My friends, you will love hearing my honest review of the game and the linked crypto token for Gods Unchained, which I played hundreds of hours of over the last year. I quit playing the game twice, for the reasons I'm about to outline here with you. If you are at all interested in Gods Unchained, you will want to hear my story, because it might save you a lot of wasted time, energy, and money.
They try to make it feel like you have real ownership in here, and the game is original and fun. It definitely was fun, and I did have fun with it, but the game was much more complicated because of the blockchain technology. The game is not truly hosted on chain, and that is why I give this one star. The whole idea of the game is, "Wow, players have real ownership," and you buy these NFTs, and the cards are actually yours, and you can trade them. But in my experience that's all a lie, because the pictures, and the rules for the game, and everything of true value is hosted off chain. And they change it. The cards, they change how the game works, and often they change things in ways the community doesn't agree with at all.
The Player Numbers Have Tanked
What we can see in the data is that over the last year, the daily active players for this have just completely tanked. It was close to 8,000 or 9,000 a year ago, back when I was playing, and it's done nothing but tank the entire year, except for a little recent pump when a new set came out. When they release a new set, people often come back. I got back into the game after I quit once, when they released a new set, and then I quit again after about another month in it. This game is a total mind and money suck. In my experience, it doesn't provide any value back to you.
How I Got Lured In
I got way into this game after they sponsored me twice in 2022 on Twitch to stream the game live. The first time I played it, I didn't even like it that much. I only played it because they were giving me hundreds of dollars to just live stream it on Twitch, which was a pretty good deal for me at the time. Then they sponsored me to play it again a few months later, and I was looking for a game to play. I got all excited because I bought the lies with this game, that you can really own the cards and there's true ownership for players, and I dumped thousands of dollars into it. I bought hundreds of dollars of the cards.
The problem is that if you actually want to play at the highest levels of the game, you often need cards that cost hundreds of dollars each, and then the price will often tank for these cards over time. So you buy these cards, like Demogorgon for example. When I first bought this card, it was $500 or $600, and now the price has tanked down to like $300. Many of the other cards have the same price history. If you look, the Demogorgon price in ETH was up to over 0.3. When ETH tanked a bit, it got close to 0.5, and the price has just tanked on this card and many of the others.
The Token Is Down 95 Percent
If you're looking at it thinking, "Well, the game is going to get played, and everybody's going to want to play this, it's going to go viral," that's how I got lured into it, and I bought up all these cards. But the truth is the token has done terribly. It's down 95 percent since it launched, with most everybody buying the token losing money in it. And not only that, but it gets worse. It looks like the team manufactures pumps of the token. I have no proof of this, but you'll see where, for example, there's no volume and nothing happening with it, and then it looks like the team or somebody involved with the project does these huge buy orders to shoot the price up to 30-something cents.
The token itself with the game is also hopeless because it's play to earn, so they're handing out thousands of these tokens a day to people that are just playing the game, and that means the price just totally tanks. And if you want to earn any substantial amount of money on the play to earn, you usually need to buy the cards. Since this is an ERC-20 token, it means you constantly have to pay gas fees to get this on and off of Immutable X. I've paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars moving my Ethereum onto Immutable X to buy the cards, and then moving it off when I sold the cards, and then moving it back on when I bought them again. The game is a little bit addictive, but not addictive enough to actually keep people sticking around.
Just a Rip-Off of Hearthstone and Magic
Does this look good to you? I say it doesn't look good. If you look at the quality of the game itself, it's basically a rip-off of Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering. That's a problem, because Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering already have huge communities, and I don't want to invest my time or my energy in a competitive environment. I want to put my money and my time into a place where there's no alternative, where I'm not just competing to play a game when there are a bunch of other games.
I've played a lot of Magic the Gathering Arena, and comparing Gods Unchained to Magic the Gathering Arena, Magic has everything. It has every advantage. It only cost me $100 to make several good decks that got me into Mythic in Magic the Gathering Arena, while in Gods Unchained you usually, but not always, need to spend much more than that if you want to play up to the highest level and have the game not be utterly boring. You can use one single deck that's maybe a $20 or $30 deck and just grind that deck out, and the game goes on. It goes a bit faster than Magic the Gathering, but it's also much more boring for that aspect. You can often tell exactly what's going to happen. It's often just kind of gambling, where it's just the luck of who draws the cards.
There are a few cards that give people a massively unfair advantage, where you basically can't beat them. They made a few very rare cards you can only get that are just automatic win conditions. When you compare the gameplay of something like Magic the Gathering and Gods Unchained, I'd much rather play Magic the Gathering Arena. It doesn't cost nearly as much to build out great decks. There are so many more cards, there's so much more depth, the game has so much more history, and it has such a larger community.
The NFT Experience Is Not Mass-Adoption Friendly
The NFT functionality of this is just annoying, if anything. It's not mass-adoption friendly, because in order to buy the NFTs you need to have a MetaMask wallet. You need to use something like Token Trove or Aqua XYZ to actually buy the card. And then you get scraped. You absolutely get scraped when you put money on this. Either you use your credit card and put money on to buy something, and then you get wrecked with like a 5 or 10 percent fee, or you get stuck paying Ethereum gas fees to put money on.
And then if you actually want to earn really well on the play to earn, you need to be in the highest division, Mythic, which is going to take you a decent amount of hours and games. I was able to get into Mythic in just like a few hundred games, because I played a lot of customizable card games before, but I bought thousands of dollars of cards, and this game is very much pay to win. If you look at the top decks on this game, it's very pay to win. If you look at the meta and see which decks are winning, the decks that are wrecking tend to be very expensive, and the cards that have the highest win rate tend to be the expensive ones. So if you look at the meta and the card win rate over the last seven days, yes, some cards you can get will be cheaper, but the individual cards run $10, $20, $25, $30, $70 for the highest win rate cards.
And here's the thing too. They recently introduced a new set, which has put some more higher win rate cards in, and they constantly change the meta up. So sometimes they'll nerf a card that you had to pay hundreds of dollars for. The meta has actually gotten better since I played it — there aren't nearly as many expensive cards that are in the highest win rate — but that means everybody who is holding these other cards in the past has gotten wrecked buying them. Then they release a new set of cards that often has cheaper alternatives. So the players who've been in the game for a while, who had all these expensive cards, get wrecked, which means there's no real value to holding the cards themselves. You always have to keep buying the newest sets in order to get the highest win rate cards.
And still, there are many of these cards that, if you're going to play at the highest level, you need all of them — these $50 cards, and some of them you need two copies of, like Therial. Therial is $500. That is one that's actually held its value better over time. But if you want to play at the highest level, you end up needing a bunch of these different cards, these $300 cards, hundred dollar cards. If you want to play and really enjoy the game and be successful in the play to earn, you'll need to invest thousands — invest is not the right word — you'll need to gamble thousands of dollars in these NFT cards, and get wrecked in gas fees, and take a bunch of time to buy this on MetaMask and transfer it to your wallet and sync your game client up.
This is just not mass-adoption friendly. And I don't want to put my time into a game like that, because the basic future thing that's exciting to me is mass adoption. Right now there's been some hype and what looks like to me artificial manipulation of the price, because they got it listed on the Epic Games Store, and they've been saying all year that the mobile app was coming soon. But even with the mobile app on Google Play and the App Store, everybody who's using it to really get any value out of the game will have to learn how to use MetaMask, and how to put these tokens in and buy the cards. This stuff is just too hard and too annoying for most people who are gamers and aren't into crypto. Unless you're getting paid to play it, it's not a very lucrative proposition. If you want to dig into crypto and gaming honestly with me and the people figuring this out together, I'd love for you to join the Jerry Banfield Family.
What the Twitch numbers told me
What I've seen, if you look at the streamer stats, is that since this game came out — right when it launched, during the crypto bull market — it spiked, and it certainly could have another speculative pump temporarily in a bull market. But things are inevitably going to just dump again and again on this. Gaming is really competitive. There are a lot of games out there. This is a game that's competing with Magic: The Gathering Arena and Hearthstone, huge established games battling for people's time and attention, and Twitch is a good indication of the community. There was a big spike in the bull market after the game first released, and all it has done since then is dump, with an occasional spike. The number of viewers has dumped all the way down. A new set just came out, but that hype often only lasts for a month or so. The viewership has fallen to the point where it's about where it was right when the game came out, before the bull market hype — basically the viewership is about where it was two years ago at this point.
Yes, it's good that it has sustained at all, but you need to keep in mind this game has hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital investment behind it. It doesn't look like it's even profitable right now. It looks like the money they make from the game is not sustaining it. Basically, you're betting that the game takes off before the venture capital money runs out, and in my view the odds on that are not good right now. Based on the data, look at the actual active users. Yes, you might get more users when the mobile app comes out, but keep in mind, if people weren't playing on desktop, it's not that easy to get new people to actually play a game and stick with it. Playing Gods Unchained when you don't have any of the good cards, and you're just facing these pay-to-win decks that mow you over, is not fun. It is not fun at all. That's going to make it hard to onboard and keep new users, as we've already seen for this game.
The token is a manipulated mess
The token itself is just an utter mess, a manipulated mess, where it does nothing but lose value unless they artificially inflate it — where it looks like the team buys huge amounts. That's probably accurate, but I have no actual evidence. What it looks like is the team uses some of their venture capital money — they put a few hundred thousand in to push the market way up right when they want to pump it for a specific reason. Most of this year they've done little buys to push it up, and then it just inevitably dumps as people keep playing to earn. It looks like, in preparation for the mobile app release, they've tried to artificially pump it up more.
When you actually try to use the token itself, what's super annoying is that if you want to buy something, it's cheaper in Ethereum in almost every case. For example, there's a card, Pyramid Warden, that has a high win rate. If you want to play at the highest levels of the game and really have fun, this is a card you're generally going for. It costs $52 to buy in Ethereum, and it costs $61 to buy it in the token. That's more of a sales pitch for why you'd want to buy Ethereum, to me, than for the Gods token itself. They give out thousands and thousands of the Gods token every day, and then when you go to buy things, most of them are priced way higher in the Gods token, especially some of the most valuable cards in the game. Demogorgon is $293 in Ethereum, and when you go to buy it in the Gods token it costs $510 — because the people buying and selling these cards don't want your Gods token for it. They know Ethereum has real value that can maintain over time. The Gods token is completely speculative. There's almost no use for it.
They were giving out staking rewards for it by just leaving it in your wallet, and those staking rewards were pretty good — until you consider they're coming from inflation. Only 50% of the supply is out now. For a speculative pump, this thing does have a much better game, a much better team, and a lot more users than many other crypto games. But these days, everybody is launching their own crypto game. And because this is not hosted on chain, the Gods token has no real value in terms of governance or in terms of giving users true ownership over the game. There's no real DAO for this.
You don't really own the cards
I wish I'd known about all this stuff before I started playing, because I bought into the hype that, wow, this is going to be the next Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, and the technology is so exciting because you really own the cards. But you don't really own the cards when the development team does whatever they want — destroying the value of the existing cards by putting out new cards. You're holding some five- or six-hundred-dollar card like Demogorgon, and then they release a new card that does essentially the same thing for like two bucks in the new set and wreck the value of that card. There's no use in trying to hold onto cards over time or collect them. The price of all the Gods Unchained cards used to be like $20,000 to buy all of them, outside of the really, really rare outliers. And the price has just continually tanked over time. The cards look like they're trending towards zero — which, yes, makes it more accessible, but when you're talking about true ownership for players, what's really valuable is that the cards maintain some value over time.
When you've got people who love the game and they've watched the value of their collection tank by like 50% over a period of a few months, and the developer says, well, we don't even pay attention to the market prices of the cards — meanwhile in the past the developer has done things like intentionally use funds to buy up cards off the marketplace to artificially create scarcity. They've released sets where they put out too many of the cards, and then they buy up a whole bunch of cards and burn them, and the whole community gets pissed off about it. There's some controversy every month at a minimum, with the developer doing things that outrage the community. That's why you keep seeing the community dwindle over time. It only takes one of those things to break the bubble of hype and speculation for you to realize this sucks. Why am I putting my time into this? It's hard to get your friends to play a game like this, too, where you need to connect your MetaMask wallet and do all this stuff. A lot of people who game are not into crypto. And then there are so many other crypto games that are more hype and more speculative than this. I seriously doubt this does well over time.
What it cost me, and what I learned
That's sad, because for a few months I played it, I streamed it, I was all in on it — but there's no money in streaming it, and there's no money in playing the game all the time. Maybe there's a temporary bull pump for this, but with the price chart, most people, even if the technology is fantastic — like the Internet Computer, even if the technology is amazing — often look at a price chart like this and go, no, it's down 95%, it's been a total rug pull. A chart like this is going to have a hard time getting back to bull market highs outside of blatant manipulation, which appears like it's going on. That means if you're not aware of the manipulation and when it happens, you're going to get wrecked. The volume on this is acceptable based on where the market cap is, but with all the token supply, they're going to keep dumping. Inevitably, this is just a big waste of time.
What I've learned is that I want to be careful about where I put my time. I had fun playing this game, but the only reason I really had fun playing it is because I put thousands and thousands of dollars into the cards. If I hadn't, I couldn't stand to play with a cheap deck, because you just get mowed by the more expensive decks. It seems like that's a little bit better since I've played it — but that also means everybody holding those expensive cards got destroyed. So if you look at the big picture with Gods Unchained, it's a lot of hype and promises and excitement that ends up being a huge disappointment. The game itself is a big disappointment. It is fun, but in a world where there are tons of other fun games with bigger communities that more of your friends are playing, it's questionable whether any game like this can keep surviving. The bigger the game is, the more expensive it tends to be, but it also has a bigger community and network effects. I don't see that this has a big enough community and network effect to sustain, all the NFTs and stuff.
If I look at the entire experience, I spent hundreds of hours playing Gods Unchained, and what did I get? I lost thousands of dollars on this. I essentially traded those hours and dollars for nothing. It was a huge waste of my time. The only value that has come out of it is what I've learned — and what I've learned is that I don't want to do that again. They paid to sponsor me a few hundred dollars, and I gave all that back. I did huge Gods Unchained giveaways to the community. I gave away thousands of Gods Unchained tokens. I essentially paid people to watch my streams, and it was all a big waste of time. Almost nobody who followed me from Gods Unchained even comes back to watch me on Twitch. If you're not playing Gods Unchained, people don't even watch you.
I hope this helps you not waste your time with Gods Unchained. In my experience, this is extremely speculative and extremely risky, and I seriously doubt it can even get back to its bull market highs. There are going to be a lot of other altcoins that will probably do much better than this. It's too expensive to maintain the game. The developer is running out of time — they've got to start making a profit or their venture capital money runs out, and it looks like they're just bleeding out. Given another year or a couple more years, they're going to run out of money to sustain the project, and that's going to be it. I don't want to circle the drain with this thing anymore. I hope this information has been useful for you, and if you want to talk with me more about any of this, the best way to reach me is to join the Jerry Banfield Family and chat with me there.
Where I share the rest of my work
I've got three YouTube channels going. I put this one on my crypto reviews channel, which is where I dig into the specific coins and projects I'm looking at. I also make videos on all kinds of other topics, from YouTube itself to many more crypto videos on the cryptocurrencies I love, and most of those go up on my main channel.
If you enjoy seeing the lighter, more creative side of what I do, I keep my games and comedy work over at jerrybanfield.net, and I've pulled a lot of that together into my Games playlist so you can watch it all in one place.