Cloud Gaming and More NFT Hacks

TGIF! We brought a huge bag of loot after hacking our way through beating the big bad boss. Here you go, call us Robinhood.

Head in the Cloud, The Newzoo Report

Well-known game market data company Newzoo has recently published its Global Cloud Gaming Report. Now there are a few juicy bits in this monstrosity, it's worth the read. We dove into it so you don't have to.

The cloud gaming ecosystem is growing really fast, so fast it's mouthwatering. So let's go geek mode to break down the numbers.

• Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): Newzoo estimates that there will be 220 million people using cloud gaming in 2022. 49.5% are in the Asia-Pacific region and the second largest goes to Europe with a 17.4% share. They expect that this will grow to 464.9 million by 2025. That's more than 2x in 3 years. 👀

• Cloud gaming paying users: They point out that there are about 31.7 million paying users with 35.9% in Asia-Pacific. Europe and North America brought the fire this time with 32.3% and 21.9% respectively. This is expected to grow almost 3x by 2025 with 86.9 million paying users.

• Revenue from cloud gaming: About US$2.4 billion in revenue is expected to be made from cloud gaming in 2022 and we could see it grow to US$8.2 billion by 2025. Of the $2.4 billion, 36.5% was allocated to Asia-Pacific, 30.3% to Europe and 27.1% to North America.

So what's helping push the growth?

1. New cloud services continue to launch while existing ones are expanding what they deliver.

2. The use cases are also expanding to offer something appealing to almost every user. This is also beneficial to developers and publishers

3. New AAA games and upcoming cloud games are acting as catalysts for user growth.

4. We've heard how difficult it is to find a next-gen console. Well, this hardware supply constraint is nudging players to cloud gaming to get their fix.

Newzoo talks to companies in cloud gaming

Newzoo went ahead to interview some of the players in cloud gaming. Here's the summary of what they had to say.

• Xbox: More than 10 million people around the world streamed through Xbox Cloud Gaming since its launch in 2020 and it's been growing significantly since they announced the numbers.

• Well-Link: Cloud gaming was a clear solution for miHoYo, Genshin Impact's developers to deliver a good gaming experience on lower-end devices. They were so bullish about the result that they said this - "We ended up providing a better experience running the cloud version of Genshin Impact on an iPhone 6 than running the mobile app on an iPhone 13 Pro Max."

• Hadean, a startup working on distributed computing for Web3 and metaverse: There were 14,000 concurrent clients connected in a single global shard in their collaboration with CCP Games in 2019.

Our take

With the Apple store being adamant about the take rate they want to charge on digital assets, and many Web3 games going the desktop route to bypass this, we think Web3 gaming and Cloud gaming can work together. The size and growth of the cloud gaming market only serve to reassure us that we may not need to push uphill against the big gatekeepers in mobile gaming by using cloud gaming to reach users. Cloud gaming, meet Web3 gaming 🤝.

Want to read the report yourself? HERE.

Hacker hits Limit Break CEO

Gabriel Leydon’s (CEO of Limit Break) Twitter account was hacked on Wednesday and used to spread a scam link. The attacker was successful in stealing NFTs and Crypto from those that interacted with it. Leydon has accused an AT&T employee as the one pulling the strings.

We all know how dangerous the internet can be, but it's even worse when a verified account is compromised. Scams on Twitter and YouTube are a constant threat. In this hack alone dozens of NFTs and a ballpark $30,000 worth of cryptocurrency were stolen through a scam link shared by a respected Web3 developer compromised account.

Although the Web3 twitter space acted quickly it wasn't quick enough to save everyone. Like this poor Mutant Ape who after a flurry of transfers was quickly sold for around 12 ETH.

Leydon has regained control of his Twitter account and blamed an employee at mobile carrier AT&T in a voice message shared via tweet. He claims to have been the victim of an unauthorized sim swap. Below is his response.

According to CT sleuth ZachXBT this hack is another perpetrated by the hacker known as "Monkey Drainer" who has been linked recently to the theft of millions of dollars of NFTs.

Twitter has been struck by similar attacks over the last 4 months. In many cases, the scam link is spread through a prominent web3 creator or project account that has been compromised. The lesson here is to be wary of what you sign in your wallet. No matter where it's from.

Read the full story HERE.

The Sneaky News You May Have Missed

• Meta announced it would use Arweave for the storage of its creators’ NFTs. Creators on Instagram can now make and sell NFTs on the Ethereum, Polygon, and Flow blockchains, with support for Solana and Phantom wallets coming soon. The integration of Social Web2 and NFT Web3 has begun. Read more HERE.

• Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity) announces its move on game publishing with "Mavis Hub." Mavis hub will leverage the Ronin Network so users and developers can build an entire ecosystem of games. Read more HERE.

Until Next Time

That's it for today! I'm going to make sure 2FA is on so I don't get hacked.

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