The past few years have been rough for investors in crypto gaming and GameFi, with most tokens and NFTs struggling to take off and other companies shutting down. However, the sector is starting to show signs of booming.
OhBaby Games’ flagship NFT collection, OhBaby Pass, launched on October 8th for 0.1 ETH ($410) and quickly rose to 0.5 ETH ($2000) shortly after the mint ended. The collection is currently changing hands at 0.42 ETH.
OhBaby NFT – OpenSea
The bull market for GameFi projects has clearly waned, with the sector’s market capitalization falling to just $12.5 billion after Friday’s decline. As a benchmark, The Sandbox Metaverse’s SAND token and Decentraland’s MANA reached a combined market cap of $14 billion at the peak of Metaverse mania in 2021.
Standalone games have also struggled, with Illuvium’s ILV token, another 2021 hot stock, dropping 99% from its all-time high of $1,911 to just $14.51 due to token unlocking and players abandoning the ecosystem.
Investors are starting to throw in the towel as tokens flow, with prominent NFT gaming investor Grail.eth publicly sharing its decision to exit gaming tokens and NFTs in September
“I love gaming, but it’s not a market where you can make money right now. I’ve been holding out for a few years thinking the product and team were more ready than they are now, but mostly I’ve encountered a series of disappointments, products that aren’t ready, and red-hot fraudulent liar founders who come to TGE and shit on the community… My focus is on investing in stories where I can make money right now,” Grail shared on X.
new class of game
The past year has seen some short-term winners emerge in the gaming space, particularly in semi-idle RPGs and pixel RPGs such as Onchain Heroes and Cambria.
OhBaby takes a slightly modified approach. Their flagship game, OhBaby Kart, has been live on the Steam Games Marketplace since 2023, but the team is developing a number of games, including Pawker, a “Bam Bam Boom” platform fighter and deck builder, among other ongoing projects.
Notably, the game studio’s products have had zero on-chain integration to date except for payments, and NFT Pass marks the studio’s first on-chain foray into a cryptocurrency-dominated player base.
“For me, tradable on-chain assets have always essentially always made sense, it’s just that having assets and not having games doesn’t make sense,” Pasteur Tran, founder of OhBaby Games, told Defiant. He also said the market could see more on-chain integration in the future, but did not provide details.
“I don’t think the market situation for crypto games has really taken off or even exists yet. I think there’s a lot of room for us to grow, and the space is still fresh. The first iteration was that we dreamed of making a game, but we’ve never made a game before. (And if you’ve never made a game before, you can get burnt out very quickly.) Crypto games are likely to start flourishing from here, and we’re ready for it.” Tran concluded.