Few blockchain games survive long in the growing market that sells the play-to-earn model as an easy way to make money.
The lifespan of these projects is short: they usually come with a simple game built on Binance Smart Chain, a native cryptocurrency, and the promise of having solid enough economics to hold the token price — that is, the player’s reward — there in up.
While some may succeed in their first few weeks, the lack of new players willing to keep the game’s market moving causes the token’s price to plummet at one time or another, killing the project’s profitability.
In many cases, these games are nothing more than pump-and-dump schemes in which their creators, most of the time anonymous, promise things that the game can’t deliver just to make the asset price go up for a short time.
Below is a list of the “promising” games that saw their tokens evaporate, leaving thousands of players at a loss.
CryptoMines
CryptoMines was a game created on the Binance Smart Chain that allowed players to use the ETERNAL cryptocurrency to create spaceship NFTs and send them on missions that generate rewards, also distributed in the form of the ETERNAL token.
The cryptocurrency even hit an all-time high of $801 on November 25. With no strength to maintain its good performance, the price began to collapse and a month after the record, the ETERNAL was only worth US$ 1.90 — a drop of 99.7%.
When the slumps intensified in early December, the game’s staff made a Publication to explain what had happened:
“A snowball effect made people able to dump ETERNAL when it rose to a certain point, and so began the downside effect amplified by these traders and the collective fear,” reads an excerpt from the note that classifies the drop. as “devastating”, as big as the growth of the game.
The developers also took the blame for claiming that the economy they created was flawed by allowing an overpopulation of NFTs to form, reaching the point where investors would no longer need to continue investing in the game.
As a consequence, the lack of new players buying NFTs caused the pool that paid the rewards to be emptied and the whole scheme collapsed à la financial pyramid.
The CryptoMines team proposed to the community to create Cryptomines Reborn, a “reborn” version of the game that would put a new token on the market.
If it actually gets off the ground, the chance is that the game will have little support from the community that suspects that it was the CryptoMines developers themselves who made the dump that caused the devaluation of ETERNAL, since they were the biggest holders do token.
CryptoCars, CryptoPlanes e CryptoGuards
The developers of CryptoCity wasted no time and soon released three games from the same universe: CryptoCars, CryptoPlanes e CryptoGuards.
The games are pretty much the same and just change the theme. CryptoCars, for example, is a car racing game. CryptoPlanes is the same thing, only with planes.
In these games, the user buys cars in the form of NFT to participate in races and earn the native tokens as a reward.
Matches are automatic, meaning the player doesn’t need any ‘special’ skills to stand out, but cars with better ratings, as the better – and more expensive – the car, the greater the chance of winning.
The rewards generated by the games are currently negligible given the performance of native currencies in recent weeks. CCAR, from CryptoCars, is worth just BRL 0.06, a quote 99% lower than its historic high of BRL 10.16 reached in November, according to the CoinGecko.
The scenario is equally bad for CryptoPlanes CPAN and CryptoGuards CGAR, priced at BRL 0.09 and BRL 0.11, respectively. Both are also worth 99% less than their record prices.
CryptoCity universe games have become very popular and highly publicized by digital influencers.
Brazilian youtuber Peter Jordan, from the Ei Nerd channel, was one of those who sold the game’s false promise. With more than 670,000 views, the title of his video was far from modest and said “car game paying 28,362 reais a month, better than Axie Infintiy”.
Users of the Facebook group Jogos NFT Brasil noticed that the youtuber deleted the video in the same week that prices plummeted and CryptoCity gaming websites went down, raising community fears about a possible rug pull.
BNB Heroes
In January, BNB Heroes joined the list of fraudulent games that were released with the sole purpose of enriching the creators themselves, without delivering anything promised to the community.
the security company PeckShield reported that a large amount of BNBH was dumped into the market by the cryptocurrency’s own parent address.
The dump had an immediate effect on the token, which saw its price plummet within minutes to R$0.02. Two months earlier, the coin was worth R$26.
BNB Heroes was an NFT-shaped collectible card game that garnered attention when it launched in November by promoting itself as the first play-to-earn game to reward players directly with Binance Coin (BNB), Binance’s native cryptocurrency. .
Zodiacs
ZDC, the cryptocurrency used to reward users of the play-to-earn game Zodiacs, was another that has lost virtually all of its value in recent weeks.
The Zodiacs describes itself in its white paper as a “game for racing fans” that allows the player to buy NFTs of cars inspired by the 12 zodiac signs to participate in races, similar to CryptoCars.
Before long, the ZDC went into freefall caused by the imbalance of the game’s economy that succumbed to the lack of new players.
The coin hit a record price of BRL 1.04 in December, but is currently worth 97% less, trading at BRL 0.02.
Amid the sudden drop, the team behind Zodiacs decided to release a second version of the game, with a new token and smart contract created from scratch.
The new token (ZDCv2) even hit a record of BRL 0.06 after its launch, but it could not escape the same fate as its predecessor and is currently worth BRL 0.01.
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