Approaching the end of 2023, we’ve been taking a look at which games building on blockchain have been the most popular this year; notably popular through traditional distribution platforms such as the app stores, Epic Games Store and Steam.
NFL Rivals: 3 million mobile downloads
Mythical Games’ American football game NFL Rivals stands out as one of the earliest web3 games to trend on mobile. In an exclusive interview with BlockchainGamer.biz, CEO John Linden spoke about the role Mythical has been entrusted by the likes of Apple, to influence the rules around web3 gaming on the app stores. The game is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play store with the ability to buy NFTs using a new in-app currency.
Following the soft launch in April 2023, NFL Rivals quickly gained traction and broke 1 million in NFT trading volume as well as exceeded 2 million downloads in early September.
At the end of November, the game reported 3 million players via X.
Nine Chronicles: 200,000 mobile downloads
Planetarium’s RPG Nine Chronicles rose to around 35,000 daily active unique wallets during November in terms of on-chain activity.
Since the mobile launch of Nine Chronicles M on 22nd November however, the players continues to increase by the day. To date the game has exceeded over 200,000 downloads on the app stores and has also become the #1 downloaded mobile RPG on the Korean Apple App Store.
Torque Drift 2: 200,000 PC downloads
Torque Drift 2, from Animoca Brands-subsidiary Greasy Monkey Studio, was already off to a good start since launching early access on Epic Games Store in the beginning of of October. Since recently dropping its Nissan NFTs however, the PC game has broken 200,000 downloads.
Pixels: 115,000 DAUWs
A browser game, so included here for comparative purposes, social farming RPG Pixels has seen a leap in growth and peaked at over 115,000 DAUWs since it launched on Sky Mavis’ Ronin blockchain. This number has since fallen back to around 85,000 (as of writing), but that’s largely down to active measures to tackle bots, which accounts for an estimated 40% of DAUWs.
Phantom Galaxies: 50,000 downloads
Finally, since launching early access on Epic Games Store, Ultra and on Steam with a vanilla web2 version in the middle of November, mecha space title Phantom Galaxies from Animoca-owned Australian developer Blowfish has reached over 50,000 downloads.
For more, check out our most anticipated blockchain games.
