Uncategorized
GTA owner joins Web3, Bitcoin casino, Sunflower Land review: Web3 Gamer
Grand Theft Auto’s parent company launches new blockchain game. Plus: Bitcoin casino, FarmVille-like Sunflower Land game reviewed, and more.
…
Share this:
Grand Theft Auto’s parent company launches new blockchain game. Plus: Bitcoin casino, FarmVille-like Sunflower Land game reviewed, and more.
Grand Theft Auto owner enters Web3 via mobile gaming arm
Fun fact: mobile gaming giant Zynga is owned by Take-Two Interactive, the same company that also owns Rockstar Games, which is behind ultra-popular video game series like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption and NBA 2K.
Now Zynga is making its Web3 debut with a new franchise.
Best known for its FarmVille series, Zynga has created an offshoot studio called Zynga Web3 (or ZW3) and announced Sugartown. Its a cross-media world that will be more like a Web3 gaming platform than a single title. The cute cartoonish animals featured in the teaser video give clues that there might be more than video games in the works.
It looks like a scene from a new Netflix series, so I wont be surprised to see a cartoon featuring the Sugartown characters.
For now, though, the only thing thats confirmed is that Sugartown will launch an NFT collection called Oras, and they will be required to participate in upcoming games within the universe. ZW3 said the franchise is working with different communities to allocate allowlists for the NFTs.
If this platform becomes successful, perhaps it could give the green light for some of those big titles from the same company to jump into Web3?
More play needed in Play-to-Earn Istanbul Blockchain Week
Why arent Web3 games adopted as much as traditional games? That was one of the subjects talked about during a Web3 gaming panel at Istanbul Blockchain Week 2023. The panel mainly focused on Web3 gaming adoption, the problems of Web3 gaming and the developer side of things.
Curator Studios co-founder Ulu Yucas answer stood out in particular as I sincerely believe it expressed the thoughts of many traditional gamers including myself toward the big problem with Web3 gaming.
He started his speech by asking the audience how many Web3 gamers there were. There were a few hands raised. And this is a blockchain event! he commented, then asked how many traditional gamers there were. There was a significant increase in the number of hands raised. He pointed out there are 3 billion traditional gamers in the world and only 15 million Web3 gamers.
15 million was not the (number of) active users in Roblox back in 2015. So what we have right now is just a little private party. That means we did something wrong.
Heres what we did wrong, according to Yuca: The Web3 community is always talking about features like third-party trading, ownership, making money and interoperability. But these features have existed since games were around, including in-game items in World of Warcraft, rare items in Dota, auctions in Diablo and those occasions RuneScapes in-game currency was used as the local market currency when Venezuelas money was depreciating.
So, we focused on features that already exist in various forms and combined them with games that arent fun:
We talk about all these value propositions and monetization models. Play-to-Earn, Play-and-Earn, Play-and-Own, Play-and-Have-Coffee, Play-and-Get-Married. It doesn’t really matter because there is no play. There is no product.
He stressed that he has yet to see a game like Minecraft, or one that does What Angry Birds did to mobile gaming back in the day.
Despite the potential brought by Web3 elements, the real question was, Do we have a game like Roblox (in Web3)? Unfortunately, we do not.
Bitcoin casino works exactly like what youd expect
Not many people know this but Satoshi Nakamoto may have been a poker player, with the original 0.1.0 Bitcoin code in 2008 containing scraps of code for an online poker game.
With the introduction of Ordinals, it looks like we might be headed back in that direction. Ordinals has enabled the Bitcoin base layer to become home to numerous images, videos and even some basic games, and also laid the groundwork for DeFi on Bitcoin protocols such as Trustless Computer (TC) and the related New Bitcoin City (NBC).
Launched in early August, the gaming platform utilizes TC and transitions gameplay to NOS, a layer-2 on Bitcoin, according to core member Punk3700, who says it enhances speed and efficiency, ensuring complex interactions occur off the Bitcoin mainnet.
NOS brings an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the Bitcoin network, allowing smart contract functionality without taking space on the main Bitcoin chain. Hence, data from games won’t crowd the valuable Bitcoin blockchain real estate.
As for the gaming platform itself, dont expect a 3D metaverse with high-fidelity graphics. The website is designed as a pixelated amusement park, with each tent representing a game offering very basic casino games like jackpot and slot.
Theres also a graffiti tent where everyone can chip in to add a pixel and then get royalty if someone buys the finished canvas.
The overall experience felt like what I had with my online poker adventures back in the early 2000s, but thats apparently not the focus of the devs. Bitcoin is expanding beyond just a currency and getting a lot of attention, explained Punk3700, adding: We want to make Bitcoin as generalized as possible usable for far more than just a currency.
The league is said to promote the win-to-earn trend where gamers earn based on their skills (and maybe luck, considering its a casino), and developers promise more to come, with an upcoming Mega Whales expected to launch on Sept. 26.
Hot Take: Sunflower Land
Sunflower Land is an online farming game built on Polygon and played via a browser. Gamers are welcomed with some strict rules: one account per player, no bots or automation. It also makes clear that Sunflower Land is a game, not a financial product although only time will tell which one will be prioritized by players
The core gameplay sees users plant seeds, wait for them to grow, harvest the plants, buy more seeds and so on similar to old Facebook games such as FarmVille and CityVille. All in-game resources, such as seeds, cooked food and equipment, are NFTs that can be transferred and traded on OpenSea.
Seeds and plants have different in-game values corresponding with the time it takes for them to grow. For example, sunflower seeds grow in 30 seconds and can be sold for 125 coins (equal to 7,500 for 30 minutes), while pumpkin seeds grow in 30 minutes and can be sold for 25,000 coins.
Sunflower Land features a skill tree that allows the player to work faster and get more yields from each produce as they level up. As the player levels up, the waiting time gets longer (up to 36 hours for a single seed), but they also get more space to plant their seeds. The game currently offers two minigames if youd like to do something in-game while you wait. They are called Greedy Goblin, a minigame where you catch falling gold coins while avoiding the skulls as a goblin, and Chicken Fight, a two-player fighting game where you control chickens.
Sunflower Land launched its new season called Witches Eve on Aug. 1, which introduced a massive multiplayer online (MMO) world for players to socialize called Pumpkin Plaza. The game also welcomed the addition of Community Islands where players are provided with tools to build their own games inside Sunflower Land with the ambition of becoming the Roblox of Web3 gaming.
The game works smoothly without any problems a rare quality for Web3 games these days. The graphics look pretty, though the background music sounded really cheap. I dont know if it’s going to become the Roblox of Web3, but Sunflower Land definitely has potential with its addictive gameplay loop. Ill surely be coming back to check my island every once in a while.
More from Web3 gaming space:
Turn-based RPG Champions Arena has launched on Gala Games.
Zillion Whales mobile RTS game Wild Forest has been announced for Ronin blockchain.
Mobile NFT game NFL Rivals has launched an in-game marketplace.
French DJ Agoria and The Sandbox are collaborating to launch an avatar collection.
Netmarbles Marblex partnered with Aptos to expand its multichain gaming universe.
Nexons MapleStory Universe tapped Chainlink as its Web3 infrastructure provider.
Uncategorized
February Employment Situation
By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…
Share this:
By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert
The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.
Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.
Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.
The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.
The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.
Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.
As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.
Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.
The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.
unemployment pandemic unemploymentUncategorized
Mortgage rates fall as labor market normalizes
Jobless claims show an expanding economy. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.
Share this:
Everyone was waiting to see if this week’s jobs report would send mortgage rates higher, which is what happened last month. Instead, the 10-year yield had a muted response after the headline number beat estimates, but we have negative job revisions from previous months. The Federal Reserve’s fear of wage growth spiraling out of control hasn’t materialized for over two years now and the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%. For now, we can say the labor market isn’t tight anymore, but it’s also not breaking.
The key labor data line in this expansion is the weekly jobless claims report. Jobless claims show an expanding economy that has not lost jobs yet. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.
From the Fed: In the week ended March 2, initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits were flat, at 217,000. The four-week moving average declined slightly by 750, to 212,250
Below is an explanation of how we got here with the labor market, which all started during COVID-19.
1. I wrote the COVID-19 recovery model on April 7, 2020, and retired it on Dec. 9, 2020. By that time, the upfront recovery phase was done, and I needed to model out when we would get the jobs lost back.
2. Early in the labor market recovery, when we saw weaker job reports, I doubled and tripled down on my assertion that job openings would get to 10 million in this recovery. Job openings rose as high as to 12 million and are currently over 9 million. Even with the massive miss on a job report in May 2021, I didn’t waver.
Currently, the jobs openings, quit percentage and hires data are below pre-COVID-19 levels, which means the labor market isn’t as tight as it once was, and this is why the employment cost index has been slowing data to move along the quits percentage.
3. I wrote that we should get back all the jobs lost to COVID-19 by September of 2022. At the time this would be a speedy labor market recovery, and it happened on schedule, too
Total employment data
4. This is the key one for right now: If COVID-19 hadn’t happened, we would have between 157 million and 159 million jobs today, which would have been in line with the job growth rate in February 2020. Today, we are at 157,808,000. This is important because job growth should be cooling down now. We are more in line with where the labor market should be when averaging 140K-165K monthly. So for now, the fact that we aren’t trending between 140K-165K means we still have a bit more recovery kick left before we get down to those levels.
From BLS: Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 275,000 in February, and the unemployment rate increased to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, in government, in food services and drinking places, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing.
Here are the jobs that were created and lost in the previous month:
In this jobs report, the unemployment rate for education levels looks like this:
- Less than a high school diploma: 6.1%
- High school graduate and no college: 4.2%
- Some college or associate degree: 3.1%
- Bachelor’s degree or higher: 2.2%
Today’s report has continued the trend of the labor data beating my expectations, only because I am looking for the jobs data to slow down to a level of 140K-165K, which hasn’t happened yet. I wouldn’t categorize the labor market as being tight anymore because of the quits ratio and the hires data in the job openings report. This also shows itself in the employment cost index as well. These are key data lines for the Fed and the reason we are going to see three rate cuts this year.
recession unemployment covid-19 fed federal reserve mortgage rates recession recovery unemploymentUncategorized
Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month
Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month
Last month we though that the January…
Share this:
Last month we though that the January jobs report was the "most ridiculous in recent history" but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush.
What happened? Let's take a closer look.
On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.
Some context: after last month's record 4-sigma beat, today's print was "only" 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR... and now in the US, apparently.
Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was "the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history": it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month's ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K, a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!
Of course, that does not mean that this month's jobs print won't be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that's the only tool left in the Biden admin's box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.
In the past month the Biden department of goalseeking stuff higher before revising it lower, has revised the following data sharply lower:
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 30, 2023
- Jobs
- JOLTS
- New Home sales
- Housing Starts and Permits
- Industrial Production
- PCE and core PCE
To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years - and thus denying expectations from Sahm's Rule that a recession may have already started - in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).
And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years...
... for one simple reason: last month's average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic...
... but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.
While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS's latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month's wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.
But it's more than just the Biden admin hanging its "success" on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge... such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).
This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.
There's more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of "new jobs" has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that's great... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).
Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!
But wait there's even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!
The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!
Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers...
... but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!
This is a huge issue - especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border...
... and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened - i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.
Which is also why Biden's handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November... and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.
Wendy’s has a new deal for daylight savings time haters
Watch Live: President Biden Reminds Americans Just How Good They’ve Got It Thanks To Him
Racial and Ethnic Wealth Inequality in the Post‑Pandemic Era
Mortgage rates fall as labor market normalizes
Watch: President Biden Delivers The “Darkest, Most Un-American Speech Given By A President”
Wealth Inequality by Age in the Post‑Pandemic Era
Is the biotech market rally real? Data suggest comeback in private, public markets
People Who Received Ivermectin Were Better Off, Study Finds
Shipping company files surprise Chapter 7 bankruptcy, liquidation
Interest rates, the best it gets. It’s time to deploy cash
-
Uncategorized2 weeks agoAll Of The Elements Are In Place For An Economic Crisis Of Staggering Proportions
-
Uncategorized1 month agoCathie Wood sells a major tech stock (again)
-
Uncategorized3 weeks agoCalifornia Counties Could Be Forced To Pay $300 Million To Cover COVID-Era Program
-
Uncategorized2 weeks agoApparel Retailer Express Moving Toward Bankruptcy
-
Uncategorized3 weeks agoIndustrial Production Decreased 0.1% in January
-
International1 day agoWalmart launches clever answer to Target’s new membership program
-
Uncategorized3 weeks agoRFK Jr: The Wuhan Cover-Up & The Rise Of The Biowarfare-Industrial Complex
-
Uncategorized3 weeks agoGOP Efforts To Shore Up Election Security In Swing States Face Challenges