Even after the hack, AXS tokens are still worth billions of dollars. In that way, Axie Infinity has been the flagship game of play-to-earn (where players can make money from playing a game by collecting digital assets and reselling them) blockchain games, and it enabled Sky Mavis to raise $152 million at a $3 billion valuation in October 2021. These games used non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to uniquely identify each Axie character so that the scarcity could be authenticated. Sky Mavis charges a 4.25% fee to players when they trade Axies on its marketplace. Players can buy and sell their Axie characters as a right that proves their ownership, in contrast to games where players aren’t allowed to resell anything. And once they started playing, they could level up their characters and sell them for a profit to other players in what was called “play-to-earn” games.

In the early days of the pandemic, players learned they could earn multiple times the minimum wage to play. The price was a big hurdle because Axie Infinity became popular in places like the Philippines, where the pandemic took a toll on the job market, and people turned to Axie Infinity to earn a living. These steep startup costs for minting Axies kept some players away from the game, and it led guilds of players to provide scholarships to those who couldn’t afford the fee. The cost of minting and breeding Axies depends on the price of the Axie Infinity tokens known as Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) and the in-game currency Smooth Love Potion (SLP). In the past, it cost hundreds of dollars to mint the three Axies required to start playing the game. The current Axie Infinity game has more 1.5 million daily active users, but that game is less accessible to people on a budget because it requires players to mint their Axies, or creatures, in cryptocurrency transactions that can cost anywhere from $20 per Axie today.

I think the community is super excited as well.” Axie Infinity: Origin is a free-to-play game in alpha testing. “So that’s why we’re going forward with the early access launch this week. “We wanted to keep pushing, and we wanted to make progress and, and show the community our hard work,” Zirlin said.

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