With five million downloads in total, and one year on since the launch of NFL Rivals’ in-game marketplace, Mythical Games has released some numbers about its impact on monetization. 

Overall, the conclusion is that the integrated marketplace has boosted activity. As players gained the ability to trade their in-game characters from within the app, the percentage of players making a transaction increased by 25%, and the transaction volume by 45% per daily active user. 

In addition, as players became more confident and experienced using the in-app marketplace, some moved onto the web-based marketplace. As such, the in-game marketplace worked as advertising for the web shop. This makes sense, as the web marketplace is a better place to trade due to better price liquidity and lower transaction fees – no Apple and Google tax.

Hence players made higher value trades in the web shop, which accounted for 36% of total trades, but 70% of trading volume.

Another finding was that users who accessed the marketplace also bought more packs from the web shop. This is believed to be due to the increasing utility of in-game items, thus making players more likely to buy them from the web shop. Also, knowing that they can resell them at any time makes them more likely to buy them in the first place. 

In terms of NFL Rivals, it’s the first NFL licensed web3 game. Mythical recently unveiled a partnership with Super Bowl LVIII champions Kansas City Chiefs, which will see NFL Rivals as the club’s official mobile game for the 2024 season.

Stay up-to-date via Mythical Games’ official website.

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.”

Five days faster than the period of time it took to accumulate the last $1 million-worth of NFT trading volume, NFL Rivals has broken $6 million in lifetime trading volume.

According to data from Cryptoslam, it took 32 days for the mobile sports game to move from $4 million to $5 million and 27 days to move from $5 million to $6 milllion, demonstrating an acceleration of activity, despite American Football being in its off-season until the 2025 season starts on 5th September.

This progress is also demonstrated when looking at the game’s monthly NFT trading volume, which hit an all-time-high in May of over $1 million, including a daily high of $82,000 on 30th May.

If the current daily runrate is maintained, June will surpass May’s total by 10%.

Mythical Games’ recently said NFL Rivals has been downloaded from Apple and Google app stores more than 5 million times, making it one of the most popular blockchain games.

However, the percentage of active wallets driving the NFT trading is much smaller.

During May, there were only 19,602 unique active wallets: every player in NFL Rivals gets a custodial blockchain wallet created for them when they first log into the game, but only those creating and trading NFTs during the month are counted as being active.

One reason for the recent growth in NFT trading is likely to be the launch of the Quick Trades feature, which allows players to bundle up unwanted NFTs to buy more expensive assets, with the difference in price being refunded in the game’s NFT-based non-crypto Credits currency.

More analysis on the game is provided in the video below.

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.