With the evolution and maturation of blockchain games there’s been a lot of interest around the idea of “play to earn”.
However, until recently, earning mechanisms in Blockchain games have relied too much on collectible models where scarce, limited assets increase in value as a community grows and demand increases. This is more of a “buy and wait” model rather than “play to earn.” Players have had some ability to influence the direction of their investments by evangelizing, creating content, and creating positive environments in the community. This was already an improvement on traditional gaming ecosystems but still not a clear case of play to earn.
The Axie ecosystem was able to maintain a price floor for Axies that was always above the cost of breeding. We did this by adding additional requirements to breed so that players couldn’t simply spam breed Axies (we saw the negative effects of this as early members of the CryptoKitty community). Having the Axie floor > breeding fee was an early iteration of play to earn but we wanted something more compelling.
The Axie Community Alpha introduced our next “play to earn” mechanic through two simultaneous changes.
- The introduction of Love Potions as a requirement to breed Axies (thereby increasing breeding difficulty — our version of “mining difficulty”).
- The ability to earn Love Potions by simply playing the game.
There was no pre-mine so the players are fully in control of the SLP economy.
We immediately began to see interesting behaviors develop.
- Players began introducing their real-world friends and family to Axie to help them accumulate love potions.
- Our community set up a Uniswap pool for SLP. You can view the contract here and access the Uniswap SLP market here.
This means that for small amounts of SLP, farmers can instantly swap their SLP for ETH, giving them a stream of income simply from interacting with our game!
While still early, this development has some important implications for Axie Infinity, NFT games, and Defi.
- By giving NFT gamers instant liquidity for tokens earned from their time and effort, the benefits of “peer to contract” liquidity can now be captured by NFT owners.. Peer to contract systems such as Uniswap, Compound, and MakerDAO have been behind the massive growth of Defi and the benefits of this growth can now have a tangible impact on user-facing Dapps.
- We are starting to gain more compelling answers around the benefits/rationale for building a decentralized game. If games can be hooked up into “money legos” like Uniswap, there are a plethora of functionalities that are created that traditional games simply cannot replicate.
- I predict that games and user-facing applications will increasingly become an on-boarding mechanism for Defi. As capital accumulates in the Defi space, these applications will increasingly turn towards fun, practical applications such as game as distribution channels.
- The Future of “Play to Earn”
- The SLP experiment has been a fun, early experiment in play to earn mechanics. This year we want to take things a step further by:
- Hosting competitive tournaments with token rewards for skilled gameplay. These rewards will come from sponsors, injecting fresh capital into our ecosystem that’s not reliant on fresh users buying assets.
- Examine mechanisms to share primary sales/fees with our community to make playing our game more rewarding and speed up growth of our network.
If you’re interested in learning more about Axie, make sure to join our Discord!
Anyone with at least 3 Axies can access the Community Alpha.
You can buy 3 Axies in our marketplace. For convenience I’ve included a link below.
Once you have 3 Axies, you’ll be able to download our application and start earning Love Potions (SLP)!
Here’s a guide to the application.
That’s it for now!
With Love,
Jihoz
Axie Infinity Discord — Want to start playing but not sure where to start? Join our Discord, our community will answer any questions you have!
Axie Infinity Twitter — Our DM’s are always open :)
