This Week in Crypto Games: $250K Pokémon Card Auction, 'Pixels' $4M Competition, 'Nifty Island' Token Date

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

Ultra-rare Pokémon card: A pristine, first-edition, shadowless holographic Charizard Pokémon card from 1999 went up for auction on Friday, tokenized via Ethereum scaling network Polygon and auctioned by collectibles platform Courtyard.

The PSA 10-graded card, stored in a Brink’s vault, has an estimated value of $250,000. The 30-day auction aims to demonstrate blockchain’s potential in the collectibles market, the involved companies said. The top bid currently stands at $44,000 as of this writing.

Pixels competition: Crypto farming and social game Pixels geared up to kick off its latest Guild Wars competitive season this week. Running on the Ethereum gaming network Ronin, the competition, called Spore Sports, has $4 million worth of PIXEL tokens available to be won.

Starting December 10, the three-month event will continue through until March 4, 2025. Players will be challenged to join guilds and compete in gameplay centered around mushroom cultivation and strategic sabotage.

Nifty Island token date: Ethereum-based metaverse gaming platform Nifty Island announced that its ISLAND token launch will take place on December 17. This comes after the project concluded a nine-month play-to-airdrop campaign.

Users from the play-to-airdrop campaign will share 12.5% of the ISLAND token supply, an increase of 25% from the initial token distribution details. Nifty Island also announced it has teamed with a handful of Web3 communities to set aside one million ISLAND tokens, claimable on December 17.

ICYMI

• Gaming tokens are on the rise, including The Sandbox (SAND), Decentraland (MANA), and Gala Games (GALA).
• Portal launched its cross-chain crypto gaming hub and associated wallet.
• CCP Games is selling Founder Access packs for Eve Frontier, with the closed alpha launching Tuesday.
• Battle royale game OpenSeason announced it’d burn 82% of its token supply.

• Illuvium Beyond partnered with watch maker Casio G-Shock for an NFT card collection.
• Ethereum layer-3 gaming network Xai announced it’d release “Tiny Sentry Keys” to lower the barrier for entry into its Sentry Key ecosystem.
• Free-to-play shooter Shatterline went live on the Epic Games Store.

• Pixels had a cute little in-game celebration for Bitcoin passing $100,000.
• Forgotten Runes teased some kind of token called XP, linked to the Arcane Foundation.
• The developers of Minecraft-like game Hytopia are ditching Minecraft compatibility support.

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