The first computer games were developed in the late 20th century with the sole purpose of entertaining their audience. One of the first goals was to distract players from their routine work and provide them access to a fantasy world. Very soon, games began to compete for users' time against traditional forms of entertainment, such as movies, circuses, theater performances, zoos, etc. Planet Earth entered the new millennium with a population of over 6 billion people, and the forecast is that this number will reach 8 billion as early as 2023. If we assume that computer games will cease to …

Microsoft Crop. is acquiring gaming giant Activision Blizzard Inc. for $69 billion as part of a move to ramp up its gaming and Metaverse plans. Activision Blizzard is home to a long list of iconic gaming franchises such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, Candy Crush, World of Warcraft and Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater. Following the deal, its games are set to be added to Microsoft Xbox’s Game Pass service that has 25 million subscribers. According to a Jan. 18 announcement from Microsoft, the firm will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share at a valuation of $68.7 billion. The deal is …

Startups focusing on nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have explored various topics, from gaming to sports to film and more. However, few of these startups are tackling the genre of short storytelling. All except for Dead Handz, a group looking to change the way the world consumes short stories. User-powered storytelling Dead Handz is an Ethereum (ETH)-based fantasy sci-fi story that users can interact with and invest within. Powered by nonfungible tokens, the team behind Dead Handz aims to build a fantasy world that fans can own a piece of and profit off of its growth. The story will have multiple seasons, …

2021 was a rollercoaster ride for many projects in the cryptocurrency market but as is the nature of crypto, many tokens hit new all-time highs and then spent the following months drifting lower as the hype surrounding the project faded and traders moved into greener pastures. This is exactly what happened with Theta, a decentralized broadcasting platform that allows users to earn rewards by contributing their computing resources toward the health of the network. Theta token kicked off its run on Dec. 11, 2020, when it rose 2,468% from a price of $0.621 to a new record high at $15.90 …

After the popularity of DeFi, came the rise of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and to the surprise of many, NFTs took the spotlight and remain front and center with the highest volume in sales, occuring at the start of January 2022. While 2021 became the year of NFTs, GameFi applications did surpass DeFi in terms of user popularity. According to data from DappRadar, Bloomberg gathered: “Nearly 50% of active cryptocurrency wallets connected to decentralized applications in November were for playing games. The percentage of wallets linked to decentralized finance, or DeFi, dapps fell to 45% during the same period, after months …

Cat themed play-to-earn (P2E) NFT game Nyan Heroes is aiming to save 1 billion cats from euthanization in animal shelters across the U.S. Nyan Heroes is an upcoming NFT battle royal shooter style game built on the Solana blockchain that will enable players to compete with each other using NFTs depicting animated cats that are used to pilot mech-robot NFTs in the game. The U.S. based project has been in development since October and the game is set for release in Q4 2022. Its first NFT drop is currently available for hodling and trading on marketplaces such as Fractal. According …

The share price of Reddit's cult-favorite stock GameStop Corporation (GME) jumped by one quarter (in after-hours trading following a Wall Street Journal report on its upcoming NFT division. The U.S. retail game store giant has been quietly working on an NFT marketplace since May, and ramped things up in October by listing several job openings for Web 3.0 and NFT-experienced software engineers and product marketers. According to a Jan. 6 report from the WSJ, GameStop has now hired more than 20 people to operate its freshly minted NFT unit. An unnamed source familiar with GameStop’s plans told the outlet that …

The number of nonfungible tokens (NFT’s) sold on the layer-two protocol Polygon reached an all-time high last month at just short of 2 million. According to Dune Analytics, this marks a near 60% rise in comparison to November and the third consecutive monthly increase for the network. An Ethereum-based scaling solution seeking to construct, distribute and manage securities on blockchain technology, Polygon’s ecosystem has grown exponentially over the past twelve months, registering in excess of 3,000 decentralized applications on its network, in addition to a total value locked figure of $3.86 billion. Alongside this, the number of unique daily active …

The Philippines, a country that’s already been struggling to get back on its feet because of COVID-19, has been hit by a catastrophic super typhoon. Back on Dec. 16, 2021, the typhoon hit landfall and went on a rampage for four days, leaving 334 cities and municipalities in a state of calamity. As of Jan. 1, more than 4 million individuals were either displaced or injured, with 407 dead and 88 still missing, according to the Philippines’ National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council. A day after the typhoon hit the country, play-to-rarn gaming group Yield Guild Games (YGG) organized …

Wider adoption of nonfungible tokens (NFT) and play-to-earn games may be on the way, as one of the world's largest gaming companies sees them as the future of the industry. Yosuke Matsuda, CEO of Square Enix, revealed the company's intentions for blockchain and NFT spheres in his new year's message on Saturday. In his letter, Matsuda begins with a discussion of the metaverse before noting that Facebook's renaming to Meta is proof that the concept isn't a passing fad. He expects 2022 to be a year of hype for the metaverse as society begins to slowly embrace virtual worlds and …

Play It Forward DAO (PIF DAO) has kicked off 2022 by announcing it has raised $6 million from private investors, only six months after launching. The DAO includes a guild of over 40,000 players and 3,000 scholars across the Philippines and Indonesia, all of which are managed via a play-to-earn (P2E) scholar management program. Currently, the DAO has players across several notable Metaverse P2E games, including Axie Infinity, Thetan Arena, Pegaxy, and Dragonary. Co-founder Cholo Maputol told Cointelegraph that the funds will be used to scale the DAO’s scholarship programs, scale up its P2E board platform, and finance some early-stage …

The overall size of the global bond markets is $130 trillion, while the total market capitalization of the crypto market has surpassed the $2 trillion mark this year and keeps growing. Businesses are always looking for easily accessible financing opportunities. Traditionally, large and mid-sized companies get funding through bank and bond financing. With its global reach and intermediary-free environment, the crypto market, decentralized finance (DeFi) in particular, could become a new source of funding in the near future. However, in its current state, the DeFi lending market is not suitable for established businesses. Most protocols that lend crypto use it …