Axie Infinity, once the leader of blockchain games, has lost its former glory. In the past few months, it has encountered difficulties such as the plunge of game tokens and theft of assets on the chain. Tens of thousands of people.
In the darkest moment, the Axie Infinity development team admitted that the decline in the game's popularity is related to the flaws in the design of the token economic model and the lack of playability. How will Axie Infinity that sees the problem improve? Not long ago, it officially released a new version of the game called Origin. This is a version with a brand new interface, combat mechanics, art effects and storyline, carrying Axie Infinity's mission to return to the high light.
Compared with the previous game version, the Origin version has enhanced the strategy gameplay. Players need to use the deck to select cards according to the combat situation to fight. At the same time, the new version emphasizes the free attribute. All new players can receive 3 initial Axies for free to experience , to lower the entry threshold; on July 1, Axie Infinity also launched the virtual land pledge function, and currently 92% of the virtual land is in a pledged state.
According to data from CryptoSlam on July 12, sales of Axie Infinity NFTs increased by nearly 198% over the past week to $1.38 million compared to the previous seven days. While that figure is insignificant compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars in weekly sales at its peak, the increase in numbers means that Axie Infinity's revamp is working.
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Axie Infinity launches free version to lower barriers to entry
After experiencing the bull-bear conversion of the encryption market and the theft of the cross-chain bridge, Axie Infinity, the once popular chain game leader, also fell into a trough. At its peak in August last year, the number of daily active users of Axie Infinity was as high as more than 1 million, but now this number only hovers around tens of thousands.
Axie Infinity, which fell from the peak to the bottom, is believed by some industry insiders to inevitably decline. This was originally in line with the law of the game industry. However, judging from the recent data performance, Axie Infinity, which is in its darkest moment, is showing a glimmer of vitality.
According to data from CryptoSlam on July 12, sales of Axie Infinity NFTs increased by nearly 198% over the past week to $1.38 million compared to the previous seven days. Although this number is insignificant compared with its peak weekly sales of hundreds of millions of dollars, the growth of the number means that Axie Infinity is bottoming out.
The increase in revenue is related to the iterative launch of the new version of the game "Axie Infinity: Origin", which focuses on "free to play" to attract new user traffic, and at the same time launched the virtual land pledge function.
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Axie Infinity Origin version game interface
In the Origin version, players mainly use cards to fight. Each player sends 3 elves, and each elf can be matched with runes and upgraded. During the battle, the player will get a deck of 18 cards, and each round can get 5 cards. Each card has different functions. In the end, the player relies on the strategy of playing cards and the strength of the elves to win.
The battle modes that players can participate in have also increased a lot compared to before. In the new game version, it is divided into Adventure Mode, Ranked Match and Tournament. Among them, the adventure mode supports players to break through and practice on their own, and the ranking competition counts the rankings in the form of points. The top of the list can get AXS token rewards, and tournaments will be organized regularly.
Compared with the Axie Infinity Classical game version, the new version emphasizes the "free" attribute. All "beginners" can get 3 initial Axie elves for free after logging in to the game. With the upgrade of the adventure mode, players can also unlock more elves for free. This means that new players do not need to recharge encrypted assets to buy elves to play, which undoubtedly lowers the entry threshold for players.
Of course, the initial Axie presented by the system also has certain limitations. The initial Axie is not an NFT, and cannot be traded or used to earn SLP tokens, and its upgrade ability is weaker than that of the paid version of Axie.
This change has attracted many new players. According to the official data released by Axie Infinity, since the release of the Origin version, more than 600,000 new accounts have been registered.
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Axie Infinity from "play and earn" to "play and earn"
“Axie Infinity is in an important transition period as we evolve to a more sustainable model and narrative throughout the game,” said Philip La, Head of Game Product at Sky Mavis, the developer behind Axie Infinity.
In the past few months, Axie Infinity has been hit hard one after another, and voices in the market about the game’s “unsustainability” have become louder.
On the one hand, with the advent of the bear market of encrypted assets and the continuous issuance of the two main tokens AXS and SLP in the game, these two assets, which are the main income of players, have fallen sharply.
According to CoinMarketCap, AXS is currently priced around $13, down 92% from its peak price of nearly $165 set in November last year. Meanwhile, SLP is valued at $0.00367, down over 99% from its peak near $0.4 in July 2021.
The decline in the price of tokens has led to a sharp drop in the income of "dajin", which is the main reason for the large-scale loss of Axie Infinity users. According to a report released by the blockchain analysis company Nansen in March this year, after the market heat fell, the active users of Axie Infinity dropped by 70% from the peak, and the sales of Axie Infinity NFT on the Ronin chain also fell to a low level.
On the other hand, in March this year, the cross-chain bridge connecting the Ronin chain to Ethereum was hacked, and a total of $625 million worth of encrypted assets was lost. The incident affected a large number of Axie Infinity players, and in-game deposits and withdrawals were temporarily suspended. Although Axie Infinity later reopened the withdrawal channel relying on the help of platforms such as Binance, many players withdrew their funds from the Ronin chain due to concerns about security issues.
These successive challenges made Axie Infinity in trouble even worse. According to data from BeInCrypto Research, sales of Axie Infinity plummeted by US$816 million in March, with sales of approximately US$31 million, a 61% drop from February. Over the past year, it has generated as much as $1.3 billion in revenue.
The Axie Infinity official follow-up also admitted that there are problems in the design of the economic model of the token in the game, and there is room for improvement in the gameplay. The recently launched Origin version is a new start of the game after the review and improvement, and to a certain extent, it has undertaken the mission of Axie Infinity to return to the highlight.
To be precise, the current version of Origin is still a prototype. According to the development plan of Axie Infinity, this game version has four changing stages. The first stage is to increase the number of in-game decisions to make the game more interesting; the second stage will mainly reset the game progress and move to the top of the leaderboard Players will issue a small amount of AXS rewards; in the third stage, the game will increase SLP output and consumption; finally, Axie Infinity will start its first official season.
Currently, Axie Infinity has entered the second stage. On social media, many users shared their playing experience in Axie Infinity. Although the rewards provided in the current game are not many, many users reported that the new card battle mechanism , so that the playability of this game has been greatly improved. "Compared to previous battles that relied heavily on the attributes and levels of Axie elves, the current game focuses more on strategic competition."
Going further in the shaping of playability is a major goal of Axie Infinity, which also means a change in its game positioning. Philip La said in his latest blog that Axie Infinity is evolving from a "play and earn" game to a "play and earn" game. His attitude is very clear-he hopes that users will experience the fun of the game, not just for making money.
According to reports, in the future, Axie Infinity will also develop "land asymmetric gameplay". That is, two sets of gameplay mechanisms are designed for players who own land and those who do not own land in the ecology, so that each role can actively participate and gain value from it.
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Axie Infinity's recent sales data has picked up
In the face of the outside world's doubts about Axie Infinity, Philip La also responded with confidence that this game still exists and regularly introduces major improvements, "We will continue to launch more games and apply what we have learned over time. all the knowledge you have.”
As a flagship project in the chain game field, whether Axie Infinity can continue to maintain its growth momentum through model changes is also the focus of the industry. It is worth noting that even in a bear market, there are still many blockchain games under development, and as new games hit the market one after another, Ace will face a competitive test.
