Axie Infinity Shifts to Free To Play

Play to earn blockchain game Axie Infinity, which is developed by Vietnamese based studio Sky Mavis, is about to add a free to play feature to the popular game. The decision was made in order to onboard new users to the game. 

Axie Infinity is one of the biggest games in blockchain gaming and probably the game that started the whole "GameFi" boom in the crypto industry. The game is a Non Fungible Token (NFT) based player vs player (PVP) type which allows players to breed, raise, collect, battle and trade Axie creatures. Player's receive reward's in small love potion (SLP) tokens which can be used for paying in-game fee's or can be sold on exchanges that accept it. Another token axie infinity shards (AXS) is used for governance, staking and also as in game payments.

The game got a lot of attention as it was one of the successful games in blockchain history that adopted the play-to-earn model and IMO had great timing as the whole world was facing the pandemic where many had lost their main source of income. Most have went online to search for other sources of income, learned about cryptocurrency and of course, P2E games like Axie.

To start playing Axie Infinity, user's must 1st purchase  3 Axie NFT's to use in the game where back then, the price of 3 Axie creature's would be around $100 in Ethereum (ETH). But due to the rapid increase of player's that time, the price skyrocketed from $500 to more than $1000 in ETH. Because of this, the game was shunned by some curious onlookers due to it's pricey NFT's and of course, high Ethereum gas fee's. 

User's who want to play the game but don't have the cash to spend would look for scholarship's to play the game. A scholarship in Axie is where players with extra Axie creatures rent it out to new players and get a share of the profits earned. So it's either look for a scholarship program or a more affordable game.

This will soon change as Sky Mavis will be adding a free-to-play feature to encourage other's to test out the game without spending a sat. New users will be given "starter monster's" to start playing the game and learn all the feature's of the game before deciding to spend some crypto on it. These starter monster's are not NFT's though and players cannot sell or earn rewards from it but will "maybe" earn some sort of reward in the near future.

This will be a great feature IMO as curious players can now test the game without spending a sat. As more and more new GafeFi DApps come out by the day with new ways to attract more user's, having a F2P model added to the game could definitely get more users to try the game & most likely buy the NFT's to continue playing & earning. 

The F2P feature on the game will start before Q1 of 2022 end's and is part of the Axie Infinity: Origin (Battles V3) launch that has more new updates and features to be added.

So are you gonna play Axie Infinity once the F2P feature goes live?

**This post is also published on my Pub0x account with the the same name I use here