(10) My Understanding of Axie Infinity and blockchain development

        Although in the past two months, I have studied a lot of Axie Infinity's content: its gameplay, development, profit ability, future plan, and also wrote several analysis articles. I think I have a good understanding of Axie Infinity. But after watching the video of the Game Dev Chat on Discord on October 4th, I realized that I had some misunderstanding about Axie Infinity.

Among them, the most important point is the idea about SLP price of game output tokens. Before watching, I always thought that the higher the price of SLP, more players it could attract , and that will benefit the player communitys. The project party has not prepared enough ways to consume SLP, so many players, including myself, have given suggestions to the official, hoping to add more ways to consume SLP and increase the price of SLP. Article link:.

But in  Axie Dev Chat 2 in Discord , one of the co-founders, Jiho explained their opinion. They don’t want to give an ideal target price for SLP, price will go up or down according to the development of the game. Their expectation is the long-term stability of the SLP price, and more players can come to play, so that more people can benefit from the game.

 Sky Mavis has considered the issues of SLP price a long time ago. After all, this game was born in 2018, and it is now 2021. In the past three years, Sky Mavis has discussed SLP issues internally many times, and there have been other consumption ways. But it is not yet time to use new consumption ways.

If the price of SLP is very high, perhaps, many "scholarships" can‘t be given to those who need it most. There will be many small game studios/groups involved, and the price of Axie pets will not be stable, price will be high, and they will be controlled by these game studios/groups. Sky Mavis doesn’t want to see that. In fact, they have a long-term plan and is moving forward step by step. In order to allow the real group of normal players to get more, they even want to open up the control of game to the players. If Axie pets are in the hands of a small number of studios/groups, fail to attract a sufficient number of real players, do not allow most players to obtain long-term benefits, then the long-term plan fail at last.

For the long-term goal of continuously attracting new players and good groups, Sky Mavis even deliberately controls the SLP price not to be high, avoiding it is controlled by some studios an bad groups.

Sky Mavis controls the SLP price stability in the short-term, and is unwilling to increase the SLP price. For many ordinary players, it is difficult to accept, including me. Before entering the game and after playing the game, many people will constantly ask others: "How much do I need to invest?  I have invest ***, and how long will it take to pay back?"

If you ask this question to players who enter the game at different periods, the answer is actually different. Many people who started to play this game before 2021 have already repaid their money, but many people who started playing the game before or after the second half of 2021 are still in the foreseeable future, and some have even been cheated by scammers of their Secret Recovery Phase.

 Now, I can’t estimate how long return cycle is . However, from the perspective of the development, it requires the player group to actively participate in the activities inside and outside the game. The team members are not like game players, who cares about how long it takes to return. They want a long-term healthy and stable operation of the game, including: the price of SLP.

Insied the game, the team hopes that players can master the Axie pet skills and the rules of the battle, and can be rewarded through PVP. Outside the game, they hope that players will participate in the artistic creation of Axie pets. Currently many animated gif pictures are made. More offline activities and continuous animation content creation will be made in the future.

As a blockchain game with a long-term plan, Axie Infinity's actions in animation have actually been launched. No one can predict how much the players and groups can benefit from animation and its peripheral products in the future. After all, before Axie Infinity, players and animation fans had no opportunity to share the bonuses of games and animations. We always recharge just for our beliefs. But I am sure when we get the opportunity to share, we would be very active! This is also one of the important reasons why I am optimistic about Axie Infinity for a long time.

Conversely, those centralized online game companies and large animation companies need time to understand this model, and it takes time to make adjustments to this model. The most important thing : Are they willing to share games with players and share animation with fans? It's really difficult. If it were me, when I had a chicken (game IP or animation IP) makes golden eggs, I would take care of it and hold it firmly in my own hands.

Regarding the content outside the game, in fact, the team has already started the layout, e-sports, game guild, and cartoon animation production. Animation development must be a longer-term job, so I believe that Axie Infinity will develop and grow in the long term, it will not disappear in a short term which happens to many other block-chain games.

Of course, this block chain game with great development momentum is not without problems. On the contrary, it has many problems, and the issue of asset security is the most important one.At present, there are many scammers lurking in the gaming community in Discord, using the new players' ignorance of the blockchain to defraud many new players of Axie pets and crypto tokens that they spend money to buy.

Here are several scams that I know:

1. Pretend to be a support member and let new players fill out the form, the form includes the Secret Recovery Phase.

2. Provide so-called free scripts/robots to help players automatically finish tasks, defraud Secret Recovery Phase or scan files on computers and mobile phones to get Secret Recovery Phase.

3. At the beginning, use remote assistance software such as Sunflower , help people create digital currency wallets. After the players or studios invested a large amount of money, they suddenly gifted all the pets to their own accounts at night.

The tricks of these scammers are actually very simple, but there are always new players who do not understand the market and are deceived and suffered heavy losses. The intention to save time in the short term often brings huge risks.

In fact, I have seen that after the explosion of NFT souvenirs and NFT games this year, a large number of foreigners have entered the block-chain field to learn and study the status quo of block-chain knowledge. However, there are very few people in China who are willing to participate in the block-chain and learn block-chain knowledge. Based on my personal experience, I think more people are needed to actively participate and learn this knowledge, including: the concepts of block-chain, computing power, and meta-universe. The knowledge itself is not a Ponzi scheme. The scam of fraudsters is only produced when the knowledge is used by scammers to operate and link with finance. Block-chain is likely to be one of the important elements of the future development of games or online virtual worlds. It is a big direction and requires a lot of relevant technical personnel and financial support.

Next, let me share the content of the game white paper shared by the co-founder of Axie Infinity on Twitter on 10.18.

Axie Population & Long-term Sustainability

Key Points

Axie is a new type of game that rewards players for the time and effort they spend both playing the game and growing the ecosystem.

Axie has a 100% player-owned, real money economy. Rather than selling game items or copies, the developers of the game focus on growing the player to player economy and take small fees to monetize. Axies are created by players using in-game resources (SLP & AXS) and sold to new/other players. You can think of Axie as a nation with a real economy. The holders of the AXS token are the government that receives tax revenues. The inventors/builders of the game, Sky Mavis, hold ~20% of all AXS tokens.

Game resources and items are tokenized, meaning they can be sold to anyone, anywhere on open peer-to-peer markets.

Axie population growth is a major factor within the Axie ecosystem. At any given moment, there exists some ideal inflation rate that allows us to grow to our maximum potential. Too slow and Axie prices are too high for everyday people to join; especially competitive Axies. Too fast and you get unhealthy inflation.

Long term Axie population management relies on:

Adding additional utility to Axies through new experiences such as land, mini-games. This also adds utility to Axies beyond their effectiveness in fleeting metas.

Adding vertical, rather than purely horizontal progression.Right now in order to progress the main path that people take is by expanding the size of their collection. This dynamic is not optimal long term. In the long run there will be upgrades to both Axies AND Land that will require crafting ingredients. Axies themselves may be “released” to obtain these crafting ingredients. This creates a long term supply sink to the Axie population. Axie progression is coming in the future; and it promises to create a much stronger bond between trainers and the Axies they choose to upgrade.

SoulboundAxies, aka non-transferable Axies,that are competitive in the arena will allow anyone to compete and have fun. Earning potential for these soul bound Axies should be zero or close to zero; meaning that of course demand will remain for strong “real” battle Axies. Also keep in mind that demand for Axies is ultimately what also drives demand for SLP (and AXS), so creating more reasons to own Axies and making it easier for us to grow are important in a a healthy economy.

Transitioning from Growth-Dependency Using Network Strength

In the beginning, the Axie economy will be dependent on growth and new entrants. New players require Axies to get started, Axies price and breeding profitability will be determined by the demand from these prospective Axieplayers.This is much like any startup, growth is necessary in the early days.

However, as the size and strength of the Axie network grows there will increasingly be new sources of external capital into the ecosystem such as:

Advertising fees and sponsorships. Many projects are already eager to distribute rewards and tokens to the Axie economy. So far MakerDAO, AAVE, and Kyber Network have done experimental token drops to Axie players. Axie is already the largest community of people who understand how to use Blockchain technology in the world; there is immense value in advertising to a community like this.

Nonprofit organizations will be a major source of Axie demand and to pour capital from donors into Lunacia with no expectation of return; only the will to do good.

Government donations and grants.Axie is well poised to become a laboratory for Universal basic income experiments.

    It's also important to note that many Axie players see Axie as a fun game and a social community to meet friends. More than 50% of Axie players prefer the gameplay and community to the economic aspect. These players value the fun and relationships that they make through Axie much higher than any potential earnings; these players make the economy stronger in the long run.

There are other types of value that Axie players gain through their journey such as:

Joy of owning a pet.

Fun, rest, and relaxation.

Making friends and finding business partners/mentors.

Learning how to use an important new technology. There's no need for paid "blockchain classes".

    In fact, after I studied the Axie Infinity game and wrote articles about it, I realized that I am also a person who is not willing to think deeply, summarize, and prefer to listen to others directly. It is really difficult to control your own thoughts by yourself in this era. With a huge amount of information and content entering the brain every day, many of us cannot get the truly valuable part of it.

I asked myself 3 questions:

1. Is playing games a waste of time? Is it a waste of money to play games? However, game companies that master customer resources are making a lot of money. People who join big game companies have much higher income than other people, and they have become the envy of many people!

2. Is it a waste of time to read novels? Is it a waste of money to spend money to read novels? However, novel creators and related websites can count the money and get cramps. The income of well-known novelists is even higher than that of many celebrities, which is enviable!

3. Is watching anime a waste of time? Is it a waste of money to watch anime? However, comic creators and animation and peripheral products operating companies have made many and dozens of times the profits of other industries!

I think the Internet information age is full of opportunities and risks. If we want to seize opportunities in this era, then some opportunities are in the above three contents. We need to study it hard,  do more "homework" about it, stay vigilant, and actively participate in it.

For more information in Chinese about Axie Infinity, please visit  阿蟹中文网 , I also write a lot articles in Chinese on this website.The website owner called Wangyouping help many Chinese players a lot！