdoms (-41%) and Polygon’s Crazy Defense Heroes (-61%) were also the other big losers during the month. 

On-chain activity for Axie Infinity, which has yet to regain its market dominance since the Ronin bridge was hacked in March, declined by 39%.