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Intended or not, GoblinTown has become a trending topic, as the NFT collection features in one of the most viral video games of the year so far, Only Up. The NFT collection saw its floor price double when the Web3 community got the news, and its market cap received a 51% boost to almost $17 million. 

GoblinTown has been dropping in value over the past months, reaching a floor price of 0.2 ETH. As the value dropped, volume and trade count plummeted as well. In the first week of June only 105 NFTs were sold on the secondary market, generating 24.2 ETH in trading volume. 

This is no surprise, because GoblinTown never launched with an extended roadmap. Moreover, the brand has a CC0 license, which tends to dilute the potential commercial value of an NFT. However, in May this year Truth Labs announced two licensing deals for The 187 Collective, a collection of NFT characters that are also part of the GoblinTown universe. 

But it’s not The 187 that got the recent hype, but only GoblinTown. NFT traders who bought Goblin Town at the bottom, could have doubled their investment thanks to the recent news. 

The floor price increase resulted in a general increase in value across the entire NFT collection. DappRadar calculates the value of a selected NFT collections based on metadata and trading activity. Over the past 7 days GoblinTown increased the market cap of its NFT collection 51.51% to $16.99 million.

What is Only Up?

Only Up released on 24 May on Steam, and quickly gained traction within the gaming community. In the game you play a kid who needs to climb up towards the moon. Rumors about the involvement of Truth Labs or others in the GoblinTown community have been circulating, but have not been confirmed. 

Only Up’s accessible but challenging gameplay turned out to be fun to play, and fun to watch. According to SteamDB the indie game attracted less than 2,000 live players one week ago. Just this week, Only Up reached over 279k viewers on Twitch, while the game peaked with 5,710 players live on Steam.

Gamers can find the GoblinTown logo and various goblins across the game map. But NFTs or other crypto assets don’t have any utility within the game. It’s also not clear whether game studio SCKR Games actually owns a GoblinTown NFT, or simply used the images to create some controversy or speculation. Or maybe both?

What happened? 

Three weeks after the launch of Only Up, the game started to gain traction with content creators and game influencers. On 12 June the game had 1,900 live players as measured by Steam, and in the days after things would really take off. 

GoblinTown tweets about their presence in the game on 15 June, while in the days after prominent influencers such as FaZe Kaysan and KaiCenat used their channels to tell their followers about Only Up. Things changed after xQc, a gaming influencer who recently signed a $100 million deal with streaming platform KICK, streamed Only Up to his 11.8 million followers on Twitch.  

Up Only got lots of media attention, and with that the GoblinTown link was made. This pushed the game to the Top 5 most watched games on Twitch. And within one week the number of peak players for Only Up reached 7,000 on 19 June. That’s a 3.5x increase in the active players base within a week.

While the number of active players on Steam had been steadily increasing, the trading volume for GoblinTown stayed behind. It only was on 19 June that the hype surrounding Only Up really impacted the trading volume. While 18 June saw 23 sold NFTs for a total trading volume of 4.8 ETH, the collection had an incredible boost one day later. On 19 June it recorded 201 ETH in trading volume from a total of 530 sold NFTs.

How does Only Up impact GoblinTown? 

GoblinTown exists under a Creative Commons (CC0) license, meaning that these assets are public domain. Anybody can use imagery of the goblins without requiring permission because of this license. And while owning a GoblinTown NFT doesn’t give you commercial rights or benefits, it does give the holder a flex. Being part of the culture would be crucial here, and it’s also what a big part of GoblinTown has been built on: Web3 culture. 

Owning a GoblinTown NFT that’s part of one of the biggest gaming sensations of the year, could be a nice flex. Furthermore, it’s important to note that Truth Labs is expanding its ecosystem with the The 187 collection, sharing a bit of merchandise revenue. This is likely one of the reasons why there’s now a GoblinTown x Only Up merchandise drop happening until 23 June. 

While Only Up only impacts the reputation of GoblinTown, the community automatically attaches value to that. Clearly, visibility adds value. However, it’s also interesting to look at The 187. Truth Labs set up individual contracts with NFT holders, bypassing SEC regulations when it comes to securities. This was reported by NFTNow on 16 May, roughly one month ago and 8 days before the release of Only Up.  

• King Kong receives 1% of the revenue from royalties from GoblinTown sales, benefiting from the increasing trading volume.
• Ding Ding receives part of the sale of physical goods based on the IP of the NFT characters. That means they could benefit from the newly revealed merchandise sales. 

Truth Labs has different types of deals in mind for each of The 187 NFT collectors. Combining elements of storytelling and world building with shared revenue and collaborative building. 

Closing words

Featuring GoblinTown in the Only Up video game brought lots of renewed interest to the NFT collection. While the community doesn’t have commercial ownership over their NFTs, some can still benefit from this success. The hype increased the floor price, which is now sitting at a 50% boost from a week ago. At the same time, Truth Labs and its partners from The 187 benefit from the success as well. 

It will be interesting to see where things will go, and personally I am curious about any potential involvement of Truth Labs or The 187 in the development of Only Up.

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• Source: https://dappradar.com/blog/goblintown-viral-game-only-up-nft-trading-impact