‘Our Purpose is to Create a Balanced Game Economy’ – Exclusive Interview With the Axie Infinity Team

Axie Infinity is the most popular crypto and blockchain based game and metaverse project, breaking $4B in sales and steadily onboarding millions into Web3. Axie Infinity is a Pokemon-inspired digital pet universe where players can battle, trade, and collect fantasy creatures called Axies.

In this interview, The Axie Infinity team discusses web3, the game’s future, its p2e to p&E evolution and growth in popularity.

What do you think is the difference between Web3 and Metaverse？

Web3 is the next phase of the internet. It’s all about decentralization that is built, operated, and owned by its users. The metaverse is how users will experience this next phase of the internet. It is the culmination of a trend where our digital lives start to take more importance in relation to our physical lives, which is accelerated through Web3.

What are the secrets & successful strategies of Axie Infinity’s Web3 success?

When we designed Axie Infinity, we designed it with three principles in mind: Gamers should be rewarded for the value they create in games; gamers should be able to trade their game assets with anyone, anywhere; and games should be owned by the communities that play them. I believe these core principles, alongside fun gameplay, are what has drawn people to Axie Infinity. We’ve also just released Axie Infinity: Origin Early Access with the goal of opening up Axie to the whole world through the introduction of free non-NFT starter Axies. We believe by creating fun gameplay, an even wider audience can experience the game, take part in the economy, and ultimately be introduced to Web3.

Axie is a community-led digital nation that invites gamers to learn Web3 technology while building a better, decentralized world together. The Axie Infinity community is a powerful force that is unlike any other gaming community I’ve witnessed. In fact, the community and gameplay are the reason why over 50% of Axie Infinity players enjoy the game.

How does the Axie’s community pursue decentralization?

We believe that equitable communities are the foundation of our gaming future, and we are aggressively moving towards demonstrating their potential with Axie Infinity. We believe that this is the path towards creating gaming that’s longer lasting, more rewarding, and above all, more fun.

When considering the overall governance of Axie Infinity and the Community Treasury, we think it’s important to practice progressive decentralization which is the deliberate, stepwise process we will undergo to enable active partnership/ownership with an increasingly broad set of community members.

Right now we are still in the early phases of the process, where a few founding members have the primary responsibility for guiding the collective, building the product to collaborate around while also creating a process to enable a broader group to partner and watching for indications of community buy-in/progress.

The end goal is that the collective has the primary responsibility to guide one another as everyone works to advance the community’s well-defined mission, but we have many prerequisites to accomplish before reaching this place.

Are there any successful security-related solutions for Stopping Fraud and Creating Trust on NFT-based Gaming Platforms?

We use GeeTest CAPTCHA solution to solve the device incompatibility issue that players often complained before. Meanwhile, GeeTest helps us to further improve the user experience since it allows customizing the image set for slide verification, which makes CAPTCHA a more native solution during user interaction. Its slide CAPTCHA is more interesting, convenient and secure than traditional CAPTCHAs. In terms of bot attacks, it helped us solve a large number of bot signups.

From p2e to p&E evolution, is there a further step to web3 evolution for Axie Infinity?

Last year we saw a huge influx of media that covered the “Play-to-Earn” angle of Axie Infinity. Stories about people in the Philippines who had lost their jobs and were able to support their families during COVID19 was a feel-good story that was much needed during the pandemic.

As that narrative was continuously pushed, P2E became a very loaded term that many have interpreted to mean everyone can make money from playing. We are actively working to shift the narrative to “Play-and-Earn” which emphasizes that you can have fun playing a game and maybe earn along the way, but the primary motivation should still be the “Play.” When new technologies launch, the short-term growth they inherently generate is not sustainable.

We didn’t expect the hockey stick growth to continue forever, and pivoted the gameplay and underlying infrastructure multiple times throughout the years. Our purpose is to create a balanced game economy that above all is fun, enables ownership, and allows some players to earn.

How sustainable is Axie’s growth?

We’ve focused our energy on making Axie Infinity more accessible and taken steps to lower the barrier of entry significantly. Origin has been built from the ground up to be more approachable for a mainstream audience by providing robust tutorials and free non-NFT starter Axies. In the first week alone, we had almost half a million Origin testers and this is for desktop only with zero token rewards.