In the future, so the meme goes, you will own nothing and be happy.
But try teaching that to web3 gamers, who have been reared on an adage that runs in reverse: you will own everything and be happy.
This may sound counterintuitive in a digital age where we’re accustomed to leasing the media we consume.
Our music, movies, box sets, and video games? All streamed.
Even when they reside on our smartphones and smart televisions, we never truly own them – they remain the property of their issuer.
Within this leasing landscape, web3 games present a very different proposition.
Not only is ownership enshrined in their design, but it’s one of their primary selling points.
It’s a feature that one of the rising web3 studios, Mythical Games, has lately gone to great pains to emphasize.
It believes that the future of gaming will be determined by those who control its economies.
Traditionally, this was the right of the developers behind the blockbuster titles that an entire generation was raised on, from Goldeneye to GTA.
But web3 gaming upends this model by shifting ownership to its players.
And as an analysis of Mythical Games and its MYTH token shows, it’s a model that’s achieving product-market fit as gamers in their millions buy into the narrative and take charge of the games they know and love.
Gamers buy into what web3 is selling
Traditional video games are purchased either as hard copies or from streaming platforms.
AAA games cost a fortune to produce and this is reflected in their price – $100 for a top title is the norm.
Web3 games take a very different approach to monetization.
They are typically free to play, with developers making their money instead through the tokenization of in-game assets: native currencies that can be used to upgrade characters and access enhanced skins and armor as well as through NFTs that represent tradable assets.
You don’t have to pay to play a web3 game, but through investing in its core assets, not only does it enhance the gameplay experience, but you can capture the upside to the growth of the game and the studio responsible for its development.
If you were an early player of Grand Theft Auto, the first GTA game, which was released for MS-DOS and Windows in 1997, you weren’t rewarded for being early; Rockstar Games became a multi-billion dollar powerhouse but the value didn’t trickle down to players.
Web3 takes a very different approach.
As Mythical Gaming puts it, “Players have always built billion dollar gaming economies. Now, they’re finally getting a piece of it. Players who have freedom to trade their in game assets are more engaged, have more fun, and value their assets more.”
And it should know, having proven the value of this model with the success of NFL Rivals and the impending release of FIFA Rivals and Pudgy Party that look set to replicate this.
At the heart of this strategy is MYTH, the token that powers its onchain gaming strategy – and which has captured the attention of players and traders alike.
MYTH makes moves
The last couple of months have been mixed for the crypto market, to put it mildly.
At the time of writing, ETH is down 28% in 30 days and SOL by 33%.
Yet MYTH, the native token of the Mythical Games ecosystem, is up 29% in the past week (at time of writing).
If that’s what it can do when the market is trending downwards, how will it perform when more favorable conditions return?
Of course, MYTH’s solid performance hasn’t occurred in a vacuum; it’s been creeping higher for months, buoyed by the good news emanating from Mythical Games HQ.
FIFA Rivals is one catalyst; Mythical has been teasing the game’s launch for months now and it’s poised to finally drop in the summer.
Applying the NFL Rivals playbook to soccer ticks all the right boxes, and there’s every chance that FIFA Rivals will accrue millions of downloads just like its predecessor.
Pudgy Party – leveraging the indomitable Pudgy Penguins IP – is the other biggie.
While more of a web3-native game than FIFA Rivals, it’s nevertheless a major release that looks odds on to maintain the Midas touch that has charmed everything Pudgies have put their name to.
These are by no means the only games Mythical has in the pipeline – it’s believed to be planning more sports titles among other things – but they’re the ones closest to seeing the light of day, and which already have communities champing at the bit to get their hands on them.
More than just a single studio
At present, the primary use case for MYTH is within Mythical Games’ eponymous marketplace where NFL Rivals players can be traded as NFTs.
Soon, the marketplace will be complemented by soccer stars from FIFA Rivals as well as colorful penguins galore, or whatever in-game assets Mythical elects to tokenize for Pudgy Party.
But in the longer term, it will be the strength of the third-party games released within the Mythical Games ecosystem that give MYTH a chance of leveling up to become a universal GameFi token.
Mythical Platform provides all the tools developers need to deploy their own games on its chain and to tap into its marketplace.
Once these come onstream, Mythical will oversee a veritable web3 gaming ecosystem.
In the meantime, MYTH’s performance serves as a bellwether for both Mythical Games and the broader onchain gaming sector.
If it can sustain the gains it’s carved out over the last few months and then grind higher, the upside is almost uncapped.
It’s currently a top 20 GameFi asset by market cap – just – but could achieve a 4x over the coming year and there would still be grounds for saying that it’s undervalued.
Of course, this is crypto and a lot can change in a year.
But right now, anyone who follows web3 gaming, particularly from a trading perspective, will have MYTH on their radar.
This sleeping giant has begun to stir.
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