Could have made more money working at McDonald’s: Bloomberg Crypto criticized Axie Infinity’s directors 

Mr. Brustein spoke with one of the players who bought into their idea of play-to-earn and lost five figures.

The narrative of Alejo Lopez de Armentia, an Argentinian emigrant who began playing Axie Infinity during the GameFi excitement of Q3, 2021, is told in Bloomberg Crypto.

Loss of million

Mr. Armentia claims to have put $40,000 into the Axie Infinity world’s in-game assets and objects since October 2021. This method was initially profitable: the player made 300-400 percent weekly earnings.

Mr. Armentia made money in Axie Infinity by a variety of methods, the most common of which were breeding the in-game characters. 

However, after peaking in November 2021, Axie Infinity’s popularity began to fade, as did all of its economic measures.

This drop highlighted a fundamental weakness in Axie Infinity’s tokenomic design: its SLP token is inflationary by default and is subject to daily selling pressure.

“First and foremost has to be a game”

The game is set up to allow you to earn and spend SLP both within the game and outside of it. Any tokens used in the game just vanish. 

Play-to-earners, on the other hand, cash out all SLP by selling them on cryptocurrency exchanges, resulting in a rise in the overall quantity of tokens over time. In a crypto variant of hyperinflation, the excess supply depresses prices.

Mr. La told Bloomberg Crypto that it “first and foremost has to be a game.”

At the same time, Axie Infinity’s gameplay and aesthetics are still too basic; one Bloomberg journalist even hesitated to label it a “real game.”

“I could have made more money working at McDonald’s.”

The concerns with Axie Infinity tokenomics got more hazardous as the crypto market capitalization declined in Q1, 2022: users began aggressively withdrawing their SLP in an attempt to reduce losses.

By May 2022, the typical Axie Infinity player (in the Philippines, massive gaming guilds with thousands of e-athletes) was earning $0.6 per day.

Philip La, the former product manager of Pokemon Go, has recently joined the Sky Mavis team. He emphasizes that Axie Infinity should not be considered a substitute for full-time employment in his opinion.

At the time of writing, the AXS token is trading at $17.03, down 90 percent from its all-time high, while the SLP token has lost 98.95 percent of its market capitalization.