Nansen’s research team has published a detailed guide to the popular game Axie Infinity. It calculates quantitative insights such that 2.8 Million unique addresses currently hold 11.1 million Axies and that 97% of these users have at least three Axie NFTs.
AxieInfinity is a game that allows you to interact with digital pets called Axies. It’s a play-to earn (P2E), game. Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese gaming studio, created the game in March 2018. The game gained cultural attention during 2019, when stories emerged that players from third-world nations like the Philippines and Venezuela were earning a full time living off Axie’s native crypto assets – Smooth Love Potion and Axie Infinity.
John Aaron Ramos (22 years old), was known as Magnus TV in the gaming community. He announced that AxieInfinity had enabled him to make two profitable property purchases in the Philippines.
Nansen’s report is in line with other public assessments of Axie. It focuses primarily on the perks such as authenticated ownership and secondary market trading opportunities, decentralized governance, and the impending possibility for cross-game interaction.
The topic of decentralization is important. Ethereum’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin was famously inspired by a painful experience with World of Warcraft. This game was previously owned by Activision Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft in January for $69 billion.
Buterin stated that Blizzard had removed the damage component of my beloved Warlock’s Siphon Life spell. In other words, Blizzard installed an upgrade that rebalanced the power dynamics for certain characters and weapons. This is why Buterin was known as a “nerfed.”
These incidents are common in the gaming industry and have exposed our reliance on central servers. This has allowed us to create new opportunities for innovation.
An infographic taken from the Nansen Report illustrates how NFTs could impact gaming ecosystems. This is a shift from the linear top-down model to one that encourages a user-governed, decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), to allow players to exercise their self-sovereignty in pursuit of entertainment.
Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch, stated that gamers should embrace blockchain technology to dispel fears about gaming’s uniqueness and environmental impact. He also argued that NFT’s integration is a way for the industry to reach consensus.
NFT games are more beneficial for both players and game developers.
Blockchain will change gaming in the same way that free-to-play revolutionized it. Future games will feature fully-integrated, open-source and programmable economies.
Justin Kan (@justinkan
February 9, 2022
Similar: How to hire cheap Filipino workers: Crypto in the Philippines Part II
data revelations that Axie Infinity generated $1.3 billion of revenue and $4 billion in transactional volumes over the past year — a portion which corresponds to company profit — we interviewed a variety of experts and enthusiasts to get a balanced verdict about the true potential of blockchain-based play-to-earn gaming.
John Chen, president of the decentralized layer-2 protocol Umbrella Network, provided context to the thesis that Blockchain gaming can be seen as glorifying the fortunes of a small number of users, usually located in developing nations, to justify what could possibly be considered a modern form resource exploitation.
Chen stated that blockchain gaming is still in its early stages. It’s too early to believe there is a story for it. We don’t view it as resource exploitation,” Chen stated before.
“Certainly, gamers in developing countries don’t see it that way. P2E games provide a source of income that was previously unobtainable, sometimes in significant amounts that have a significant impact upon people’s lives.”
Brian Akaka, Laguna Games’ head of marketing, said that social events such as COVID, vaccine availability, and country development have had a significant impact upon the adoption rates for P2E games in South East Asia.
They are resource exploitation, which is a First World view. It’s more about an opportunity that doesn’t exist before. However, it has a high barrier to entry. It is certain that U.S. media will cover it from a particular perspective, but it is important to remember that this perspective is different.
Experts and enthusiasts in the field have frequently argued that adding financial incentives like NFTs or tokens to gaming platforms is a novel business model that could propel them to new heights. Others see the potential pitfalls of the implementation.
Traditional game designers are not familiar with controlling the gameplay or gamer psychology, when NFTs or tokens create an out-of-game economy. This realization is the first step in designing a game.
— eva (@wvaeu)
November 22, 2021
Some have been questioning the AxieInfinity decision to redesign their reward system over the past few weeks. This move saw daily quest and adventure mode removed, as well as a decrease in daily supply of Smooth Love Potions by around 56%. The platform stated that the inference was necessary to prevent “total and persistent economic collapse”.
