It is the first article from our series about initial offerings. Read about ICO, IEO, and IDO next.
In total: IGO (Initial Game Offering) is a crowd sale of in-game tokens or NFTs of a blockchain game that is currently in the early development stage. Developers get money to finish the project, and IGO participants get unique tokens that might rise in price if the game becomes popular.
How IGO differs from ICO, IEO, and IDO:
- IGOs are about games only. Participants will get tokenized in-game resources, skins, characters, or weapons in the form of NFTs, utility tokens they can use in-game to get an early advantage or just sell them for profit;
- ICOs might be held by any kind of crypto project and are always hosted on the project’s platform. ICO was the first, and the most popular way to raise funds — back in 2014 Ethereum team raised $18M and launched the network via ICO;
- IEOs are hosted by centralized exchanges. IEOs are considered more reliable investments, as exchanges are doing due diligence checks before listing a project for IEO;
- IDOs are hosted by decentralized exchanges. IDOs are considered less reliable than IEOs because many of them end with rug pulls.
Why Participate in IGO
There are three incentives to buy tokens or NFTs on IGO:
- to support the developers;
- to get rare assets and use them later after the game is launched;
- to sell the acquired assets after they rise in price.
Be careful and do your own research. There are no guarantees that the game will become popular, and other users will be eager to buy its digital assets on the secondary market. Before participating, it is worth it to check if you would play the game yourself, how good the marketing is, how many followers it got on social media, and if any big or trusted companies are backing the project.
How to Participate in IGO
The first thing to know is that participating in any kind of Initial Offering is different from simply buying assets. An investor must follow the rules: buy and lock tokens, get a subscription, do not use multiple accounts to buy more tokens, etc.
The second thing to consider is that IGOs are planned way ahead. Investors have plenty of time to do the research and complete the steps required to participate. But one must be fast: if the project is widespread, the crowd might buy all offered assets in a minute.
The most popular IGO platforms are the following:
- Binance Gaming NFT. There, one can buy in-game NFTs, mainly in the form of loot boxes where you will get random tokens;
- Gamestarter. It is a separate platform designed for IGOs. An investor has to complete KYC verification;
- PlayPad. A separate IGO and incubation platform where one can buy utility tokens for upcoming blockchain games.
Is it worth participating in IGOs? Yes, if the investor can guess the game’s popularity right. For example, a token of Bloktopia (BLOK) rose by 69,726% from the IGO price, a token of Cryptomeda (TECH) — by 21,566%, and a token of Cryowar (CWAR) — by 16,620% on the peak.