This pay-to-earn Axie Infinity thing is curious, making a lot of money and you’ll absolutely hear about it soon from every corner of the internet.
I don’t pretend I understand all of it. The game is simple (Pokemon style), the game economy is not. Though, one thing sounds like a complete red flag to me.
15% of Axie players cite the gameplay as their main motivation. Look, it’s a video game! That’s very low for a game and basically means that the game is not fun and people are there not for the game but for something else.
So i would guess that 15% are playing and all the others are grinding Axies (that’s what Pokemons are called here) for newcomers? To start playing the game a new player must purchase a set of Axies, that is a cornerstone of the game economy. So for every real player we have 6 workers who do the work to grind the assets for their master.
In traditional paid games this job is done by a computer automatically. Or the grinding process is actually fun which means that players are willing to do it, otherwise they would not play. In f2p games the grinding is slow, so that players either do it themselves or pay the developer to bypass it.
Apparently, in crypto-games the grinding is so brutal, that the game has real humans who don’t play, but only grind and afterwards sell their work to humans who wish to start playing.
This looks like a master-servant relationship. And, actually, it is indeed. According to the article 60% of users are from The Philippines, grinding virtual heroes to sell and earning a few bucks more than on their real jobs.
It even feels like we are going backwards in time! Progress is when we hire computers to do unnecessary monotonous work that was previously done by humans. And here it’s vice versa.