🚙 🚗 Solana's MixMob Launches 'Race-to-Earn' Game Ahead of Airdrop, Saga Phone Perks Crypto gaming startup MixMob has released its first Solana-based game, Racer 1, a card-driven strategic racing experience where players can bet on matches or play and earn tokens for winning races. The launch comes ahead of plans by MixMob to airdrop tokens to the community. Racer 1 is a “race-to-earn” game where players can also choose to stake (or lock up) their MXM tokens, according to the game’s litepaper. The game is playable on iOS and Android devices, as well via desktop web browsers and the Solana Saga smartphone.

🥇 Player Liquidity: A Key Theme for 2024 in Blockchain Gaming The infrastructure for Web3 game development is experiencing rapid expansion, according to Delphi Digital’s recently published report titled “The Year Ahead for Gaming 2024.” The collective market capitalization of 183 gaming projects has demonstrated relative stability, fluctuating between $4 billion and $7 billion throughout the year. This range is notably 86% lower than the peak observed in 2022. Despite this, there exists substantial potential for expansion.

🏆 The second annual Gam3 Awards has concluded, with Parallel earning top honors in several categories, including Best Strategy Game, Best Card Game, and the prestigious Game of the Year award. The event, celebrating the hard work of development teams in web3 gaming, showcased the diverse potential of blockchain technology in gaming.

🐉 Axie Infinity NFTs Can Soon Evolve Like Pokémon Monster NFT characters in play-to-earn game Axie Infinity can soon be upgraded thanks to a major update that brings a “Stage 2” evolution to every Axie monster, details of which the game’s developers at Sky Mavis have exclusively shared with Decrypt. Over 250 different Axie “parts” can be evolved on any Axie NFT beginning December 14, upgrading the character’s battle strength and aesthetic look. The breakthrough NFT game—in which players use cards to battle Axies against enemy Axies—first launched in 2018. Since then, Axie Infinity and its broader Ronin blockchain ecosystem has seen millions of players, faced a staggering $622 million hack, and then recovered roughly $30 million of the funds six months later.

💠 Amazon Prime Is Giving Out Free Items for NFT Game ‘Champions Ascension’ Beginning Friday, the Amazon Prime Gaming portal is offering subscribers a free claim for 100 in-game gold, as well as a monster parts loot box. The loot boxes can eventually yield enough parts for a player to craft a monster for the upcoming Maestro Towers mode. While Champions Ascension is built around NFTs—including characters that were initially minted on Ethereum but later migrated over to scaling network Polygon — the items in the Amazon Prime giveaway are not tokenized NFTs that can be traded — they are purely in-game digital items.