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NFL Rivals is a mobile game that allows players the opportunity to collect and trade officially licensed NFL player NFTs.

The NFTs in the game are player cards used to build out teams and compete in the game. Each player card has different rarity levels from common to legendary. 

Players can play against each other in online games, or in single-player seasons. Teams can be improved and upgraded by buying packs of player cards, or by buying player cards individually on the marketplace.

Gems, Gold, and Coins are the only three resource items for purchasing in-game items. Gems are the major resource used for purchasing rare items and packs. Rival Coins or Coins are used for purchasing items, packs, and upgrading players. Gold allows players to purchase exclusive offers in the Connect section.

I’ve played the game myself recently (strictly for research purposes 😉) and found it very enjoyable. The raw mechanics of the game are orthodox and don’t feel like a janky Web3 game, because all of the onchain elements are in the background. It’s very easy to pick up and crucially, feels like a game that I’ve played before. The marketplace experience is also seamless, without any ailments that often impact how rough Web3 marketplaces can be.

The numbers NFL Rivals have generated to date are strong

Since its debut in April 2023:

Drilling down into sales volume, NFL Rivals have seen over $1m in sales from Jan - May 2024, with June and July seeing drop-offs since.

The drop-off could be for a multitude of reasons (no new packs / NFT collections) but it will be interesting to see whether or not there is a stark increase once more coinciding with the start of the 2024 NFL season in early September.

Active owners and total transactions have varied slightly more in 2024. There have been between ~30,000 and 120,000 monthly transactions this calendar year, with active owners clocking in between 10,000 to 30,000 users.

As with sales, the NFL season cadence could be a reason for this fluctuation. However, another factor to add to this is NFL Rivals’ partnership with Amazon Prime for 6 months from October 2023 to April 2024. This gave prime gaming members free claimable digital assets, which could be a big driver in some of these 2024 metrics.

In my 2024 predictions at the start of the year, I talked about how we would likely see a big year for Web3 gaming. And if we were scoring this prediction, it’d be a mixed bag.

At the start of the year, I wrote:

Perhaps the most significant moves in 2024 from a Web3 Gaming perspective have been:

But even with those shoots of green, I still look to the likes of NFL Rivals as the market leaders within this ‘category’ of consumer-facing Web3 propositions.

In terms of a ‘Web2.5’ game, which very much feels like a normal game but with some Web3 elements, NFL Rivals has grown to become the holy grail. So much so, that the most talked about NFT project of the year in Pudgy Penguins has decided Mythical Games is the vendor of choice to create their game.

On the other hand, mainstream publishers and large gaming platforms have gone quiet on Web3. There are headlines here and there with quotes about what it could look like for them. EA & .SWOOSH by Nike for example announced an integration a year ago, but we’ve not seen anything since. Ubisoft have announced they have come back to Web3 gaming in April this year. SquareEnix are still teasing Sybioegenesis, their flagship Web3 project, and yet we’ve not seen something of substance. The results have been mixed, to say the least.

Web3 gaming has found a spectrum. From a ‘pure’ Web3 game with every asset in-game being ownable, all the way to something that uses NFTs or blockchain as simply an additive layer to the gaming experience. My thinking was that 2024 would see an avalanche of games at either end of the spectrum break out, but there have been fewer than expected.

Sports feels joint at the hip to this market. NFL Rivals, Sorare and the recently shuttered DraftKings Reignmakers have all shown promising signs of being mainstream propositions that are part of everyday cultural fandom. But until they truly are, or can rival their Web2 equivalents, they can’t be deemed ‘successful’ in macro terms. Of course, in isolation, and compared to the Web3 market broadly, they undoubtedly are, but perhaps not by ‘Web2’ metrics.

To date, NFL Rivals have proven to be one of the most successful ‘Web3 games’.

Mythical Games have done a great job of creating something that people want to play, with a subset of their audience revelling in the ability to collect and own in-game assets. It is a blueprint for most Web3 games, that surprisingly, so far has not been followed.

NFL Rivals have found the perfect balance between scale, stickiness and speculation.

In my opinion, the best NFT-based propositions, games or otherwise, will have an audience that is split 90/10 between players/collectors/enthusiasts and speculators.

As previously mentioned, the propositions that have done well in the sports market are the ones that aren’t ‘pure Web3’. They are propositions like Top Shot, Sorare, and NFL Rivals — that don’t feel too alien to the end-user on the front end. They’re not getting people to create self-sovereign digital wallets and making them store their private keys under their pillows. They’re simply letting them sign up with an account, and play the game or collect the digital assets. None of these propositions have their own native tokens or even particularly ‘Web3’ native.

Another thing that NFL Rivals has also shown is that the tech you use in the back end doesn’t matter in the short term. Mythical Games, the producers, have used (almost) their blockchain, called the Mythical Superchain, which is a parachain of the Polkadot blockchain. In plain English, the Mythical Superchain is like a light switch within an apartment block. It has some of its own wiring but is still connected to the mainline that provides the energy.

We're going to live in a multichain future and in the short term, all that matters right now is the user experience on the front end. Nobody is questioning Mythical's back-end tech choices because the app has been a resounding success with 10s of thousands of active users that play the game with seamless ease. This may change in the future — depending on the ecosystem that is developed by Polkadot, and how the technology itself evolves. But until then, the blockchain choices made by entities building in Web3 do not directly correlate with success in the market.

Overall NFL Rivals have done a fantastic job in primarily being a successful game. Their ability to then add to the gamer experience and monetise through ownable, tradeable NFTs seems sustainable and something their users enjoy interacting with. This isn’t Web3 for Web3’s sake, this is a proposition using Web3 to monetise and distinguish themselves from a very crowded market.

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