Avalanche Launches Free Gaming ‘Battle Pass’ With AVAX and NFT Rewards

Crypto gaming on Avalanche is gaining steam thanks to high-profile launches like Off the Grid and MapleStory N. Now, the blockchain’s gaming ecosystem has its own NFT pass to connect games and reward players for diving into them.

Launched on Monday, the free Avalanche Battle Pass is a free-to-mint NFT available via the Magic Eden marketplace, created in collaboration with Ava Labs and Playfull.

Once the pass is minted, users can register it at the Playfull website and then make progress by playing partnered games.

As they fill out more spaces on the rewards path, they’ll earn rewards like in-game NFTs and even AVAX tokens.

The “battle pass” format was popularized by Fortnite and other games, letting players earn special items or in-game currency for playing a game and completing objectives, all the while.

Solana’s gaming ecosystem launched a Solana Game Pass earlier this year, as well, but now Avalanche has its own for crypto gamers.

“One ecosystem, one Battle Pass, one user experience,” Ava Labs Gaming Lead, Parker Heath, told Decrypt. “We’ve now got everything from AAA shooters (Off the Grid) to iconic IPs (MapleStory Universe) running on their own Avalanche Layer-1s. That’s awesome for scale, but it fragments discovery and can leave each community feeling siloed.”

“The Battle Pass is our on-chain watering hole—a single progression layer where players earn rewards no matter which game they drop into,” he added.

The Avalanche Battle Pass is available to mint for free for a month, and supports more than a dozen games, including Off the Grid, Spellborne, Forgotten Playland, Pixelmon: Warden’s Ascent, DeFi Kingdoms, and The Arena.

Broader blockchain gaming vibes have been down lately amid a spate of shuttered games and studios, not to mention declining token prices.

However, Heath pointed to some brighter stats—including Off the Grid’s 300,000+ daily users amid its in-game transition to the GUNZ mainnet, plus MapleStory N attracting over 770,000 users since last month’s launch.

“These titles highlight the increasing appetite for blockchain-enhanced gaming experiences and demonstrate Avalanche’s scalability and readiness to support complex, high-volume games,” Heath said.

The Avalanche Battle Pass is intended to reward those players, as well as incentivize them to explore games that may not have commanded as much attention yet.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair