Axie Infinity, the world’s biggest blockchain-based video game, plans to be “even more aggressive” with crypto tokens earned by its players in 2023, suggesting the play-to-earn model is here to stay after a difficult year.
(Bloomberg) — Axie Infinity, the world’s biggest blockchain-based video game, plans to be “even more aggressive” with crypto tokens earned by its players in 2023, suggesting the play-to-earn model is here to stay after a difficult year.
“We need more tokens, we need more crazy stuff in terms of experiments,” Aleksander Leonard Larsen, co-founder of Axie’s Vietnam-based developer Sky Mavis Inc., said on a panel moderated by Bloomberg News at a conference in Paris on Friday.
Still, Apple Inc.’s move to restrict nonfungible tokens — unique cryptoassets that players can buy and sell — in video games has made it harder for crypto developers to compete with traditional studios, according to Larsen.
His comments appeared to mark a change in approach for Sky Mavis, which pivoted to a new version of Axie Infinity last April and said it would shift toward “play-and-earn,” rather than play-to-earn, following concern that the game’s economics were exploitative.
In Axie Infinity, players buy a set of NFT monsters to search the virtual world of Lunacia for Smooth Love Potion (SLP) and Axie (AXS) tokens, which can then be cashed out for other currencies. The game became incredibly popular during the Covid-19 pandemic in countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam, where that income could become a form of pseudo-employment.
But after a hack last March that saw more than $600 million stolen from a platform storing users’ tokens, players were unable to access their earnings for several months. Questions around ethics were raised when wealthier crypto investors established guilds that would front the cost of Axie NFTs in exchange for a portion of players’ earnings.
Read more: A Billion-Dollar Crypto Game Promised Riches and Delivered Ruin
“The pendulum has swung to the other side where play-to-earn is now this super, super bad thing,” Larsen said on Friday, adding that high transaction fees and restrictive guidelines in app stores run by Apple and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are challenging for games based in the blockchain version of the internet, known as web3.
“The directive that we’re getting from them is ‘Oh, you need to do XYZ, you need to fit in your game into this new box’. And inside that box, is literally none of the benefits that we want people to see in a web3 game,” Larsen said. “So we end up having to compete with web2 games without showing the web3 benefits, which is pretty ridiculous.”
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