Created by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity became a phenomenon in 2021, with a large majority of its player base hailing from the Philippines. Once a game that was big enough to have investment managers connected to it, things went south once the game was hacked and US$600 million was stolen.
Now, where is all that noise and money?
At one point in time, Axie Infinity seemed to be the only crypto-focused NFT game that truly allowed its players to earn a substantial amount of money.
Axie Infinity — whose creators refer to it as both a “nation” and “a bleeding-edge game that’s incorporating unfinished, risky, and highly experimental technology” is sort of like hyper-financialized Pokémon. Players buy or rent three non-fungible tokens or NFTs linked to cartoon axolotls called “axies,” each of which has a set of associated stats and battle cards. Winning battles grants players a token called a ‘smooth love potion’ or SLP, and axies can be “bred” with SLP and a third token called AXS to produce new NFTs.
Axie’s biggest selling point is the chance to turn these tokens into real money. Axies and SLP can be sold for cryptocurrency, and people can earn SLP by either playing the game directly or participating in the “scholarship” system, where they lend their axies to other players and receive a share of those players’ earnings. Axie Infinity’s in-game economy has so far relied on constant growth to keep it running, with inflation built into the mechanics. Even if the game can overcome the recent challenge of the hack, Sky Mavis hasn’t proven it can transition out of that phase.
This is all part of the wider NFT and cryptocurrency crash of 2022, which has seen the official portals of Axie Infinity scrubbing themselves clean from any instances of play-to-earn mechanics and the introduction of a crypto-free version of the game called Axie Infinity: Origin.
The question is what kind of financial impact it will have on people who have sunk hundreds or thousands or chunks of money into the economy so far, and what players who miss the hype bubble will feel like they’re getting out of the game.
