VTubing on Twitch Growing 500% YoY, Limitbreak Buys $6.5m Super Bowl Ad & Much More
Not sure if you noticed there was no newsletter last week for the first time ever but we’re BACK and ready to bring you all the best gaming industry news from these past two weeks!
Let’s dig in.
Big News
VTubing on Twitch is Growing 500% YoY
Vtubing is a form of live streaming where you use motion capture to control a 2D or 3D avatar. This is nothing new, originating in Japan in the early 2010s. Later Kizuna AI, developed by Japanese entertainment company Activ8, led the way as the most-subbed VTuber.
Since then, VTubing has also become a hot topic in the United States, and it will be fascinating to see if adoption increases even further as a virtual culture of anonymity and pseudonymity continues to rise.
Limitbreak Purchases $6.5m Super Bowl LVII Ad
This is history. Gabriel Leydon, CEO of Limitbreak and the DigiDaigaku NFT collection successfully orchestrated one of the biggest marketing feats this space has ever seen – purchasing a 30-second ad slot at the 2023 Super Bowl. It could be viewed by over 50m people. Yes, you read that right.
NFTs and Web3 gaming will receive the most attention they’ve ever had at once. One thing is certain, Leydon will stop at nothing to see his ambitions of bringing the next billion gamers to blockchain-enabled gaming.
For more on his career story and insights as someone who has been designing games for 20 years, highly recommend to check out this podcast episode:
Little News
Rapid Fire
Blockchain games and metaverse projects have raised $7 billion so far in 2022, almost 2x as much as 2021 (and the year isn’t over yet). Source: DappRadar x BGA Games Report – Q3 2022
Stardust, who we wrote about back in August here, raised $30 million. The startup have built a platform and products including one which makes it easier for web3-native games to provide players with a seamless user experience, functioning as a "blockchain-free API”. Read the official press release here.
Treeverse announces their pre-alpha game release for Q4 2022. More info in tweet here.
Games, Communities & Tools Weekly Finds
Game: OPCraft by Optimism x Lattice
Tool: VisionsDAO
The product is described as “the decentralised modular stack for on-chain business simulation games”. Recently, the team published their first community update, you can watch it here and read the documentation here.