Axie Infinity active users, NFT prices continue to fall after the reopening of the bridge

When Axie Infinity reopened its cross-chain Ronin Bridge last week, the game’s community was hopeful that users with renewed access to their money would continue to play the game. Instead, Axie continued to bleed users. 368,000 players logged on to Axie Infinity last week, and continued a steady decline that began after the game peaked at 2.7 million weekly users in November, according to Axie Infinity co-founder Jihoz Zirlin.

The loss of value for Axie Infinity and its Play to Earn competitors has surpassed the recent downturn in the crypto market. Axie hopes to revive growth by upgrading gaming, but some experts question whether Play to Earn games are sustainable at all.

Axie Infinity has been compared to Pokémon with NFTs. Players battle each other using NFTs of monsters called Axies to earn a cryptocurrency called Smooth Love Potion (SLP) that users can sell in secondary markets or use to breed more Axies. The Axie NFT floor price and SLP price tend to move in step.

Hailed for being a pioneer in “a new generation of games”, Axie received investment from Andreessen Horowitz and led Binance to lead a $ 150 million round of funding for the game after the hacked Ronin Bridge.

But in the wake of Axie’s bull run in 2021, the game’s economy seems to be in free fall. The NFT price floor for the Axies, once $ 340, is now $ 6. SLP’s market price has fallen from a high of $ 0.40 to $ 0.004. The decline in NFT price, SLP value and users are related, says Lars Doucet, a game developer who helped write several long reports about Axie for the game research company Naavik.

Axie Infinity makes money on “growth in users, which is a catastrophic thing to make money on,” Doucet told Blockworks. SLPs and Axies’ prices will rise as users join the platform, but “at the moment there are fewer people added today than there were yesterday, the whole cycle will relax.”

As the earning potential dried up, many Axie players lost interest in the game. In the Philippines, where almost half of Axie Infinity’s users are located, many players treated Axie Infinity as a job and can no longer support themselves from the game, according to Naavik.

Axie Infinity continues to release game updates and hopes it can resume growth with a more dedicated user base.

“Shakeouts happen, but this is good in my opinion for the long-term community. We are left with the players who love to play the game,” the community leader of the Axies tooling partner told Blockworks.

Axie Infinity’s struggles, which were before the bridge hack and crash in the crypto market, seem to be endemic to Play-to-Earn games.

StepN is a “Move-to-Earn” training app with a business model that is almost identical to Axies. Supporters of the Web3 app believe it is more sustainable than Axie Infinity, since training is a beneficial activity “regardless of financial rewards”. Nevertheless, the price of StepN’s NFTs has fallen from $ 1400 in April to $ 90 today, and StepN’s cryptocurrency has fallen from $ 9.03 to $ 0.11.

Play-to-Earn games need to be more realistic in terms of players’ financial prospects, says Devin Becker, a Web3 consultant who specializes in gaming economics.

“The idea that every single player can earn is wrong,” Becker told Blockworks via LinkedIn. “Players profit from other players, so some have to pay” if a Play-to-Earn economy is to be sustainable in the long run.

StepN did not respond to a request for comment.

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