As a gamer and blockchain enthusiast, I am interested in the explosive growth of all kinds of new games, including P2E, Metaverse, and NFT games. But how can one "Do Their Own Research" to get past the hype and see which games have promise?

I am learning along with all of you, but my first adventure involves the upcoming game called Far From Home. This project drew me in because of the cool science fiction theme and the giveaways on Twitter. However, the project website and promotional material is pretty short on details. The YouTube channel has one video which claims to be "in game footage," but is clearly not video of the game being played:

The most detailed description I could find was on the DappRadar page: "Far From Home is an upcoming space-based DeFi metaverse game, that will challenge its players to mine, build, and fight their way into the unknown vastness of the universe.  A key driver of value within the Far From Home universe is a player-driven economy realized through various in-game activities. These activities will include, for example: Land ownership, Mining, Refining, Missions, Crafting, Construction, Space Exploration, Deep space exploration, PVP Battle, Progression systems, Achievements and Staking.  The main goal of the metaverse economy is to align the production of goods with a sense of long-term progression and short-term enjoyment, while making collaboration necessary for the benefit of the players and corporations/organizations/guilds."

Now this all sounds great, but not particularly well thought out. For example, what is the difference between "space exploration" and "deep space exploration"? On the project website, the Roadmap has some lofty goals but no dates or even rough timeframes. The website promotes a mailing list, but the most recent MailChimp campaign was sent in January 2022. The in-game token, known as Soren, runs on Binance Smart Chain and according to DEX Guru has zero trading volume and basically no value. However, the WAX block explorer does show that staking rewards are being distributed.

To drill a little deeper, we can examine the smart contracts on DappRadar. At the time of writing, Far From Home smart contracts over the last 30 days have 158 users, less than $1 in volume, 2,600 transactions, and a balance of $3,850. Compare that to Axie Infinity, which over the last 30 days has 566,890 users, almost $130 million in volume, 3.86 million transactions, and a balance of over $788 million. Of course, the comparison is not really fair since Axie Infinity is a functioning game while Far From Home is an "upcoming" game, but I want to give you a sense of the scale of difference here.

I could excuse the low value and numbers on the smart contracts and tokens, but I can't really explain why there aren't any more solid details about the game itself, its development timeline, or the team behind it. I may still submit entries for the NFT giveaways on Twitter, and you can also enter for free at this link:

https://giv.gg/r/Hcdt6G-m48iJE

However, after doing this research, I think that it would be very risky to invest real money in a project like this. As I said above, I am still learning about this new world of gaming, so I am open to the possibility of being wrong. I hope that you find this useful in learning how to do your own research as more and more games come into the market.