Animoca Brands buys access to 60 million gamers

Blockchain gaming company Animoca Brands has bought blockchain company Gamma for $350.000, with an additional $2.5 million when targets have been met in three years. Gamma is collaborating with gaming hardware manufacturer Razer on the Razer Softminer mining software, giving Animoca Brands access to 60 million gamers through this partnership.

Out of Razer's user base of 60 million gamers worldwide, currently 692 thousand of them have installed Razer SoftMiner. That's only 1.15% of the entire user base.

The software utilizes users’ idle processing power to mine Ethereum. Gamma and Razer split the earnings of Ethereum 50/50, while users are rewarded with Razer's own loyalty credits called Razer Silver.

When Razer launched the software back in December, they faced a major backlash. Many called them out for launching a scam. The ethereum mined is more valuable than the store credits they hand out to their users. On top of that, at that time the electricity cost was higher than the actual earnings... no matter whether you'd mine Ethereum or would go for the Razer Silver credits.

To make things even worse, Razer Silver has an expiry date. So gamers will be mining decentralized and everlasting Ethereum coins, but get centralized and expiring store credit in return. On top of that, calculations showed that one Razer Silver was worth $0.00089 in December. So it would take 560 days of 24/7 mining to earn enough for a $250 Razer keyboard. Because the Silver tokens expire after twelve months, it's technically impossible to earn enough credits for a keyboard.

If all 692 thousand gamers who've installed Razer SoftMiner would use the miner 24 hours per day, seven days per week for an entire month. And all of them would be using a 1080Ti graphics card, than Razer and Gamma would accumulate approximately 2250 ETH per day. That's 67.500 ETH per month, which equals 21.1 million dollars. However, perhaps an average of 3 hours per week per user is far more likely... which would equal 9.3 ETH in total $2901 per month. Keep in mind, these numbers are pure speculation, but the mining business can't possible the reason why Animoca Brands is buying Gamma.

In recent months Animoca Brands has been very active on the market. Their latest milestone is the launch of F1 Delta Time. Currently they are selling NFTs, and the full game is expected to launch early next year. With the acquisition of Gamma they acquired questionable software, but also 60 million gamers. Perhaps that's where the real value is at for Animoca Brands.