⛩️ SEGA on Sui

Hey frens. It’s Friday, and it’s been a heck of a week if you ask me.

Things are looking a little quiet right now, but I think that’s because so many studios are waiting until next week at GDC to make their big announcements.

There’s some big news coming, plus I’ve set up chats with OpenSea, Immutable, Ronin, and others that I think are making big plays in the space. 

Expect hot takes, news, and vibe checks all around.

Have a great weekend and rest up, because next week’s gonna be wild!

— Kate Irwin

P.S. Let me know how you’re liking The Drop! Send me an email at [email protected].

SEGA digital card battler comes to Sui

SEGA’s Code of Joker game series is coming to the gaming-focused L1 blockchain Sui via a new game.

SEGA licensed the IP to the third-party firm Jokers, Inc., which is developing the upcoming title.

The new game based on the Japanese anime-style arcade IP is called Code of Joker: Evolutions. Players will be able to open card packs and collect cards onchain as Sui NFTs. 

“We knew that we wanted to match the physical feeling of opening a new card pack,” Takashi “Gin” Mizouka, cofounder of Jokers Inc., said in a statement. 

While Sonic the Hedgehog, one of SEGA’s most famous characters, appears in footage of Code of Joker gameplay, I think it’s very unlikely the quick blue mammal will pop up in Code of Joker: Evolutions.

Mysten Labs didn’t respond to my question about whether Sonic will be in the new game, but I do remember that roughly two years ago when I was covering blockchain gaming, SEGA co-COO Shuji Utsumi said SEGA won’t license its biggest IPs for third-party blockchain games and won’t develop its own in-house crypto games, either. 

That said, SEGA is obviously still open to licensing some of its other game brands. 

Two years ago, it licensed the Sangokushi Taisen brand for a third-party blockchain military card battle game on Oasys, developed by Double Jump Tokyo.

By the way, that game is finally launching on March 25. You can preorder Battle of Three Kingdoms on iOS and Android — and yes, this one is available in English on the US App Store. It’s a bit funny the app store descriptions omit any mention of the game’s crypto elements, though. This game has NFT cards, and its website also mentions staking the game’s SGC token.

To be honest, it was hard to find any details about Code of Joker online in English. It’s a game from 2013, and I wasn’t able to find any recent YouTube videos about it. The most recent one I found was from six years ago. The Code of Joker Pocket mobile game ended service back in 2018, according to a message on its website and a post on its X account.

Ultimately, the character art looks detailed and appealing for those into anime style, but the IP doesn’t seem to have crossed over to US audiences yet. Regardless, I think existing fans of the game could get a kick out of this installment of the series.

I asked the team whether the game will be released in English (as opposed to only in Japanese), and they weren’t ready to share that yet: 

“More details forthcoming,” a PR rep replied. If the game doesn’t release in English, I imagine it’d be tough for it to reach a broader audience. 

But maybe that’s not the point — Asia has been proven to be an important market for Web3. In 2023, 50% of global mobile gaming revenue came from the Asia-Pacific region with over 1.5 billion mobile gamers there, according to data from Grandview Research.

Tiger Research has also pointed out that recent regulatory moves in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia are positioning those countries for continued blockchain participation. We’ve seen Sony’s Soneium throw its hat into the ring, who recently announced that four mini-app games will be using Soneium as part of a deal with the messaging app Line.

We don’t know much more about Code of Joker: Evolutions yet, but it’s expected to launch at the end of this summer for iOS, Android and as a web version.

Pump.fun slides into DMs

Pump.fun, the platform where anyone can launch a memecoin, is adding direct messages (DMs) to its iOS and Android app versions. 

The new features include the ability to create group chats, send DMs to individual users, and share tokens, the team announced on Thursday. 

The Android and iOS apps don’t have great reviews overall. Users have complained about technical issues with the app not letting them make purchases, using up a lot of data, or having difficulties opening the app. More recently, some Android users have reported issues with getting updates to install properly and the app lagging overall. 

The iOS version only has seven reviews, while the Android version has more than 300 reviews and has seen over 100,000 downloads in total.

Bitkraft GP shares take on gaming

2023 was the year where significantly less funding was granted to crypto gaming projects than in 2022. Last year, we saw similar numbers to 2023, suggesting this could more or less be our new normal:

But why did this happen — and where do we go from here?

Bitkraft Ventures specializes in what they call “synthetic reality” investments, including crypto, gaming, and AI. 

Bitkraft General Partner Carlos Pereira breaks down what’s happened with crypto gaming investments: The 2021-2022 crypto cycle more broadly saw a large funding bubble, and blockchain games got a “disproportionate share” of that funding overall. 

Why? Because games can be easier for people to understand tangibly over other projects, like apps that don’t exist yet.

“I think it’s an easier pitch, and I think that that easier pitch seduced a lot of people into coming into the space and deploying super aggressively,” Pereira tells me.

Then there’s the public perception piece — people might perceive games as doing worse than they actually are, especially if they complain that gaming tokens or NFTs haven’t given them big gains. That’s possible even if gaming tokens aren’t falling further than other altcoins with comparable market caps.  

Pereira also believes games had an easier path to monetize communities early on. But monetization strategies may also be changing now that the crypto bubble more broadly has burst. 

“We’ve always had this idea that when you launch an NFT — not from like an accounting perspective, but from a philosophical perspective — what you’re doing is incurring leverage on your business,” Pereira explains. 

“You’re putting debt on the social capital of your business and that just racks up pressure for you to go out there and deliver because you’ve now pre-sold these assets that need to have utility, that need to have all these things. And so we’ve been quite against, generally speaking, people trying to monetize their communities too early,” he added.

• The exchange Jupiter is adding a “Like” feature where you can click to like your favorite Solana memecoins. Tokens with more likes will get more visibility, according to the platform. 

  • For now, only users with verified Twitter accounts or “Smart Accounts” can click the like button.

One of the battlegrounds in Wildcard, a game I’m excited to playtest again soon: