I am back! The recent Axie Infinity news and success has inspired me to write more articles about Axie Infinity to help encourage growth and spread the gospel…cough cough…news. Since I am going to be touching on the entire White Paper, I will have to split this review into several parts so that one does not carry on too long.
It has been a while and a lot has happened since I last wrote an article (check out one of my first articles here). Not only that, but the community has probably 10Xed and no one probably knows who I am anymore. Nonetheless, I want to come back with an article on the Axie Infinity White Paper and analyze, in detail, what is in it. Let’s start…
Axie Infinity:
Starting off nothing new, Axie Infinity is a Pokemon inspired universe where you can battle, collect, raise, and breed Axies. That is important to what Axie is, but I think the next part is pretty significant…
“Although Axie is still in early access, Axie is ranked the #1 Ethereum game by daily, weekly, and monthly active users. It has generated over 6,400 ETH in revenue (2M+ USD) so far.”
Many people overlook this sentence. For any startup, revenue is great. But this is a blockchain startup that has 2 Million Dollars in revenue. Yes, actual revenue. Yes, millions of dollars of it. This gives you the ability to actually calculate the potential value of Axie Infinity and their token…but I will leave that for another article.
Further…
“Our Vision
We believe in a future where work and play become one.
We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities.
Most of all, we have a dream that battling and collecting cute creatures can change the world.
Welcome to our revolution.”
Normal gaming companies want you to pay 60 bucks for a game and spend countless hours and days on it for fun, with no financial reward. But what if a game paid you 60 dollars to play it. Think about that… A game paying you to play? Sounds revolutionary. Yeah, it is and it is Axie Infinity’s vision and mission to make that happen. We have already seen it happen with players in the Philippines making cents (SLP) when playing Axie Infinity. Play to earn is here. The revolution is here.
Game Play:
I remember playing this game when all I did was get up in the morning and click auto queue on freak’s website, sending all my Axies to battle at the same time with Bean’s blessing just to gather enough experience to breed. Ahh, those were the days. Now we see intense PvP battles at the top of the leaderboard with thousands of dollars worth of AAVE at risk! It is encouraging to see that there are over 7,000 weekly active users with this current battle system. However, with the leeks over the past couple months I am excited for the next version of the battle system.
It will be interesting to see Chief host future tournaments with this new battle system. The eSports future of Axie is bright.
Land:
This is when it gets really interesting. There are several land leeks that I want to look at. The first being:
“Plots can be upgraded over time using a variety of resources and crafting ingredients that can be found when playing the game.”
Also, “Chimera will drop an assortment of resources, items, and blueprints used to upgrade land and individual Axies.”
There are a couple things to unpack here. The first being the fact that land will be upgraded. What does it mean to upgrade land? What benefits does upgraded land have? How will the upgraded land be priced? In my mind, upgraded means: elements built on top of land that enhance the value of it, more specifically buildings. We have known this all along that certain buildings will require a certain amount of parcels and obviously from the quote, a certain amount of resources gathered from the land (wood, stone, etc.). On top of land, they casually mentioned that AXIES CAN BE UPGRADED TOO. From the beginning, we knew that mystic parts will be upgradable. But this does not explicitly say “only mystic Axies can be upgraded”, this clearly says individual Axies. Personally, I love this idea. I think it is important to have the ability to upgrade any Axie because it further incentivizes people to play. Since Mystics are very limited, if only Mystics could be upgraded few people would have the thrill of upgrading their Axies. However, it seems that all Axies will have some ability to be upgraded. Yuge.
This next part about crafting was further talked about and even leeked on the website itself.
The idea is that Chimera, the beasts that you battle on Lunacia, can drop blueprints, such as the one you see above(?), that give the ingredients to unlock new upgrades in the game. If you find a new blueprint first, you will be the first to craft that item and potentially profit off of it. This is important because it develops a narrative and gives gamers incentives to play the game; especially if you are able to defeat these Chimera in groups, which they clearly laid out in the white paper. Being able to gather a guild and defeat high level bosses creates a special social experience (game chat?) inside of the game. It is no longer just you that gets to celebrate taking down the beast, it is the group of people that you play with.
Further, the team said: “…land-owners might find AXS tokens on their land plots, or use the Axies that occupy the land plot to explore resource nodes on the map. When interacting with resources nodes Axies can find AXS and potentially other resources.”
This is revolutionary! The fact that you can earn the governance token of Axie Infinity while playing the game is truly bleeding edge technology. This is the ultimate reward for having FUN while playing the game. Not only does AXS have its own monetary value, which you can directly sell for ETH, it also gives you access to Axie Infinity’s potential revenue from the treasury. Playing Axie Infinity can be an investment in your future. What other game provides that type of value?
To finish up land talk, the team mentioned a particular tidbit that had me thinking:
“…phase two will focus on turning Lunacia into a virtual world with a focus on user-generated content. Players will be able to create games using the Lunacia SDK and place these games on land that they own. The Lunacia SDK will initially be a map editor where players can use Axie Infinity art assets to create games and other experiences. Once a game has been created it is saved as a Non-Fungible Token and can be traded. These NFTs can be placed on land and players will be able to click on them to enter the game inside.
Through this process, we aim to gradually decentralize the game creation aspect of the Axie universe.”
You have to read those lines a couple times just to grasp the significance of what they are saying. First to clarify, I think phase 1 of land gameplay is developing basic functions of land gameplay on the current land out there. Functions such as gathering resources, battling Chimera, crafting items are all a part of this first phase. Phase two they said is focused on user-generated content where players can create their own games on their land and save it as an NFT that can be traded.
We have already seen several Axie based games developed, such as Axie Sushi, Flappy Axie, and Axie Hunt. With the SDK, any user can create their own game utilizing Axie art and TRADE IT. This is another potential source of revenue that players can have. Say you develop the Axie version of Pac-Man (insert any game here), you can then generate an NFT out of this game and sell it to other players so that they can play it too. In my opinion, when they say they want to “decentralize the game creation aspect of the Axie universe”, this is what they mean. Users not only have the power to contribute to the game, they control what games are played. The possibilities for this are truly endless.
This is only a small part of what is in store. I will dive deeper into AXS and the rest of the White Paper in Part 2 of the analysis but the excitement around Axie Infinity is real. This game, and the distribution of AXS, will change the way we think about gaming.
If you like what you read please follow and clap it up! I truly appreciate any feedback that you have. You can either find me:
on Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_YCB
Or in Axie Infinity’s Discord as YCB: https://discord.gg/axie
