🫡 Steam ahead

GM! 

Slowly, then all at once was yesterday’s mood. We got a big announcement from Sandeep over at Polygon that touches on his role change and a lot of technical details, plus the news that Stripe is buying Privy.

Crypto is anything but static. Right now, it feels like the industry is continuing to cut the fat in some areas, but it’s also evolving to look more and more like Wall Street every day.

Do with that what you will.

— Kate Irwin

Off The Grid wallet activity holds steady ahead of Steam launch 

Eight months after its early access public launch, Off The Grid is preparing to release on Steam.

The game is currently available as a free-to-play title via the Epic Games Store on PC and on latest-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles’ respective game shops. 

We don’t have the exact Steam launch date yet, but Delphi Ventures Founding Partner Piers Kicks, whose firm invested in Gunzilla Games, said yesterday that the shooter is coming to Steam in a “few weeks” (so likely in the last week of June). 

The game remains on Epic’s list of “Most Played” games, suggesting it’s doing well, and holds a player rating on Epic of 3.9 out of a possible 5.

Gunzilla CEO Vlad Korolev said last month that Off The Grid has consistently had over 10,000 new players daily since launch.

Off The Grid falls behind its non-crypto shooter peers when it comes to attention on Twitch, however. In the past month, OTG saw less than a million total hours watched, with an average of 28 Twitch streamers broadcasting the game at any given time. The game sees a total average of about 1,400 concurrent viewers on Twitch.

Those numbers don’t compare to games like Counter-Strike 2 (over 75 million hours watched, with 105,000 average total viewers in that same period) or Apex Legends (17.3 million hours, with 24,000 average total viewers), though.

That makes OTG the 157th most-watched game on Twitch by total watch hours in the past month.

Wallets don’t equal players

First things first: We don’t have exact Off The Grid player count numbers yet, and it’s not accurate to interpret a wallet count as a player count. This is in part because OTG’s crypto elements are optional, but also because we live in a world where bots and AI agents can control wallets (and users can have more than one wallet).

Still, the number of crypto wallets engaging with Off The Grid has grown (roughly doubled) since the game opened up to the public in October. 

DappRadar data suggests Off The Grid saw between roughly 40,000 and 170,000 daily UAWs engaging with its crypto elements in its first month of launch. Today, eight months later, it’s seeing around 200,000 daily UAWs.

The vast majority of OTG-related blockchain activity remains on Off The Grid’s testnet, not its mainnet, indicating the ecosystem hasn’t fully switched over just yet.

One player’s story

Aside from the crypto gaming die-hards, how well is Off The Grid retaining new players? A snapshot lauded by Gunzilla’s Web3 director Theodore Agranat paints one person’s perspective. A pseudonymous Off The Grid fan did a test with a new account to get a slice of how many new players are still playing the shooter game — and shared findings in a thread with roughly 12,000 views so far. 

He tracked other new OTG accounts to see how many were still playing the game three weeks later.

He found that across 152 accounts and four matches, 40% of those player accounts were “inactive” just three weeks later. A little over 48% were still active after that period, while the rest were “semi-active.” 

The conclusion: OTG has “significant” player retention.

To me, this isn’t enough data to draw firm conclusions about the whole game. We also don’t know how many of these are alt accounts, for instance, which could impact those numbers.

Retention expectations

Player dropoff is, of course, normal for all video games — even the most successful ones. And what one game considers a “successful” retention rate could be considered abysmal to another. 

There isn’t a lot of public data on what’s widely considered a good retention rate for PC games. Spanish software firm Barbary suggests a 20% retention rate is good for games a week after launch, while anywhere from a 5-10% retention rate is “strong” for PC games after the game has been out for a month.

Data software firm Solsten, however, has found that retention rates higher than this are becoming “the new standard,” because it’s costing developers more money to acquire users now than it did a few years ago. Overall, this makes the gaming industry more competitive.

Ambitious, higher-budget live-ops games do need more retention than other types of games, however — especially if they’re free-to-play titles where gamers don’t fork out cash upfront.

I think that over time, Gunzilla will have to either keep spending to add substantial updates that bring gamers back from Fortnite and CoD — or focus more on its pro-crypto core base.

Gunzilla didn’t respond to my request for player count data.

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Putting Telegram Gifts in perspective

TG’s crypto layer is still seeing a lot of activity. The ecosystem saw a collective total of $9.2 million in daily volume for Telegram Gifts on Monday.

One analyst believes the surge was in large part due to a post from Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, where Durov promoted TON and TG Gifts (Durov has over 11 million Telegram accounts following his channel).

To put that $9.2M daily number in perspective, the entire NFT market saw about $17.2M in total sales volume on that same day, June 9.

So while some VCs have told me they think Telegram gaming is dead, Telegram’s crypto layer more broadly isn’t.

Could TG’s crypto layer keep growing? It’s possible, though it’s already seeing a lot of cash. TG Gifts currently has an FDV of over $293M and a market cap of $214M. But 56% of all TG Wallets were created this year, suggesting the wallet’s biggest growth spurt could occur in 2025.

• Crypto-powered brand loyalty platform TYB has raised $11 million in Series A funding in a round co-led by Offline Ventures and Strobe Ventures (formerly Blocktower VC).

  • Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, and Unusual Ventures also participated in the round.

• Optimism’s Chief Growth Officer Ryan Wyatt (who was previously President of Polygon Labs and before that was YouTube’s Head of Gaming) is stepping away from the gig to transition into an advisory role after about a year and nine months in the role.

• Pudgy Penguins is working with NASCAR in what sounds like a very 2022-era promotional deal.