3rd Place: Gas Wars - 2D Arcade Blackhole survivor
What’s Bank or Plank?
“The game features 2-4 players racing yachts around a lagoon to gather, plunder, and bank gold before a negative turn of events or the five-minute time limit causes them to lose their haul. With its high-pressure mechanics, the project successfully remixed familiar formats for a competitive crypto-native audience”
Firstly, there’s the new Dungeon feature, the next major release, coming to mainnet in May. Dungeons are designed to be “the first touchpoint a new player has with the Cambria universe”, a more accessible gameplay loop (short, understandable, streamable, and juicy) to attract a broader audience:
Deposit → get into a Dungeon → kill mobs → level up → find new gear → extract loot
The closest reference to the gameplay is “a cross between Diablo x roguelike dungeon crawlers”. Dungeons also borrows the best elements of Gold Rush (Luster, Stress/Sanity, etc.?), but with some key twists
Interesting to see this re-emergence of the dungeon-crawling genre within crypto (see Maze of Gains and Unchained). Arguably, one of the best formats for a risk-to-earn model
Ben says: “key goal w/ design - distilling down best parts of Gold Rush loop into a sit & go experience, w/o the 10hr+ MMO ramp up time.”
The docs mention the key principles that shaped its design:
Built for scale (hard to solve, easy to expand), easy to onboard (“sit ‘n Go format”), streamable (short and punchy sessions), surprisingly deep (easy to learn, hard to master)
Since it’s built for streaming, Cambria will likely focus heavily on short-form (UGC) content to drive growth. We talked more about the topic in Sidelined Alpha 91
The V0 of Dungeons won’t have PvP, but the team has plans to introduce Hardcore Dungeons in a future version: “a fast paced Dark & Darker-style PvPvE mode that is a winner-takes-all”
Moving on to the development of Genesis, Cambria shares that the goal is to have Dungeons, Islands, and Gold Rush live inside a single world:
Gold Rush is becoming a “macro-PvP-centric experience,” centered on extraction and competition between groups of players and guilds. Part of its design will be a combination of a standard league + season-based structure:
“The intent is to give serious players fresh resets at the competitive level while also creating long-horizon progression tracks”
Historically, Cambria had a seasonal wipe model (with 0 progression carried over). In Genesis, some things will become permanent, changing the meta-progression of the game (we talked about seasonal models with Skarly as well)
Furthermore, it’s worth noting how Cambria is approaching Island NFTs: “We think of continued Islands development as centered around enhancing the value prop of Islands as mini-communities inside of Cambria…”
So, Islands are becoming a deeper social retention layer for these mini communities to congregate and participate in a game (Supply Drives) that benefits them in the other parts of the game
Lastly, there are more interesting updates on NFTs (incl. Cores), Renown, and more. But this segment is already becoming too long
It’s interesting to see the Cambria universe piecing together: Dungeons are top-of-funnel, the Duel Arena and Gold Rush are more in the middle, and Islands are at the bottom
REALGO RAISES $3.5M
This week, RealGO announced that they raised over $3.5M in funding in an early investor and strategy round, backed by Animoca*, Cogitent Ventures, X21 Digital, Notch Ventures, and Becker Ventures to build out its “Meme 3.0 ecosystem bridging gaming and onchain utility for Meme IPs”
*I’m uncertain what round Animoca was part of, nor was I able to confirm the involvement of the VC through its social media channels
RealGO is turning crypto-based memes into assets that can be “captured, collected, battled, socialised, and truly owned” through an AR + AI + Web3 lbs-game. Think Pokémon Go, but for memes
Players explore the world → capture meme pets (DOGE, PEPE, PNUT, etc.) → collect resources → battle → and earn rewards
Something that isn’t new in crypto, as we’ve seen with games like GenoPets, Coin Hunt World, SpaceCatch, and I would even put STEPN in that category of games
So, why memes? RealGO aims to solve the gap that memes lack in tangibility and experiences that make them last. Turn memes “from speculations to participations”
Gaming is just a pillar of RealGO’s “Meme 3.0 infrastructure”, which the founder sees as a type of media that can educate Web2 users about crypto and memes, and onboard them
I do question whether RealGO is able to do so. Why would anyone play this game (Play Store) over Pokémon Go?
After watching an interview with the founder of RealGO at HK Consensus and on the Blockchain Game Alliance, it became apparent to me that this team is likely just oblivious to what’s actually happening, based on quotes like:
“A game should be fun first” (a classic 2022 - 2023 quote), “the gamers are still there (in crypto)”, and “our users are actually craving to get our tokens, not because they want to sell, actually because there’s a usage in game”
Currently, the team is running a loyalty points program (airdrop campaign), in which players can earn 5% of the total supply of RT tokens. Points can be earned through in-game and social actions
According to its dashboard, there are 41K “active loyalty players” (S2 participants?), and the campaign is ending in 37 days
TGE is scheduled for Q2 2026 and will likely happen close after S2 concludes
Overall, I don’t see this attracting a Web2 audience, nor do I see it being interesting enough for a crypto-audience, let alone meme-coin holders. But who knows, maybe I’m overlooking something, and their TGE turns out to be a success
Today, CoinMarketCap (CMC) felt the need to remind us that crypto gaming is “effectively dead” (93% of games). The headline comes from a Caladan report, stating that token values are down 95% down from 2022 peaks, and studio funding has collapsed by 93% by 2025. So, let’s get into the details of this report….
Daniel made a good point on the failure rate, questioning the methodology that resulted in the 93%, saying that ATHs are a hype metric, tokens can fall while game metrics rise, DAUs vary by genre, among other things
The report starts by mentioning how $12 - $15B in VC capital and token and NFT sales have flowed into crypto gaming between 2020 - early 2026 (VC accounted for $8 - $9B)
Most of that (VC) funding came in in 2021 ($3.5B) and 2022 ($4B) in 2021 - 2022, and since then, funding has taken a nosedive ($0.36B in 2025).
The slide “The Decline Across Every Dimension” details how key metrics across funding, users, tokens, and capex, such as quarterly VC funding, annual funding, average token ATHs, gaming share DAU, and DAWs, fell significantly from their peak
Notably, 62.5% of all crypto VC investment in 2022 went to gaming, while in 2025, it only captured 7.2%, and capital moved to AI, RWA, PMs, etc.
As mentioned, 93% of projects have failed, which are put into 5 buckets, each illustrated by a case study:
Pre-product capitalization, metaverse vaporware, unsustainable tokenomics (P2E), corporate governance failure, and perpetual development
Some of the taglines: “P2E economics required perpetual new capital inflows to sustain existing player payouts”, “hundreds of millions spent for virtual worlds with fewer users than a mid-tier Minecraft server”, and “Always building. Never shipping. A sector-wide pattern of scope expansion without product delivery”
You could make the argument that the failure rate in traditional gaming is similar. Which was surprising to me, considering that until a few years ago, there wasn’t even “a goal to shoot on” in crypto gaming
On the other hand, you could question whether this comparison is the right one to make, as the business model sustaining traditional gaming and crypto gaming (thus far) is quite different
The report adds additional cultural signals of sector exhaustion, including:
Lily Liu’s quote about gaming on the blockchain (which backfired), Axie’s co-founder leaving, and the BGA 2025 Survey, in which 36% of professionals rank scams/fraud as the #1 threat
Moving on to “what survived”, the report highlights what has worked, including Cambria, Pixels, and Web 2.5 Studios (Wemade and Fumb Games)
“Player retention for quality web3 titles has improved 35 - 45% monthlu, approaching web2 benchmarks of 40 - 50%. Gaming accounts for 25% of all dApp activity (up from 20.1%), but this is a growing share of a shrinking pie…”
Lastly, the report states how there’s a disconnect between token price recovery and the operational reality of gaming studios, and whether this is an indicator of genuine re-emergence or another speculative cycle
Then, 5 variables are stated that determine the outcome of crypto gaming: game-first replicability, institutional publisher entry, Animoca Brands’ Nasdaq IPO, Web 2.5 trajectory, and token rally sustainability
For now, I question the impact of institutional publishers (“crypto AAA gaming is dead”), and on the last point, maybe the future of crypto gaming is less about volatile (utility) tokens
Overall, the Caladan report provides an interesting overview of the sector. Even though you might disagree with some of the methodology, we can’t deny the hard numbers showing that the industry is starving, but we have to believe “the remaining 7%” will prevail:
