This Week in Crypto Games: Hamster Kombat ‘HamsterVerse’, Telegram Game Airdrop Updates

The crypto and NFT The gaming space has been busier than ever lately, with prominent games starting to be released, token airdrops piling up, and a seemingly constant array of other things happening at all times. There’s a lot involved!

Happy, Declutter‘s GG is completely over it. And if you want to quickly keep up to date with the latest developments in crypto video games, we are happy to present this week in Crypto Games.

Our weekend roundup offers the biggest news from the past week, plus – this is an expanded edition due to the holidays – along with a few other tidbits you might have missed.

Biggest news

Hamster Kombat TON layer-2: Following the fourth largest gaming token launch in 2024, the makers of Telegram tap-to-earn game Hamster Kombat unveiled plans to create a layer-2 network on top of The Open Network (TON).

This came after A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) vote overwhelming voted in favor of the move, with 1.1 billion HMSTR token votes in favor and only 104,368 against. However, it is worth noting that the two best voters At the time of writing, they hold more than 88% of all voting rights, giving a number of whales enormous influence.

Prior to this, the developers announced that the highly anticipated (and much-delayed) second season of Hamster Kombat will be “more than just a game,” with three games now in the works to become the core of an entertainment ecosystem utilizing the IP. Called Hamster versesa closed beta is already underway for 30,000 community members.

Off the Grid ranks high: When the end of the year came, Avalanche-based shooter Off the grid has generated some favorable reviews in the media. It wasn’t just winning GG’s Game of the Yearbut the battle royale shooter also won Gam3s’ Game of the year distinction and achieved a Rolling stone end of year playlist.

Gunzilla Games announced its plans for 2025 Declutter in addition to the GOTY awards. Most notably, this includes an estimated date for the first quarter of 2025 GUNZ network to enter the main network, which would allow the GUN token to be traded freely. Before then, the studio plans to launch ranked and solo queue modes and open up the remaining 80% of the map while starting the game’s storyline.

After that, Gunzilla will look to bring third-party developers into the GUNZ network, and is even eyeing a possible Telegram mini-app for the ecosystem. It should be a big year for one of crypto gaming’s biggest success stories to date.

Illuvium’s next steps: Crypto gaming franchise Illuvium announced how things will continue in the new year. The project before three titles launched that complemented each other, both through shared resources and through a narrative loop, but focusing on all three titles was too challenging. Moving forward, the team will prioritize efforts one game at a time, starting with the auto-battler Illuvium Arena.

The lengthy blog post also talks about plans to reduce microtransactions, add more content and raise more funding. Perhaps most importantly, the post ponders the possibility of temporarily putting the flagship title Illuvium Overworld on hold until it is a “fully realized experience.” But in 2025, improving the Overworld MMO experience would be the answer Illuvium the team’s “top priority”.

ICYMI

• Telegram game Catizen rewards distributed to airdrop pass holders Fridaywhere holders received three different tokens.
• Iconic gaming brand Atari revealed a new portable console, the “My Arcade.”
• Zoo, a fast-growing Telegram game with over 12 million players, confirmed that the mining phase will end on January 31 and that one in-game ZOO token will be equal to one future on-chain token.
  
• Sonic SVM confirmed that players of its TikTok tap-to-earn game will receive a SONIC airdrop on the Solana blockchain.

• Crypto trading card game Parallel crossed 6 million games played in the history of its existence, with developers to claim that an average of 200,000 matches are currently played per week.
• Telegram game Cat gold digger has announced that its token will be listed on Bitget, Gate, MEXC and other exchanges on Thursday, January 9.
• Someone turned the iconic first-person shooter Doom into a CAPTCHA challenge for human verification.

GG Spotlight

Here are a few of our original stories from the past few weeks that we think are definitely worth a weekend read:

Edited by Andrew Hayward