A VIDEO and a longform article from Time are examining how several Filipino players have turned on Axie Infinity — once hailed as the flagship proof of concept for the play-to-earn phenomenon.
“Several scholars TIME talked to said they owe hundreds or even thousands of dollars to friends or family who helped them pay the initial investment, only for their monsters to become worthless,” wrote Andrew R. Chow and Chad de Guzman in the report, chronicling the “anger and anxiety” felt by many who pinned their hopes for extra income on the popular game.
Watch the video version of the report below.
Both the video and the article present the story of fast-food vendor Samerson Orias, who once dreamed of parlaying his Axie scholarship into a consistent, reliable income stream.
Instead, Orias and other Axie scholars, said the report, would find their earnings dwindle as the real-world value of Axie’s SLP tokens shrank. (As of posting, one SLP Token is currently worth $0.004, or around 20 centavos.)
“By spring 2022, the bottom had fallen out of the crypto market, making playing the game nearly worthless. While Axie Infinity boasted over 2.7 million daily active users last November, only 760,000 are still active,” said Time.
Axie Infinity deals with upheavals
It’s a swift turnaround from the game’s heyday during the crypto boom of 2021, when as many as 40 percent of the game’s players came from the Philippines.
Time even featured Axie Infinity in a November 2021 article entitled “The Metaverse Has Arrived. Here’s What That Actually Means.” There, Axie Infinity was presented as an example of a blockchain-based game that could “turn the time [players] spend [in a game] into cryptocurrency.”
But in the months since, Axie and its Vietnam-based developer Sky Mavis have encountered their share of upheavals, including a well-publicized hack that made off with around $600 million, as well as the launch of a free-to-play edition and a new rewards system to shore up the in-game economy.
As of posting, neither Sky Mavis nor its vocal co-founder Jeff “Jiho” Zirlin have responded publicly to the Time report.
However, a Sky Mavis representative told Time that they contest the game’s characterization as a “Ponzi scheme.”
“Focusing on growing a network through early incentives does not make a Ponzi scheme. Axie Infinity’s main purpose is to provide entertainment,” they said.
While an economist at research firm Chainalysis told Time that Axie’s current troubles “portend badly for crypto’s once rosy play-to-earn future,” others are more upbeat.
In a June interview with reportr, Luis Buenaventura, country manager of Filipino tech startup Yield Guild Games, saw Axie Infinity as a gateway to crypto.
“It was primarily because of Axie Infinity that a lot of Filipinos are suddenly crypto-aware because they had to learn crypto to take advantage of this income opportunity,” he told reportr’s Pia Regalado.
For Buenaventura, crypto games should not be viewed as a “get rich quick” scheme, but rather a “get rich slow” one.
This September, Sky Mavis will hold its very first AxieCon in Barcelona.
Get more of the latest sports news & updates on SPIN.ph