A lot of people stating this is a Ponzi or a pyramid scheme and using the premise that the game economy will only continue to work if new players join and put money into the economy in the form of purchasing axies for a high price. Isn't this the case for any business with employees? Seems obvious to me that if there is no repeat business/sales the economy (business) will shrink, it's up to the game developers to keep developing new and exciting reasons for the business to grow and people to re-invest into the economy which they clearly state they will try to do through community lead decisions and further game development. I wish innovation in blockchain wasn't so quick to be labelled as Ponzi and pyramid all the time. Any economy/business relies on the sale of products which is the continued injection of money. Very interesting to watch this play out, I am involved with a small investment. I think the business lessons I learn from watching this economy play out will be worth a couple of thousand dollars which is my investment, if I earn some money on top of that then fantastic but not expected. Good real-world education on economics.
Just saw this (late) so my reply will probably not be seen. You raise an interesting point - I think the difference is that the premise of a purchase of goods & services is not for a return on investment. Eg: John purchases an Apple mobile phone for $500 because he needs it to make calls and text his friends, not because he thinks it can generate him some income. So in this case, Apple generate revenue and profits because they put together raw materials and services that results in value addition. Chips + metal + plastic + brand = A phone that can provide value-add to the consumer.
The long discussion below is questioning whether Axie Infinity has similar properties. One argument is that players on Axie are predominantly there because they earn a good return on their investment of time and money, and this good ROI is predicated on the fact that it needs additional people to buy-in to support the yield. This is similar to degen farms offering you 2mn % APR that people farm and dump (This isn't inherently bad, but users should see what it is for what it is). So the question is whether Axie is a similar scheme but via a more complicated tokenomics. Speculators in degen farms know what they are going in for, and go in with their eyes wide open. The danger comes when a user doesn't know how a degen farm works and goes in without knowing what or how it works.
Another discussion was that if one thinks the game itself has organic attractive pick-up, then one can argue about the utility of NFTs/items/farming. This is also a good angle and as discussed below, it's similar to bootstrapping an "economy" where the "government" must create a currency, instill value/utility to it despite printing, and getting the economy to become self sustaining without huge incentives.
So the question is whether Axie Infinity is self-sustaining in the long run. If you think it's not self-sustaining and the users are only there for high "yields", then one result is just like an MLM - "consumers" only join because they believe they will make a profit, which is predicated on more people joining.
If you think it's self-sustaining, has the ability to grow organically and sustain its ecosystem and manage between casuals and workers class, then you could say it's a business with utility for its consumers and that's where the yields come from.
In the end, the difference between a MLM and a real business is how sustainable the economics are. Seasoned crypto investors who invest into degen farms do so knowingly. The danger comes when new investors wade in without understanding what's going on. I agree that people should not write-off many things as Ponzi but I think we can all agree it something worth a least some thought.
This was an exceptional read. As a long-term community builder who has maybe less attention to crypto that I should have (it just got captured early in the scene I'm in by a group I don't love), thank you for helping me expand & blow my mind with the opportunities and possibilities here.
Hi Packy, thanks for the great breakdown, though I struggle to understand the long term model because it feels like Axie violates the idea that one gets paid to bring utility to the world.
Axie allows players to play-to-earn and this could be the future where many players, especially those in poverty-stricken or poorly managed countries (SEA, Venezuela, etc) can earn a living doing so.
What I struggle to wrap my head around is how this ties in to the utility of the platform - sure it's great that one could play this game and earn SLP that is 5x what I would've earned in my country, but what is the utility that I'm being paid for?
Typically, a person works towards the real economy and gets paid $x for their work to provide utility to someone else. For example, one would work in a cafe as a waiter and help distribute real world goods and services so that other users have utility such as being able to drink coffee, eat snacks. There is a trickle down effect on the economy where a user pays $5 for a drink, and of that say $1 goes to the water, $2 goes to rent, $1 to utilities and $1 to cafe owner.
Even When you talk about other game developers, users either 1) pay to play the game such as WoW, or any games you purchase on Steam/Epic etc or 2) play the game for free but get monetized another way such as ads or user data. The idea is that one enjoys the utility of the game to their lives (destressing, role-playing, adventure and excitement, or just killing boredom) and pays for that utility directly or indirectly. The game studio have to invest up front, and hopefully earn their risk-adjusted cost of capital over the lifecycle of monetizing the game.
In this Axie pay-to-earn model, the player is getting paid to play the game but it generates no real world utility for anybody else. I get that the game is skill-based, but who's providing the payment to these players? They are playing to earn money and replacing jobs that have an impact on the economy. My intuition is there must be utility created out of this game but I cannot identify what that utility is, who is enjoying it and why they are getting paid.
It circles back to the a longstanding issue in DeFi which can be summarized in the question of "where is the yield coming from?". A simple example is in a degen yield farm. Buyers who don't understand the tokenomics and token dilution end up being exit liquidity by supporting the price as the token dilutes massively. A few months ago, forking swaps was all the hype so what you get is a ABCswap offering ABCtoken if you pool your liquidity there, and giving you 99999% APR. That's effectively printing banana money and you can make a nice amount if you get out before it collapses. If there is no spill-over utility in playing Axies and it ends up effectively printing SLP to pay users to incentivize them to be onboarded and play, doesn't it end up similar to a degen yield farm but disguised another way? One way to picture it is effectively, whoever is buying SLP/AXS is supporting the dilution and supporting the yield to these players in PH (they can be thought of as the LP providers in degen yield farms)
If we assume a nice chunk of the PH population plays this game instead of working and is able to earn returns significantly above that of working in PH either informally or formally, then the PH economy suffers some removal of productive labor. Let's say 50% of the population is playing this since this earns better than base income - what happens to the PH economy? If they can cash it out and purchase goods and services that still support it, but we'll also see labor shortages and collapse of the informal economy. From my exp majority of informal economy is in distribution (what we call general trade) and that is how most goods and services penetrate outside of T1 cities. Removing those will have significant impact to all stakeholders - FMCG supplier, distribution, consumers, logistics etc.
So yes it sounds nice that players play to earn and can earn more than their base line income. But what are they getting paid for, and who is keeping up this yield? I'm not sure of the answers myself but I suspect under the model of gaming and NFTs, it's basically a degen yield farm model - which BTW I understand every yield farm has to start somewhere, but one way to think is if one thinks the 99999% APRs of a degen yield farm is not sustainable, why would the profits earnable in this game through SLP be any different?
It's a good question and here's how I understand it. At its core, it's labor arbitrage - the average person in the U.S. values an hour of time up to 15x more than in the Philippines (call it a $15/hour wage vs. $1/hour wage). And so the utility that is being generated is time saved - I can spend 100 hours accumulating a certain amount of resources in-game for free, or I can pay someone in the Philippines to do it at their demanded rate of labor. In essence, I can play Axie for a long time and accumulate X amount of Smooth Love Potion or just buy it at market rate
If you think about it, this is no different from how trade and specialization works in an economy. I can spend 500 hours learning how to tan and craft leather, or I can pay a thousand bucks to have some Italian handbag maker do it for me.
This concept has actually existed in gaming for a long time and it was mentioned in the article with World of Warcraft. In other MMORPGs, people would pay thousands of dollars to buy high-level accounts from other plays who put in hundreds of hours to train them (think Runescape, Maplestory, etc.) Only those transactions were not secure at all because they just involved messaging your customer a username and password with no guarantee the assets were transferred. Crypto provides that layer of security and transfer of ownership.
At the end of the day you can bifurcate the Axie Infinity user-base into "workers" and "casuals" where workers will play the game to generate resources and casuals will play the game for community and overall enjoyment. Casuals will care less about the minutiae of optimizing SLP generation per hour and will "outsource" that to the workers (same way we "outsource" any other product or service we buy in the real world!) To the Casual, the product is simply owning a pet, interacting with the community and roaming the world.
Smart question. I stopped reading the essay in the first half due to this. I only came back and completed the entire essay after seeing it again on my Twitter feed. Essentially, the Play-to-Earn model sounds cool and fun but it doesn’t work long term. There is zero economic productivity.
Wouldn't it work though as long as new players coming in keep feeding the economy with new (real) money (buying 3 new axies each)? The play-to-earn SLPs aren't minted out of thin air, they're indirectly backed by the current and new money coming in.
I think the premise of your question has a bias toward the "real world" and "real economy" being the only things that ultimately can have value. Reimagine your coffee shop example, but instead of a customer paying $5 for a cup of coffee in the "real world" they pay $5 for a digital item in a digital world. They still get the same $5 worth of satisfaction and that $5 goes to other people in the digital economy that worked to create & provide that digital item. The key here is with blockchains you can enforce scarcity in the digital world, like you can in the physical world so it takes work to create and distribute these digital items. In Axie, there are players who want to play the game for enjoyment and they need Axies which are scarce and are only created through a breeding process that requires SLP & AXS. SLP is only created through "work" (just like refined coffee beans) so the workers who create the SLP are paid by the players who ultimately need the SLP to produce new Axies.
But as the article states, only 15% of Axie players are playing for fun, and 37% play "for community" whatever that means for a blockchain game beyond "I enjoy the talking about the speculative nature of owning the token". Even assuming that the 37% are actually actively playing, they likely aren't contributing much to the in-game economy either way. So the question becomes, is the gameplay fun enough that 15% of players can support the 48% of players who are actually "play-to-earn"? According to the article, you currently have to pay at least $585 to acquire the 3 axie needed to start playing. That is an insane barrier to entry for people whose other options for a fun game to play is completely free, even more so when you factor in the idea that at least 8 hours of daily playing (more likely 10-12 hours) nets you $52 a day, so those thinking they may join for casual play that they can earn money on will immediately be put off.
The only way I can see Axie surviving long term is if they drastically reduce the cost of playing for fun, otherwise it'll never get the adoption rate required to support the player base that is play-to-earn. There's only so many whales out there who are willing to drop $1000 a month, realistically you need likely need to flip the % playerbase (85% play for fun, 15% play-to-earn) in order for the economics to work long term.
Going back to your coffee example, a relatively few number of "rich" coffee drinkers who pay $5 for a latte support a huge economy underneath of baristas, servers, processors, distributors, transporters and farmers. Ultimately, your question IS the only question that matters, can these play-to-earn dynamics be self sustaining. I think of the answer is yes, Axie Infinity has Facebook level growth potential ahead of it based on the fact that they currently only have under a million DAUs and there is no doubt people will continue to "play" as long as they can make money. From my perspetive, simply dismissing this as an obvious Ponzi would be a mistake akin to doing the same on Bitcoin in 2013.
Also, keep in mind that Sky Mavis, the game developers, have been tweaking the economic dynamics for 3 years and will continue to do so. For example, they've already announced the intent to release "soul bound" Axies which would be free to play but will have limited earning potential. There are many other levers that can be pulled to maintain economic equilbrium as the game growth ebbs and flows, SLP emissions, breeding costs, etc.
These are very valid points: The digital asset economy is no doubt an economy like you said. In your example, one buys $5 of digital assets and gets his/her worth of utility from that, and that $5 funds the economics of other players and/or sustains pay-to-earn. How that pyramid of players look is important since it drives economics for the entire game.
In theory, if there are no more new liquidity being injected or rate of liquidity additions slow down, the earnings potential of an axie player should not be supernormal as players will leave if the return on time/effort vs other opportunities is better. One also has to believe the game's potential as a standalone game and not as a income earning stream, since the injection of liquidity maintains the income earning stream. If one believes the game will fade and new user growth slows, then over time we should see yields dropping.
The question is whether the influx of liquidity (new and/or casual gamers) is able to keep up the economics for play-to-earn players since there is a required investment to play and one can calculate the payback or breakeven period. The players who inject capital by purchasing their starter axies are the ones supporting the yield.
This has an interesting implication - the easiest way to keep up yields is not to reduce user churn (as with most games) but to get new sign ups, since a retain user results in more payouts or yield dilution.
I play many games myself and understand the utility of digital assets, avatars and paying for skins despite not being providing any true "utility" to the game - I buy some skins just because it's cool and fun. Dota2 and CSGO are good examples of games who have monetized skins (that provide 0 game benefits other than looking cool). But what I think tying back with my posts and the earlier posters' point - Dota2 and CSGO started as games that was free-to-play, and people played it because they enjoyed it as a game. Axie has a big community playing it because it earns them supernormal profit. It is rare to find a professional gamer who is one because he merely finds it fun - playing a game for 8-12 hours a day on schedule becomes a large grind. So a large chunk of your entire base is playing it because it earns supernormal profit, and your supernormal profit is predicated on new users funding it, one has to believe the game without the income stream can stand alone and attract players.
I'm not saying axie is a ponzi scheme, although I would say many things in DeFi are actually ponzi-ish. The flipside is that to start an ecosystem out of nothing, you do need some ponzi-ish economics to get it running. The question is how self sustaining the ecosystem can get. But those who are saying that pay-to-earn is the new model miss the point that it is only as sustainable as new liquidity or high casual user churn (pay to start playing but quit soon after), enough to support those who really want to pay-to-earn. I suspect if the entire user base was pay-to-earn and had no new players, we would see yields deflate.
There's no doubt that in the early days the growth of the Axie economy depends on user growth of all types: casual players, professional players, breeder "yield farmers" and SLP grinders. I think Sky Mavis has been pretty open about that and most of the community understands that. However, there are a few 'self-correcting' dynamics that are very interesting and novel and I think an under appreciated factor in the Axie ecosystem’s continued steady growth over a 3 year period.
For example, if new user growth starts to slow the demand for Axies will fall, which will reduce the 'floor' price for Axies, which makes it cheaper to play for new users to buy into the game which, in theory, should attract new players. Also, less users playing the game means less SLP would be issued which would offset the decrease in demand for SLP due to reduced breeding. The supply/demand dynamics between AXS, SLP & Axies (NFTs) creates an equilibrium similar to the difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin mining, especially in the early days when most users of Bitcoin acquired it for free from mining on their CPU —less users meant a lower price which makes mining less profitable so miners drop off the network, but the difficulty adjustment eventually makes mining more profitable so it attracts users which increases the price.
I’d compare the Axie economy right now to Bitcoin in the early days, which in its own way was “play to earn”, except the gameplay was mining. For many people it was a fun game, you were competing with the other players (miners) to “win” the next block and every once in a while, you’d randomly win and get awarded this magic internet money that you couldn’t do much with but it was cool. However, in aggregate all that mining was bootstrapping a monetary network that grew to be worth a trillion dollars over 10 years.
I agree with you that supernormal yields aren’t sustainable in the long run, but they are so long as the demand to play outstrips the supply of playable Axies. Also, I don’t think Axie Infinity requires supernormal profits to operate or even grow, but it certainly helps. Axie Infinity has been growing steadily for 3 years and for most of that time the profits were very meager to normal, the supernormal part started to kick in when they moved to the Ronin sidechain in February.
The numbers today are, a basic player can earn at least 150 SLP per day, at $.33 equals $45 per day or $16,400 annually of they played pretty much every day (~4 hours per day). The majority of players are playing via a ‘scholarship’ where they lease the Axies from their owner for 30% of the SLP earned. So, assuming you have a smartphone and an Internet connection anyone in the world can earn around $12,000/year for playing a game 4 hours a day with no up-front capital. According to the World Bank, 85% of the world lives on less than $30/day (https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty), so that’s 6.7 billion people that could make more money playing a game on a mobile phone for 4 hours a day than whatever they are doing now. And 66% of the world actually lives on less than $10 per day, so even if the price of SLP went down to under $.10 there would still be billions of people that make less than they could playing Axie.
Another underappreciated aspect of what’s going on with Axie is that they are building the largest (and most diverse) community of cryptocurrency holders in the world. It’s true that many of them are selling their SLP for local currency to live on, but many are also saving some portion of their earnings in ETH, AXS, & BTC. They all have Metamask installed, they understand how to do cross-chain asset bridges (Ethereum – Ronin), and they’ve used all used a decentralized exchange. For example, a typical Filipino player will earn SLP in the game, bride it from the Ronin chain to the Ethereum chain, swap SLP for ETH on Uniswap, and send ETH to coins.ph to swap for local currency (pesos). They learned to do all this from other members of the Axie Infinity community which currently is the 2nd largest Discord server in the world (behind Fortnite).
Many also keep savings in DeFi, so another source of value into the Axie ecosystem will be sponsorships, initially from DeFi protocols to attract Axie users as customers but eventually eSports level sponsorships as well. As an example, both Aave and Maker have done sponsorships to attract Axie users and this was back when the user base was 1/10th of what it is now.
Case and point, look how many people are begging for a scholarship to play Axie in this comment stream alone. It's annoying AF, but it shows there is a HUGE demand to play this game that hasn't been met yet.
I'd argue that right now Axie is most akin to a MLM company (multi-level marketing). MLMs are direct-sales companies that rely on salespeople selling directly to consumers to make all their product sales, usually clothing, makeup, "healthy" food, etc.
MLMs require their salespeople to buy starter kits to begin selling their product. - Axie requires you to buy 3 Axie to begin playing.
MLMs reward their salespeople for signing up new salespeople through a reward-sharing program, many early adopters earn a majority of their income from revenue sharing from their "downline" recruits. - Axie has this as well in the form of sponsorships (although those being sponsored don't have to buy-in) where an early adopter who got in cheap can passively earn revenue on their teams' work.
Many MLMs make a majority of their money on people signing up to sell the product, not on product sales themselves. - Axie feels like it's in this phase right now. People are excited by the opportunity to earn, so they are signing up and buying-in, but the number of people they will be selling to (players for fun) is still very low relatively speaking.
MLMs can be a successful source of income for many of their salespeople if the product is actually good. MLMs based on custom men's clothing would be an example of this. But for many MLMs, the only people who make money are the parent company itself and the salespeople who were early enough to sign up a lot of downline people to earn for them while only make relatively few actual customer sales themselves. Often MLMs have sales bonus incentives that increase commission for sales once you reach a certain sales goal. Upline salespeople who are earning a lot on their downline recruits often give advice to personally buy the product to reach that bonus commission level because "you'll sell that product anyway, need to ensure you get the bonus commission as fast as possible". But the actual product (often health food and makeup) isn't actually any good and the salespeople find that they can't actually find anyone to buy it from them. - This feels a bit like buying better Axie to kickstart your breeding/PVP income, bigger upfront investment for a chance at bigger profits down the road.
It's still to be seen which kind of MLM Axie is, will it be a true success where the product is actually attractive to the average consumer (is the game actually fun to play and worth spending money on) or will it be like most MLMs where the only people able to make money are the ones who got in early, and once people realize that the actual customer base isn't going to show up because the gameplay isn't worth it, they move on to the next hot MLM to try again.
Except in this case the marginal cost of the product is zero and there is no parent company. The players of the game are also the owners via the AXS token. I think there's definitely a new model here, but having a digital product and an ownership/governance token involved makes it quite different than say Herbalife.
A lot of these mechanics were pioneered by DeFi DAOs last summer, but all of those have a single asset, for the most part, their governance token. Axie Infinity has a governance token $AXS, a community token $SLP and community mintable NFT assets that all interplay. I don't think its a simple as saying some people are playing for fun and others are playing for profit. I think everyone lies on a spectrum of both fun and profit.
A mental analogy I use is poker, ultimately it is a game for money and no-money poker is boring. Having real skin in the game is a big part of what makes it fun.
Hi! This would be my first and last time messaging you. I just want to let you know that I appreciate your hard work for axie but to be honest, I personally can't feel any different with the server situation a week ago. I play axie to earn and relieve my stress at work. But during this past few days, I feel that you also vent your anger towards your clients by telling us to shut up and not offering a decent plan to make things work. I maybe clouded with rage as of the moment since I only earned frustrations playing axie. I want to express that as a client, it doesn't help when you chose not to inter act with us and keeping us always in the dark. I pray that you make haste with your plans so that your clients can keep their sanity. I know don't care for what a new comer like me but then again I want to thank axie for the 1st month that I enjoy the game and I want to curse it because with a short span of 7 days it game me lots of stress and 0 satisfaction. As you've said earlier, axie is a marathon but running a marathon like an idiot who doesn't know where and when it will finish is just insane for my end. Thank you and sorry for venting my frustrations with you. I cannot help to do this since you're the only person I can message to atleast alleviate what's inside me.
Message to Jiho. I can't send this to your discord.
Many of the dynamics concerning this game have been misunderstood, so let me clarify and get my points across:
1) The overwhelming majority of players come from "developing" countries. They see Axie Infinity PURELY from a play-to-earn perspective. The average monthly salary in the Philippines is $200. They can't afford to buy axies - instead they earn via scholarships.
2) It's not that new people enter the ecosystem via buying 3 axies and starting to play the game. New entrants receive 3 axies from scholarships. So the supply of axies comes from people who breed their axies.
3) THE QUESTION WE SHOULD BE ASKING OURSELVES IS: At which price of SLP do all these people stop playing the game because it's not worth their time anymore? Current SLP minted (supply) vs burnt (demand) dynamics are driving the price of SLP down. As of September, 27th, we are at 0.07 cents / SLP. So an average player makes about 0.07*150SLP = 10.50USD per day. Most of the players are scholars, so they get a 50%-70% cut, e.g. 5.25-7.35USD.
> As Howard mentioned, this is a strategic game. It depends more on skill than luck of the draw.
I think it mainly depends on which Axies you buy. In fact, Axie is very much play-to-win. There's only so far skill can take you—if you spend more money on Axies with better stats and abilities, you have a huge advantage.
> 48% said they played for the economy, forming a solid base of people building livings on the platform, but 37% said that their main motivation is the community
Would love a source for this.
> People buy Axies as pets. There are two billion pet owners worldwide, 99.99999% of whom buy pets knowing that they’ll lose a lot of money. Axie is already attracting many people who just buy their Axies as pets with no expectation of return.
Great piece thank you. Lots of smart technologies and innovating problem-solving. It does feel like this is the beginning of something new that has the potential to be big, most likely for beyond Axie.
Color me as skeptical as far as this being the solution to long term money generation for 3rd world citizens goes. I don't doubt one bit there is quite a lot of money to be made here, but that doesn't mean this is a sound and long term financial solution or plan. With the little knowledge I gathered from the article I see 2 potential issues, I'd love to hear other people's feedback on this.
1. This is a pyramid or ponzi scheme, not a value generator. This system works only as long as new players are willing to lay many hundreds of dollars to get into the game. New players pay existing players to enter the game and you can see already the pyramid drawing itself. I'm sure a lot of money can be made here for quite some time, but one day there'll be more existing players than new players willing to lay cash to get in, and the law of supply and demand will apply and prices will fall to eventually be close to zero when supply will far exceed demand. Players don't create or generate anything new or valuable here, they basically just sell an access to the game.
Also, selling digital land is an interesting concept, as speculators will be able to invest, buy and sell properties and just like in real life and with digital currencies, some could make a lot of money and some could lose a lot of money too. But this is nothing like having a job and generating a steady cash flow by generating some output and have Mr. market reward you with some dollars. Nothing wrong with that, but again, I'd question the long term sustainability of it or the wisdom to rely on it as everyday income.
2. The whole system works for as long as people perceive this as being a good solution to their financial problems. The day something else pops and has better return and more flashy features, people will move to that new thing. I doubt the moat is as big as you seem to think. If I have an egg farm, as long as people eat eggs I should do relatively well, independent on whether you think I'm the next big thing or not. If you buy eggs, out of necessity, I'll be making money. Whereas here, I should be ok for as long as people think this is the next big thing. The perception of people is what creates it's value as it doesn't really generate any value on its own.
That's not to say it'll be impossible to make a living on these platforms, but I just don't see this as the Eden garden, but just the best place to make money while playing a game until the next big thing is out and replaces it.
With all that said, I think this is still good news as it's innovating and bringing a lot of new concepts that could be the basis the next big thing will be an iteration of this, most likely.
Nice ponzi. This is so simple... SLP price will crash sooner or later due this massive and ridiculous inflation. People gets paid on SLP by giving nothing on exchange which in the long run will make this coin near to 0. As the price of SLP goes lower people won't find any excuse on playing this game
Hope they can solve the issue about old ronin address disconnection to our axie account>>>and connect to another new ronin wallet—reason for the issue-to have again an access for transaction in the marketplace because of lost seed phrase>also make the migration of axie appear :/
Фantastic read, Packy! Learned something new and got hungry for more own research! I also agree that while there are structural risks (crypto-related), Axies major risks is boredom - how to create and amuse customers?
At which point I started to recall my adolences and countless hours spent with Final Fantasy. Wouldnt that be also a logical move to Play2Earn for SquareEnix?
The read is deep yet captivating. The data is also impressive. While some statements disguise themselves as deductive conclusions instead of speculation it is clearly a well written & informative piece.
If you get a scholarship you can start playing, but right now that is the only way unless you have at least $600usd. I dont see myself playing this game for that reason, its price is just too high.
A lot of people stating this is a Ponzi or a pyramid scheme and using the premise that the game economy will only continue to work if new players join and put money into the economy in the form of purchasing axies for a high price. Isn't this the case for any business with employees? Seems obvious to me that if there is no repeat business/sales the economy (business) will shrink, it's up to the game developers to keep developing new and exciting reasons for the business to grow and people to re-invest into the economy which they clearly state they will try to do through community lead decisions and further game development. I wish innovation in blockchain wasn't so quick to be labelled as Ponzi and pyramid all the time. Any economy/business relies on the sale of products which is the continued injection of money. Very interesting to watch this play out, I am involved with a small investment. I think the business lessons I learn from watching this economy play out will be worth a couple of thousand dollars which is my investment, if I earn some money on top of that then fantastic but not expected. Good real-world education on economics.
Just saw this (late) so my reply will probably not be seen. You raise an interesting point - I think the difference is that the premise of a purchase of goods & services is not for a return on investment. Eg: John purchases an Apple mobile phone for $500 because he needs it to make calls and text his friends, not because he thinks it can generate him some income. So in this case, Apple generate revenue and profits because they put together raw materials and services that results in value addition. Chips + metal + plastic + brand = A phone that can provide value-add to the consumer.
The long discussion below is questioning whether Axie Infinity has similar properties. One argument is that players on Axie are predominantly there because they earn a good return on their investment of time and money, and this good ROI is predicated on the fact that it needs additional people to buy-in to support the yield. This is similar to degen farms offering you 2mn % APR that people farm and dump (This isn't inherently bad, but users should see what it is for what it is). So the question is whether Axie is a similar scheme but via a more complicated tokenomics. Speculators in degen farms know what they are going in for, and go in with their eyes wide open. The danger comes when a user doesn't know how a degen farm works and goes in without knowing what or how it works.
Another discussion was that if one thinks the game itself has organic attractive pick-up, then one can argue about the utility of NFTs/items/farming. This is also a good angle and as discussed below, it's similar to bootstrapping an "economy" where the "government" must create a currency, instill value/utility to it despite printing, and getting the economy to become self sustaining without huge incentives.
So the question is whether Axie Infinity is self-sustaining in the long run. If you think it's not self-sustaining and the users are only there for high "yields", then one result is just like an MLM - "consumers" only join because they believe they will make a profit, which is predicated on more people joining.
If you think it's self-sustaining, has the ability to grow organically and sustain its ecosystem and manage between casuals and workers class, then you could say it's a business with utility for its consumers and that's where the yields come from.
In the end, the difference between a MLM and a real business is how sustainable the economics are. Seasoned crypto investors who invest into degen farms do so knowingly. The danger comes when new investors wade in without understanding what's going on. I agree that people should not write-off many things as Ponzi but I think we can all agree it something worth a least some thought.
This was an exceptional read. As a long-term community builder who has maybe less attention to crypto that I should have (it just got captured early in the scene I'm in by a group I don't love), thank you for helping me expand & blow my mind with the opportunities and possibilities here.
Hi Packy, thanks for the great breakdown, though I struggle to understand the long term model because it feels like Axie violates the idea that one gets paid to bring utility to the world.
Axie allows players to play-to-earn and this could be the future where many players, especially those in poverty-stricken or poorly managed countries (SEA, Venezuela, etc) can earn a living doing so.
What I struggle to wrap my head around is how this ties in to the utility of the platform - sure it's great that one could play this game and earn SLP that is 5x what I would've earned in my country, but what is the utility that I'm being paid for?
Typically, a person works towards the real economy and gets paid $x for their work to provide utility to someone else. For example, one would work in a cafe as a waiter and help distribute real world goods and services so that other users have utility such as being able to drink coffee, eat snacks. There is a trickle down effect on the economy where a user pays $5 for a drink, and of that say $1 goes to the water, $2 goes to rent, $1 to utilities and $1 to cafe owner.
Even When you talk about other game developers, users either 1) pay to play the game such as WoW, or any games you purchase on Steam/Epic etc or 2) play the game for free but get monetized another way such as ads or user data. The idea is that one enjoys the utility of the game to their lives (destressing, role-playing, adventure and excitement, or just killing boredom) and pays for that utility directly or indirectly. The game studio have to invest up front, and hopefully earn their risk-adjusted cost of capital over the lifecycle of monetizing the game.
In this Axie pay-to-earn model, the player is getting paid to play the game but it generates no real world utility for anybody else. I get that the game is skill-based, but who's providing the payment to these players? They are playing to earn money and replacing jobs that have an impact on the economy. My intuition is there must be utility created out of this game but I cannot identify what that utility is, who is enjoying it and why they are getting paid.
It circles back to the a longstanding issue in DeFi which can be summarized in the question of "where is the yield coming from?". A simple example is in a degen yield farm. Buyers who don't understand the tokenomics and token dilution end up being exit liquidity by supporting the price as the token dilutes massively. A few months ago, forking swaps was all the hype so what you get is a ABCswap offering ABCtoken if you pool your liquidity there, and giving you 99999% APR. That's effectively printing banana money and you can make a nice amount if you get out before it collapses. If there is no spill-over utility in playing Axies and it ends up effectively printing SLP to pay users to incentivize them to be onboarded and play, doesn't it end up similar to a degen yield farm but disguised another way? One way to picture it is effectively, whoever is buying SLP/AXS is supporting the dilution and supporting the yield to these players in PH (they can be thought of as the LP providers in degen yield farms)
If we assume a nice chunk of the PH population plays this game instead of working and is able to earn returns significantly above that of working in PH either informally or formally, then the PH economy suffers some removal of productive labor. Let's say 50% of the population is playing this since this earns better than base income - what happens to the PH economy? If they can cash it out and purchase goods and services that still support it, but we'll also see labor shortages and collapse of the informal economy. From my exp majority of informal economy is in distribution (what we call general trade) and that is how most goods and services penetrate outside of T1 cities. Removing those will have significant impact to all stakeholders - FMCG supplier, distribution, consumers, logistics etc.
So yes it sounds nice that players play to earn and can earn more than their base line income. But what are they getting paid for, and who is keeping up this yield? I'm not sure of the answers myself but I suspect under the model of gaming and NFTs, it's basically a degen yield farm model - which BTW I understand every yield farm has to start somewhere, but one way to think is if one thinks the 99999% APRs of a degen yield farm is not sustainable, why would the profits earnable in this game through SLP be any different?
It's a good question and here's how I understand it. At its core, it's labor arbitrage - the average person in the U.S. values an hour of time up to 15x more than in the Philippines (call it a $15/hour wage vs. $1/hour wage). And so the utility that is being generated is time saved - I can spend 100 hours accumulating a certain amount of resources in-game for free, or I can pay someone in the Philippines to do it at their demanded rate of labor. In essence, I can play Axie for a long time and accumulate X amount of Smooth Love Potion or just buy it at market rate
If you think about it, this is no different from how trade and specialization works in an economy. I can spend 500 hours learning how to tan and craft leather, or I can pay a thousand bucks to have some Italian handbag maker do it for me.
This concept has actually existed in gaming for a long time and it was mentioned in the article with World of Warcraft. In other MMORPGs, people would pay thousands of dollars to buy high-level accounts from other plays who put in hundreds of hours to train them (think Runescape, Maplestory, etc.) Only those transactions were not secure at all because they just involved messaging your customer a username and password with no guarantee the assets were transferred. Crypto provides that layer of security and transfer of ownership.
At the end of the day you can bifurcate the Axie Infinity user-base into "workers" and "casuals" where workers will play the game to generate resources and casuals will play the game for community and overall enjoyment. Casuals will care less about the minutiae of optimizing SLP generation per hour and will "outsource" that to the workers (same way we "outsource" any other product or service we buy in the real world!) To the Casual, the product is simply owning a pet, interacting with the community and roaming the world.
Smart question. I stopped reading the essay in the first half due to this. I only came back and completed the entire essay after seeing it again on my Twitter feed. Essentially, the Play-to-Earn model sounds cool and fun but it doesn’t work long term. There is zero economic productivity.
Wouldn't it work though as long as new players coming in keep feeding the economy with new (real) money (buying 3 new axies each)? The play-to-earn SLPs aren't minted out of thin air, they're indirectly backed by the current and new money coming in.
I think the premise of your question has a bias toward the "real world" and "real economy" being the only things that ultimately can have value. Reimagine your coffee shop example, but instead of a customer paying $5 for a cup of coffee in the "real world" they pay $5 for a digital item in a digital world. They still get the same $5 worth of satisfaction and that $5 goes to other people in the digital economy that worked to create & provide that digital item. The key here is with blockchains you can enforce scarcity in the digital world, like you can in the physical world so it takes work to create and distribute these digital items. In Axie, there are players who want to play the game for enjoyment and they need Axies which are scarce and are only created through a breeding process that requires SLP & AXS. SLP is only created through "work" (just like refined coffee beans) so the workers who create the SLP are paid by the players who ultimately need the SLP to produce new Axies.
But as the article states, only 15% of Axie players are playing for fun, and 37% play "for community" whatever that means for a blockchain game beyond "I enjoy the talking about the speculative nature of owning the token". Even assuming that the 37% are actually actively playing, they likely aren't contributing much to the in-game economy either way. So the question becomes, is the gameplay fun enough that 15% of players can support the 48% of players who are actually "play-to-earn"? According to the article, you currently have to pay at least $585 to acquire the 3 axie needed to start playing. That is an insane barrier to entry for people whose other options for a fun game to play is completely free, even more so when you factor in the idea that at least 8 hours of daily playing (more likely 10-12 hours) nets you $52 a day, so those thinking they may join for casual play that they can earn money on will immediately be put off.
The only way I can see Axie surviving long term is if they drastically reduce the cost of playing for fun, otherwise it'll never get the adoption rate required to support the player base that is play-to-earn. There's only so many whales out there who are willing to drop $1000 a month, realistically you need likely need to flip the % playerbase (85% play for fun, 15% play-to-earn) in order for the economics to work long term.
Going back to your coffee example, a relatively few number of "rich" coffee drinkers who pay $5 for a latte support a huge economy underneath of baristas, servers, processors, distributors, transporters and farmers. Ultimately, your question IS the only question that matters, can these play-to-earn dynamics be self sustaining. I think of the answer is yes, Axie Infinity has Facebook level growth potential ahead of it based on the fact that they currently only have under a million DAUs and there is no doubt people will continue to "play" as long as they can make money. From my perspetive, simply dismissing this as an obvious Ponzi would be a mistake akin to doing the same on Bitcoin in 2013.
Also, keep in mind that Sky Mavis, the game developers, have been tweaking the economic dynamics for 3 years and will continue to do so. For example, they've already announced the intent to release "soul bound" Axies which would be free to play but will have limited earning potential. There are many other levers that can be pulled to maintain economic equilbrium as the game growth ebbs and flows, SLP emissions, breeding costs, etc.
These are very valid points: The digital asset economy is no doubt an economy like you said. In your example, one buys $5 of digital assets and gets his/her worth of utility from that, and that $5 funds the economics of other players and/or sustains pay-to-earn. How that pyramid of players look is important since it drives economics for the entire game.
In theory, if there are no more new liquidity being injected or rate of liquidity additions slow down, the earnings potential of an axie player should not be supernormal as players will leave if the return on time/effort vs other opportunities is better. One also has to believe the game's potential as a standalone game and not as a income earning stream, since the injection of liquidity maintains the income earning stream. If one believes the game will fade and new user growth slows, then over time we should see yields dropping.
The question is whether the influx of liquidity (new and/or casual gamers) is able to keep up the economics for play-to-earn players since there is a required investment to play and one can calculate the payback or breakeven period. The players who inject capital by purchasing their starter axies are the ones supporting the yield.
This has an interesting implication - the easiest way to keep up yields is not to reduce user churn (as with most games) but to get new sign ups, since a retain user results in more payouts or yield dilution.
I play many games myself and understand the utility of digital assets, avatars and paying for skins despite not being providing any true "utility" to the game - I buy some skins just because it's cool and fun. Dota2 and CSGO are good examples of games who have monetized skins (that provide 0 game benefits other than looking cool). But what I think tying back with my posts and the earlier posters' point - Dota2 and CSGO started as games that was free-to-play, and people played it because they enjoyed it as a game. Axie has a big community playing it because it earns them supernormal profit. It is rare to find a professional gamer who is one because he merely finds it fun - playing a game for 8-12 hours a day on schedule becomes a large grind. So a large chunk of your entire base is playing it because it earns supernormal profit, and your supernormal profit is predicated on new users funding it, one has to believe the game without the income stream can stand alone and attract players.
I'm not saying axie is a ponzi scheme, although I would say many things in DeFi are actually ponzi-ish. The flipside is that to start an ecosystem out of nothing, you do need some ponzi-ish economics to get it running. The question is how self sustaining the ecosystem can get. But those who are saying that pay-to-earn is the new model miss the point that it is only as sustainable as new liquidity or high casual user churn (pay to start playing but quit soon after), enough to support those who really want to pay-to-earn. I suspect if the entire user base was pay-to-earn and had no new players, we would see yields deflate.
There's no doubt that in the early days the growth of the Axie economy depends on user growth of all types: casual players, professional players, breeder "yield farmers" and SLP grinders. I think Sky Mavis has been pretty open about that and most of the community understands that. However, there are a few 'self-correcting' dynamics that are very interesting and novel and I think an under appreciated factor in the Axie ecosystem’s continued steady growth over a 3 year period.
For example, if new user growth starts to slow the demand for Axies will fall, which will reduce the 'floor' price for Axies, which makes it cheaper to play for new users to buy into the game which, in theory, should attract new players. Also, less users playing the game means less SLP would be issued which would offset the decrease in demand for SLP due to reduced breeding. The supply/demand dynamics between AXS, SLP & Axies (NFTs) creates an equilibrium similar to the difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin mining, especially in the early days when most users of Bitcoin acquired it for free from mining on their CPU —less users meant a lower price which makes mining less profitable so miners drop off the network, but the difficulty adjustment eventually makes mining more profitable so it attracts users which increases the price.
I’d compare the Axie economy right now to Bitcoin in the early days, which in its own way was “play to earn”, except the gameplay was mining. For many people it was a fun game, you were competing with the other players (miners) to “win” the next block and every once in a while, you’d randomly win and get awarded this magic internet money that you couldn’t do much with but it was cool. However, in aggregate all that mining was bootstrapping a monetary network that grew to be worth a trillion dollars over 10 years.
I agree with you that supernormal yields aren’t sustainable in the long run, but they are so long as the demand to play outstrips the supply of playable Axies. Also, I don’t think Axie Infinity requires supernormal profits to operate or even grow, but it certainly helps. Axie Infinity has been growing steadily for 3 years and for most of that time the profits were very meager to normal, the supernormal part started to kick in when they moved to the Ronin sidechain in February.
The numbers today are, a basic player can earn at least 150 SLP per day, at $.33 equals $45 per day or $16,400 annually of they played pretty much every day (~4 hours per day). The majority of players are playing via a ‘scholarship’ where they lease the Axies from their owner for 30% of the SLP earned. So, assuming you have a smartphone and an Internet connection anyone in the world can earn around $12,000/year for playing a game 4 hours a day with no up-front capital. According to the World Bank, 85% of the world lives on less than $30/day (https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty), so that’s 6.7 billion people that could make more money playing a game on a mobile phone for 4 hours a day than whatever they are doing now. And 66% of the world actually lives on less than $10 per day, so even if the price of SLP went down to under $.10 there would still be billions of people that make less than they could playing Axie.
Another underappreciated aspect of what’s going on with Axie is that they are building the largest (and most diverse) community of cryptocurrency holders in the world. It’s true that many of them are selling their SLP for local currency to live on, but many are also saving some portion of their earnings in ETH, AXS, & BTC. They all have Metamask installed, they understand how to do cross-chain asset bridges (Ethereum – Ronin), and they’ve used all used a decentralized exchange. For example, a typical Filipino player will earn SLP in the game, bride it from the Ronin chain to the Ethereum chain, swap SLP for ETH on Uniswap, and send ETH to coins.ph to swap for local currency (pesos). They learned to do all this from other members of the Axie Infinity community which currently is the 2nd largest Discord server in the world (behind Fortnite).
Many also keep savings in DeFi, so another source of value into the Axie ecosystem will be sponsorships, initially from DeFi protocols to attract Axie users as customers but eventually eSports level sponsorships as well. As an example, both Aave and Maker have done sponsorships to attract Axie users and this was back when the user base was 1/10th of what it is now.
https://axieinfinity.medium.com/axie-infinity-x-aave-9cb63a0ee38a
https://blog.makerdao.com/game-on-maker-and-axie-infinity-partner-receive-dai-themed-nfts-for-opening-cdps/
Case and point, look how many people are begging for a scholarship to play Axie in this comment stream alone. It's annoying AF, but it shows there is a HUGE demand to play this game that hasn't been met yet.
I'd argue that right now Axie is most akin to a MLM company (multi-level marketing). MLMs are direct-sales companies that rely on salespeople selling directly to consumers to make all their product sales, usually clothing, makeup, "healthy" food, etc.
MLMs require their salespeople to buy starter kits to begin selling their product. - Axie requires you to buy 3 Axie to begin playing.
MLMs reward their salespeople for signing up new salespeople through a reward-sharing program, many early adopters earn a majority of their income from revenue sharing from their "downline" recruits. - Axie has this as well in the form of sponsorships (although those being sponsored don't have to buy-in) where an early adopter who got in cheap can passively earn revenue on their teams' work.
Many MLMs make a majority of their money on people signing up to sell the product, not on product sales themselves. - Axie feels like it's in this phase right now. People are excited by the opportunity to earn, so they are signing up and buying-in, but the number of people they will be selling to (players for fun) is still very low relatively speaking.
MLMs can be a successful source of income for many of their salespeople if the product is actually good. MLMs based on custom men's clothing would be an example of this. But for many MLMs, the only people who make money are the parent company itself and the salespeople who were early enough to sign up a lot of downline people to earn for them while only make relatively few actual customer sales themselves. Often MLMs have sales bonus incentives that increase commission for sales once you reach a certain sales goal. Upline salespeople who are earning a lot on their downline recruits often give advice to personally buy the product to reach that bonus commission level because "you'll sell that product anyway, need to ensure you get the bonus commission as fast as possible". But the actual product (often health food and makeup) isn't actually any good and the salespeople find that they can't actually find anyone to buy it from them. - This feels a bit like buying better Axie to kickstart your breeding/PVP income, bigger upfront investment for a chance at bigger profits down the road.
It's still to be seen which kind of MLM Axie is, will it be a true success where the product is actually attractive to the average consumer (is the game actually fun to play and worth spending money on) or will it be like most MLMs where the only people able to make money are the ones who got in early, and once people realize that the actual customer base isn't going to show up because the gameplay isn't worth it, they move on to the next hot MLM to try again.
Except in this case the marginal cost of the product is zero and there is no parent company. The players of the game are also the owners via the AXS token. I think there's definitely a new model here, but having a digital product and an ownership/governance token involved makes it quite different than say Herbalife.
A lot of these mechanics were pioneered by DeFi DAOs last summer, but all of those have a single asset, for the most part, their governance token. Axie Infinity has a governance token $AXS, a community token $SLP and community mintable NFT assets that all interplay. I don't think its a simple as saying some people are playing for fun and others are playing for profit. I think everyone lies on a spectrum of both fun and profit.
A mental analogy I use is poker, ultimately it is a game for money and no-money poker is boring. Having real skin in the game is a big part of what makes it fun.
I would like to hear Packy's comment on this question.
this needs a reply as i've been questioning this myself...
Hi! This would be my first and last time messaging you. I just want to let you know that I appreciate your hard work for axie but to be honest, I personally can't feel any different with the server situation a week ago. I play axie to earn and relieve my stress at work. But during this past few days, I feel that you also vent your anger towards your clients by telling us to shut up and not offering a decent plan to make things work. I maybe clouded with rage as of the moment since I only earned frustrations playing axie. I want to express that as a client, it doesn't help when you chose not to inter act with us and keeping us always in the dark. I pray that you make haste with your plans so that your clients can keep their sanity. I know don't care for what a new comer like me but then again I want to thank axie for the 1st month that I enjoy the game and I want to curse it because with a short span of 7 days it game me lots of stress and 0 satisfaction. As you've said earlier, axie is a marathon but running a marathon like an idiot who doesn't know where and when it will finish is just insane for my end. Thank you and sorry for venting my frustrations with you. I cannot help to do this since you're the only person I can message to atleast alleviate what's inside me.
Message to Jiho. I can't send this to your discord.
This article turned out to be incredibly wrong and irresponsible. Can you please do a post mortem on what went wrong with your analysis?
Would love to see this as well.
Many of the dynamics concerning this game have been misunderstood, so let me clarify and get my points across:
1) The overwhelming majority of players come from "developing" countries. They see Axie Infinity PURELY from a play-to-earn perspective. The average monthly salary in the Philippines is $200. They can't afford to buy axies - instead they earn via scholarships.
2) It's not that new people enter the ecosystem via buying 3 axies and starting to play the game. New entrants receive 3 axies from scholarships. So the supply of axies comes from people who breed their axies.
3) THE QUESTION WE SHOULD BE ASKING OURSELVES IS: At which price of SLP do all these people stop playing the game because it's not worth their time anymore? Current SLP minted (supply) vs burnt (demand) dynamics are driving the price of SLP down. As of September, 27th, we are at 0.07 cents / SLP. So an average player makes about 0.07*150SLP = 10.50USD per day. Most of the players are scholars, so they get a 50%-70% cut, e.g. 5.25-7.35USD.
Good piece! Here are some questions/feedback:
> As Howard mentioned, this is a strategic game. It depends more on skill than luck of the draw.
I think it mainly depends on which Axies you buy. In fact, Axie is very much play-to-win. There's only so far skill can take you—if you spend more money on Axies with better stats and abilities, you have a huge advantage.
> 48% said they played for the economy, forming a solid base of people building livings on the platform, but 37% said that their main motivation is the community
Would love a source for this.
> People buy Axies as pets. There are two billion pet owners worldwide, 99.99999% of whom buy pets knowing that they’ll lose a lot of money. Axie is already attracting many people who just buy their Axies as pets with no expectation of return.
Would also love a source for this.
Great piece thank you. Lots of smart technologies and innovating problem-solving. It does feel like this is the beginning of something new that has the potential to be big, most likely for beyond Axie.
Color me as skeptical as far as this being the solution to long term money generation for 3rd world citizens goes. I don't doubt one bit there is quite a lot of money to be made here, but that doesn't mean this is a sound and long term financial solution or plan. With the little knowledge I gathered from the article I see 2 potential issues, I'd love to hear other people's feedback on this.
1. This is a pyramid or ponzi scheme, not a value generator. This system works only as long as new players are willing to lay many hundreds of dollars to get into the game. New players pay existing players to enter the game and you can see already the pyramid drawing itself. I'm sure a lot of money can be made here for quite some time, but one day there'll be more existing players than new players willing to lay cash to get in, and the law of supply and demand will apply and prices will fall to eventually be close to zero when supply will far exceed demand. Players don't create or generate anything new or valuable here, they basically just sell an access to the game.
Also, selling digital land is an interesting concept, as speculators will be able to invest, buy and sell properties and just like in real life and with digital currencies, some could make a lot of money and some could lose a lot of money too. But this is nothing like having a job and generating a steady cash flow by generating some output and have Mr. market reward you with some dollars. Nothing wrong with that, but again, I'd question the long term sustainability of it or the wisdom to rely on it as everyday income.
2. The whole system works for as long as people perceive this as being a good solution to their financial problems. The day something else pops and has better return and more flashy features, people will move to that new thing. I doubt the moat is as big as you seem to think. If I have an egg farm, as long as people eat eggs I should do relatively well, independent on whether you think I'm the next big thing or not. If you buy eggs, out of necessity, I'll be making money. Whereas here, I should be ok for as long as people think this is the next big thing. The perception of people is what creates it's value as it doesn't really generate any value on its own.
That's not to say it'll be impossible to make a living on these platforms, but I just don't see this as the Eden garden, but just the best place to make money while playing a game until the next big thing is out and replaces it.
With all that said, I think this is still good news as it's innovating and bringing a lot of new concepts that could be the basis the next big thing will be an iteration of this, most likely.
Nice ponzi. This is so simple... SLP price will crash sooner or later due this massive and ridiculous inflation. People gets paid on SLP by giving nothing on exchange which in the long run will make this coin near to 0. As the price of SLP goes lower people won't find any excuse on playing this game
Awesome article
Smashing post
Hope they can solve the issue about old ronin address disconnection to our axie account>>>and connect to another new ronin wallet—reason for the issue-to have again an access for transaction in the marketplace because of lost seed phrase>also make the migration of axie appear :/
Good day manager,I'm willing to schoolar if choose me
Name:marycris palubon
Age:35
Location: payatas Philippines
I'm willing to schoolar if you choose me
Because helping my mother and my daughter also I'm willing to schoolar thank you
Фantastic read, Packy! Learned something new and got hungry for more own research! I also agree that while there are structural risks (crypto-related), Axies major risks is boredom - how to create and amuse customers?
At which point I started to recall my adolences and countless hours spent with Final Fantasy. Wouldnt that be also a logical move to Play2Earn for SquareEnix?
The read is deep yet captivating. The data is also impressive. While some statements disguise themselves as deductive conclusions instead of speculation it is clearly a well written & informative piece.
If you get a scholarship you can start playing, but right now that is the only way unless you have at least $600usd. I dont see myself playing this game for that reason, its price is just too high.