At the start of the NFL season on 6th September, Mythical Games’ mobile game NFL Rivals will kick off a partnership with the Super Bowl LVIII champions, the Kansas City Chiefs.

As it enters its second year, NFL Rivals, the first NFL-licensed web3 game, has reached 5 million downloads across mobile app stores. In July 2024, the game also exceeded $7 million in lifetime trading, having recorded $1 million in monthly NFT trading volume for the first time in June.

Mythical has since migrated its Mythos chain, on which the game is deployed to Polkadot.

In terms of the partnership with the Chiefs, it provides a chance for football fans to win VIP experiences at the team’s home games at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium throughout the season. A select group of fans will also receive tickets to a special Rivals-themed Chiefs home game.

“After our massively successful inaugural season of NFL Rivals, we’re thrilled to partner with the Kansas City Chiefs, one of NFL’s most storied and successful franchises,” said Mythical Games CEO John Linden. 

“Being from Kansas City and a lifelong Chiefs fan, this announcement is so exciting for me!”

Vice president of partnership strategy and development at the Kansas City Chiefs Kim Hobbs said, “We are thrilled to have NFL Rivals joining our family as the Official Mobile Game of the Chiefs. We remain focused on reaching fans wherever they engage and consume the NFL, and mobile gaming is a growing market, especially amongst our young fans.”

About a year on from its mobile app store soft launch, it seems like Mythical’s NFL Rivals is accelerating in terms of trading activity. 

While it took 94 days to move from $1 to $2 million, more recent data suggests it would have taken just over a month — 32 days — to move from $4 to $5 million of trading.

Averaged across the time it took to go from $2 to $4 million, it would have been 65 days, which suggests a sharpening change in velocity. 

In simple dataviz terms, the blue line has now crossed the red trend line.

A feature contributing to this is likely the newly introduced Quick Swap option, which lets players pool multiple unwanted NFTs in their inventory until they reach the amount required to buy an NFT player they do want.

Quick Swap is all about convenience for players, but they actually end up trading NFTs to a lower value than if they would be sold individually via Mythical’s web marketplace. Notably, trading NFTs in-app also uses the game’s Credit currency, which is the process by which Apple and Google take their 30% cut of blockchain-based economy activity.

Despite this, players seem willing to opt for convenience over individual trades, something Mythical CEO John Linden confirmed further when discussing trading on the Dmarket skins platform, saying Quick Swaps accounted for 80% of its total trading volume. Then he added, “it’s going to be the majority of transactions [in NFL Rivals] once it goes live in-app”.

Launched in 2023, NFL Rivals is Mythical Games’ first mobile-based web3 game. Following its successful integration of web3 features such as an in-game marketplace, Linden has described how Google and Apple have gradually become more welcoming in their attitude towards blockchain games. 

As part of this adoption, Mythical also announced in 2023 that its initially PC-based flagship title Blankos Block Party, is set to pivot towards mobile, with an expected launch sometime in 2024.