This Week in Crypto Games: Sonic SVM TikTok Airdrop on Solana, MLG Meme Coin Soars

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

TikTok airdrop: Sonic SVM, a layer-2 gaming chain built on top of Solana, launched its SONIC token on Tuesday. The token peaked at a $443 million market cap but has since fallen to $277 million. With this, players of the project’s TikTok tap-to-earn game Sonic X were able to claim their token allocations—with the claim period ending on January 30.

The game followed the simple tapping premise that most games within the genre follow, but innovated by launching the game via TikTok rather than Telegram. This helped the project reach more than 2 million players, which Sonic SVM said has proven it to be a success. Now, Sonic SVM wishes to onboard third-party projects to follow in its footsteps.

Call of Duty meme coin: 360noscope420blazeit (MLG) skyrocketed 5,200% over just six days thanks to Call of Duty-themed nostalgia. The Solana meme coin hearkens back to the perceived golden era of Call of Duty—before “omnimovement” and overly complex killstreaks, or the flood of microtransactions and goofy skins. It's not just vibes either: They've launched custom online servers for classic Call of Duty games to draw in a community of crypto gamers.

This approach quickly attracted a cult-like following, but when members of iconic esports team FaZe Clan started shilling the token, it went parabolic. Richard "FaZe Banks" Bengtson believed in the token so much that he even got a tattoo of the original MLG logo—that is, Major League Gaming, an organization that was at the heart of the Call of Duty esports scene.

The MLG token isn't an official offering of that Activision-owned tournament organizer, of course, but that hasn't stopped it from posting monster gains. MLG has peaked at a price of nearly $0.178 as of this writing, putting it at peak market cap of about $177 million on Saturday. It's down almost 30% since then.

The Machines Arena on Steam and PS5: Ethereum hero shooter The Machines Arena—which runs on gaming network Ronin—is coming to new platforms, and will release on leading PC marketplace Steam as well as the PlayStation 5 console. However, due to both platforms having restrictive crypto policies, those versions of the game will have zero or potentially limited crypto features.

On Steam, there will be absolutely no crypto features. However, for the PlayStation 5 release, Directive Games Design Manager David Gracia told Decrypt the company is still in discussions with Sony about how crypto elements could be implemented. This is something to keep an eye on, as we’ve yet to see a game successfully implement live crypto features on PlayStation (Off the Grid, in early access, has a testnest blockchain on the back end but no current player-facing on-chain features).

ICYMI

• Telegram game Seed revealed airdrop details ahead of mining phase ending on January 15.
• The makers of Ethereum game Illuvium announced plans to add AI agents to the game as non-playable characters via the Virtuals Protocol.

• Telegram game Trump’s Empire claimed to have surpassed 4 million total players.
• A Pudgy Penguins game is in development by Playember, set to launch on Abstract.
• Transak went live on Ethereum gaming network Ronin with its fiat-to-crypto infrastructure.
• An AI agent called Jaihoz—based on Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff "Jihoz" Zirlin—launched on Ronin thanks to the Virtuals Protocol.
• PIXEL, the token tied to social farming game Pixels, is set to receive staking soon.

• Yuga Labs’ metaverse Otherside is working to get to an “always-on world” state by June.
• The Machines Arena developer Directive Games announced that its new title Civitas will release in 2025.
• Limit Break released "Apptokens" as a new class of digital asset that it believes will power the next-generation of digital game economies.
• BNB Chain action role-playing game Seraph launched its token last week. It's down 72% since then.
• PUBG creator Brendan Greene said his game studio is “not even thinking about” adding NFTs to its next game.

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