‘Hamster Kombat’ Airdrop, GTA 6 Bitcoin Trailer, and McDonald’s Metaverse

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 debuting 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

Hamster Kombat explodes: Telegram-based game Hamster Kombat has quickly become the buzziest game in the crypto world, and now the studio says it has amassed more than 100 million total players. That’s an immense number—roughly 1/9 of the entire Telegram user base, and three times the players that Notcoin amassed before closing its “mining phase.”

There’s been immense social interest around the crypto exchange management clicker game, with its official Telegram channel becoming the biggest overall on the messaging platform, plus lots of demand for the daily combo and daily cipher code that earn players millions of free coins.

Last week, the Hamster Kombat team revealed that the token launch on The Open Network (TON) is currently targeted for July, giving players a target for the airdrop.

GTA 6’s ‘Buy BTC’ leak: There have been all sorts of rumors about Grand Theft Auto implementing cryptocurrency for its next big game, but it was still a huge surprise when the first GTA 6 trailer leaked last December with “BUY BTC” plastered on top. It had been added by the leaker, however, and there’s currently no indication the game will actually feature Bitcoin.

But now we know a bit more about how that moment came to be. Reliable pseudonymous crypto sleuth ZachXBT shared apparently leaked messages between the leaker (called Skenkir) and allies, where they discussed swiping the trailer from the official YouTube account of Rockstar Games before adding the BTC branding and leaking it on Twitter. Click here for more.

McDonald’s metaverse: Grimace fans, unite! Fast food chain McDonald’s has launched its own metaverse game in Singapore, and owners of the 2,000 Grimace NFTs released last year in the country can access exclusive features thanks to token-gating.

ICYMI

• Arbitrum has unlocked $220 million worth of ARB (at the current price) to help fund gaming ecosystem growth over three years. Read more about the initiative.
• The Sandbox has raised $20 million in new funding that values the Ethereum metaverse game platform at $1 billion.
• Leading Ethereum wallet MetaMask has implemented a game launcher thanks to an integration with crypto gaming store HyperPlay.
• Notcoin is handing out $1 million in NOT tokens in total to thousands of early users who traded the game’s pre-market NFT vouchers before the coin went on-chain.
• Pirate Nation plans to launch its PIRATE token on June 13.

• The developer of Sui third-person shooter has raised $7.5 million to help launch the blockchain game later this year.
• Sky Mavis recovered another $5.7 million worth of assets stolen in the $622 million Ronin bridge hack from 2022.
• Ethereum layer-3 gaming network Xai will kick off its Vanguard: Genesis campaign this week with a series of game launches and new token rewards.
• The Mystery Society, which launched on Polygon, is shifting to Immutable.

GG spotlight

Here are a few of our original stories from this past week that we think are well worth a weekend read: