Jurassic World in ‘The Sandbox’, Telegram Gets ‘Not Games’

The crypto and NFT gaming space is busier than ever lately, what with prominent games starting to release, token airdrops piling up, and a seemingly constant array of other things happening at all times. It’s a lot to take in!

Luckily, Decrypt’s GG is all over it. And if you need a quick way to get caught up on the latest moves around crypto video games, we’re happy to present This Week in Crypto Games.

Our weekend roundup serves up the biggest news from the past week, along with a few other tidbits you might have missed. We also showcase a few of our original stories from the week.

Biggest news

Jurassic World in The Sandbox: Ethereum metaverse game The Sandbox is kicking off its fifth alpha season with a new in-game Jurassic World experience created in collaboration with Universal and Amblin Entertainment, allowing the player to become an employee of a dinosaur park.

Acting as a member of the Dinosaur Protection Group, users are tasked with ensuring the park runs smoothly without the presence of franchise protagonist Owen Grady. Players will be given dinosaur eggs that they need to care for, and then once hatched, they ‘ll need to care for the baby dino for it to mature into an adult. The dinosaurs will grow using Jurassic Points, earned by performing tasks such as feeding or cleaning the dinosaurs.

The high-profile launch of Jurassic World: Dinosaur Preserve comes as part of a six-week long season that will pack in over 40 new experiences, including content from other entertainment brands like Attack on Titan, The Smurfs, and The Terminator, all built on an improved game creator that allows for new features. A specific launch date is still to be announced, but it will be coming sometime this month.

Notcoin expands: Open Builders, the company behind influential Telegram tap-to-earn game Notcoin, announced on Wednesday that it is set to expand beyond individual games with the rollout of Not Games, a platform with unified progression and rewards shared across multiple new games.

Not Games will feature a single player profile that maintains achievements and rankings across all titles within the ecosystem. Players will also have a unified balance and inventory system, allowing assets earned in one game to potentially have utility in others. And earned items can be sold via secondary marketplaces.

This is an attempt to unify the previously fragmented gaming experience on Telegram. It is set to be powered by the existing NOT token on The Open Network (TON), which Notcoin launched last year in a large-scale airdrop to millions of players.

Razer aims to eliminate bots: Popular gaming brand Razer is teaming up with World (previously known as Worldcoin) to help remove AI bots from online games. This comes as AI bots are causing chaos in the gaming landscape, with nearly 3 in 4 gamers agreeing that bots are an annoyance that makes gaming less fun.

The gaming giant is launching “Razer ID verified by World ID,” a new single-sign on feature that uses World’s blockchain-based proof-of-humanity technology to verify real human gamers. This will allow developers to add new anti-bot measures into their games, with Ethereum game Tokyo Beast to be the first to adopt the technology.

ICYMI

• Yeet raised $7.75 million, in a funding round led by crypto venture fund Dragonfly, to build a crypto casino.
• The makers of Ronin MMORPG Forgotten Runiverse announced that it is now developing the game across Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile devices.

• Slingshot DAO is set to launch a publishing ecosystem for Roblox games, with over 30 experiences due this year.
• A browser-based casual board game LOL Land is set to launch on April 15, built on Ethereum layer-2 network Abstract.
• Crypto sci-fi MMO EVE Frontier announced that it will host a three-day hackathon from April 29 to May 1, with $3,000 in prizes up for grabs.
• A weeklong “vibe coding game” competition kicked off on Monday, where entrants must use AI tools for 80% of the game code.
  • One notable entry to the competition was a first-person Flappy Bird remake, which someone else then rigged to be controlled via flapping to their webcam.
• Ronin-based game Fishing Frenzy: Uncharted Waters launched on Friday.

• Season 3 of Crypto: The Game wrapped up, with X user TedNotLasso claiming the top prize.
• Crypto shooter Kompete appears to be gaining hype after its 18th test tournament this week.
• Off the Grid users continue to report the sale of skins on the black market, with one player claiming to have sold two items for $400.

• Notcoin gloated that its token has much higher daily trading volume than Hamster Kombat’s token.
• Teased upgrades and ecosystem expansion caused the token for Ethereum mobile game Heroes of Mavia to spike 430% over the course of a week.

• Sugartown, the game developed by D20 Labs—a team comprised of ex-Zynga employees—announced that its token will be called WIN. But it’s not available to trade yet.
• Atari partnered with B3, a layer-3 gaming chain built on top of the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, to bring Pong and other titles to crypto
• Axie Infinity closed pre-registration for its upcoming MMO Atia’s Legacy on Tuesday.

GG spotlight

Here are a few of our original stories from this past week that we think are well worth a weekend read:

Edited by Andrew Hayward