I've started talking about Parallel back in late September after I had first seen the closed Beta on Aftersounds stream. Since then, I've did several more articles about just how awesome this game has been so far and obviously, I've been playing it quite a lot.
I was already pretty excited about the whole thing when I first found it, even giving some exact tips on what you need to do to start earning. With all that said, I never would have expected how fast this thing would start to accelerate! Keep in mind, this is still in Closed Beta, so access is somewhat gated and new players are only coming in if they are actively looking for it. Still, the game and especially the token has seen some crazy growth over the last few weeks:
When I got in in late September, the token was traded somewhere around the $3.6 mark. Since then, token value has already more than doubled and while it's an up and down, so far it's going pretty strong and not really showing much weakness. The crazy thing is, while token prices are going up the rewards for playing are also increasing. Here's what I got for my latest win:
Keep in mind that this is without a win streak bonus. On average, I make about 0.1 Prime per win which translates to 0.5 Prime a day. At current prices, that's already $4 a day of - if we pretend it would stay like that - almost $1,500 a year. As detailed in this article I've only payed about $150 on my whole deck. Obviously, these prices have gone up a bit, but you can still get a reasonably strong deck for farming for about $200 - $250!
Those are not the only strong signals from the ecosystem, though. Besides Parallel there's also a second game in active development - AI Colony. Now I don't know too much about this game yet, it seems to be some AI driven colony management game. To fully play it, though, you will need to own an Avatar. That reason alone is now also pushing the price of these avatar NFTs through the roof:
Once again, keep in mind that I earned this avatar for free just by playing the game! Also, that's only the best offer I could take right away. The floor for its rarest trait is 2.5 ETH on the market right now. So it seems like the sky is the limit right now and everything is exploding a bit.
Now I'm not an idiot and I know that everything that goes up is eventually going to come down again. But - and that's a big but - Parallel is doing all this on its own right now. Sure, Bitcoin going up helped, but while that is trading sideways for a while now, Parallel is still climbing to new highs on a regular basis. I also firmly believe that the true bull run is still quite a bit away. We'll probably enter hyper bull mode sometime in Q4 of 2024 or Q1 of 2025. So even if the party is going to stop for Parallel, I'm quite confident that it will only be paused and that we'll see another, even bigger rally during the actual bull run.
People keep saying that Play2Earn died with the last bull and that might be true in a way. The first iteration of Play2Earn indeed was "everybody earns, nobody cares" - meaning that everybody was just trying to extract as much value as possible, no matter if the game was actually fun or if there even was a game. The different with Parallel (and possibly AI Colony?) is that the game is actually fun. It's a fully fledged trading card game with tons of different collectibles and rarities. The whole economy is set up in a way that ensures that you can't own everything without continuously spending outside money. At the same time, there are plenty of opportunities to spend the Prime you earned while playing, thus keeping it in the ecosystem.
Personally, I'm really bullish on where Parallel could go and besides Splinterlands, it's growing to be my biggest portfolio in the Play2Earn sector - which is fun considering I've only spent that $150 initially and probably won't spend any more any time soon.
So yes, getting into the game is already more expensive than it was, but I don't think it's too late yet. The possible returns are really good and i you can wait until the next real bull market, chances are extremely good that Echelon Prime and Parallel will be in a way better situation than what they are right now!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time.