I have been playing Axie Infinity since months ago before it exploded. I remember getting a pack of 3 floor Axies at the total price of 70$. The game has worked pretty well for me in terms of ROI but things have changed a lot since then.
Now, Axie Infinity is going through a critical moment. It’s the time to make changes and good decisions or the game could not survive.
The Euphoria
At the time Axie Infinity went popular and everybody wanted to aboard the hype train. Therefore, the lowest priced Axies in the market skyrocketed from $50 each to $200. Because of this high demand, the players started to breed more Axies which burned a lot of SLP and AXS. The SLP token price went to $0.30 and the AXS token to $93.
SLP is the only token players can earn by playing. Before, any player could easily get a minimum of 150 SLP per day which translates to $20-30 per day depending on the price, but then the price of SLP started to falling down…
The Lack of Control
The main issue started with scholarships, but let me explain it first. The scholarship consists on create a new Ronin wallet, transfer 3 Axies (the minimum to play the game) to the wallet, and then give login access to another person. This works like a renting system, where the manager and the new player agree on sharing the benefits (SLP).
Because the game went popular in the Philippines and a lot of them couldn’t pay for 3 floor Axies (around $600) then most of them opted in for the scholarship to play the game for free. The system was a total success, and in a short period of time, the SLP token circulating supply increased (more inflation). Instead of using this inflation to breed more Axies and reduce the SLP stock, it was dumped straight to the market.
Here, two problems happened. The first one is you need ETH to buy an Axie, so if you are a scholarship and want to buy your own Axies, you have to sell SLP for ETH. And the second one, to breed an Axie, you needed to pay a fee of 4 AXS at the price of $40-60 at that moment. Therefore, people were either selling SLP for AXS or just selling SLP.
Will Axie Economy Recover?
There are two ways to earn SLP in-game. One is adventure mode (PvE) and the other one is arena mode (PvP). Knowing this, a few changes were introduced:
- Halve PvE rewards. This could have been a good chance if it weren’t because they increased PvP rewards at the same time. This is what I call a 360º turn.
- Reduce AXS fee for breeding. Another good change if it weren’t because of AXS price. It doesn’t worth spending $150-180 on breeding a bad Axie that sells for $180. It does for good Axies but these ones are scarce. People still prefer to sell SLP.
These changes didn’t work as expected and the price is still going down. In my opinion, better changes like paying an SLP fee when purchasing an Axie and later burn these tokens; increase the SLP fee for breeding and lower AXS even more, and halve SLP for both PvE and PvP would have been much better for the health of the economy.
In the next months, we will see if new and better changes are introduced into the game. Right now it feels like a roller coaster and we don’t know what will happen. I personally want the game to succeed but only time will tell us.
Do you play? What is your opinion?