How the Gaming Index Works

The Gaming Token Index is a market-cap-weighted index (base 100) that tracks the performance of pure-play gaming tokens.

Candidates are drawn from CoinGecko’s gaming-related category tags. To be considered a gaming token, a coin must either match at least two gaming categories or belong to one specific core gaming category. A broad “Metaverse” tag on its own is not sufficient — this deliberately keeps general AI, DePIN, and infrastructure tokens (e.g. RENDER) out of the index.

Passing the category check is necessary but not sufficient. Every candidate is also filtered against the following screens:

Market-cap floor

At least $10M to enter; an existing constituent is only removed once it falls below $8M, so tokens don’t flicker in and out at the boundary.

Liquidity

A minimum 30-day average daily trading volume is required. Tokens with negligible volume are excluded regardless of market cap.

Wash-trading risk

Tokens flagged as high or critical wash-trading risk are excluded to keep index volume figures meaningful.

Manual overrides

A small allow-list and deny-list handle edge cases where the automated rules produce wrong results (e.g. a legitimate gaming token that’s miscategorised, or an obvious non-game that sneaked through).

Constituents are weighted by market cap. To prevent any single token from dominating, each constituent’s weight is capped at 10% of the total index. Excess weight from capped tokens is redistributed proportionally across the remaining constituents.

The list of tokens in the index is reviewed on a schedule (monthly), not every second. So a token randomly spiking for a single day won’t push it in and out — the line-up only changes at a scheduled review, or an occasional ad-hoc one for a major event. Within any given day the membership is fixed.

Here’s the obvious worry: if a brand-new token joins, won’t the index number jump up just because there’s now “more” in it? And drop when one leaves? If we simply added up everyone’s value, yes — and that would be misleading, because the index is meant to track whether gaming tokens are going up or down in price, not how many tokens happen to be on the list.

To prevent that, the index uses a behind-the-scenes scaling number called the divisor. The index value is the combined market cap of its tokens divided by this divisor. On a normal day the divisor is held fixed, so the index moves only when prices move. The instant the line-up changes, the divisor is automatically re-tuned so the index reads exactly the same right before and right after the change. Joining or leaving, by itself, moves the index by zero — only real price changes move it from there.

The index value is calculated from each constituent’s daily close price snapshot. Intraday price swings do not affect the index until the following day’s close.