Axie Infinity - a familiar name that rings a bell about the axolotl with cute different parts. This game was first launched in 2019 and popularised in 2020. It is unarguably one of the widest known web3 games both within and outside the web3 community. At their peak in 2021, they hit a whopping $3B valuation with close to 2M active players daily. This game was known to revolutionise play-to-earn (P2E) games and it would change the gaming scene forever.

But where are they now?

The player base have now shrunk to roughly 100K daily and earnings have been cut tremendously.

The point here is that, many individuals are in P2E games for the profits they think they are promised. Social media & advertising tells them they can earn huge amounts of profits just by simply gaming - which is not true at all.

Most web3 games are reliant on having new streams of players entering the economy and hence, not sustainable. The new streams of players coming in create a demand for assets from early adopters and these early adopters get to sell their assets for a higher price due to the surging demand, therefore, profiting from the game.

Without the influx of new players, there is no demand which leads to a decrease in value of the assets. Players starts to realise that the economy is unsustainable and and starts getting rid of their assets for a low price in hopes to retrieve some of their capital. However, with everyone trying to do the same, the floor price dips even more and trying to find new players to play the game for asset owners gets harder as the game token is no longer valuable.

Most web3 games currently follow a similar game economy of sorts and until we find a sustainable way to do this efficiently, I believe that we should prioritise the basic fundamentals of web3 games - gaming. Based on a recent report by ChainPlay in 2022, a outstanding 81% of GameFi investors are starting to value the fun factor in games rather than the earning capacity of the game. When creating a game within the GameFi industry, if your focus is not on gaming, then is it really a game? I personally think that most of these games are gamified yield farming in some sense and perhaps we should create a new category for such games.

If you have any interesting thoughts, feel free to share them! Happy to discuss and learn more :) Tips would be greatly appreciated too!