In a recent report released by NonFungible.com, a majority of NFT game transactions were made in Axie Infinity with around $3.5 billion worth of Axies were sold and transacted. This accounts for nearly two-thirds of all NFT game transactions and dwarfs most other individual transactions in the NFT game space.
NBA Top Shot came in second with $827 million and community gaming platform Loot came in at $242 million at third in sales.
According to the report, the second-largest earning category in NFT were games at a whopping $5.7 billion of the total $17.6 billion NFT transactions and only second to the collectible space. In fact, NFT game transactions were even larger than the art space.
Axie Infinity was created by Vietnamese game developer Sky Mavis back in 2018, where users can own cute little creatures called Axies which they can use to battle against other players’ Axies in a bid to gain Smooth Love Potions (SLP) as rewards. These SLP tokens can then be exchanged for real-world cash.
Last year, Axie Infinity had a surge in popularity, especially with SLP prices reaching Php 20 per token. This caused an influx of players from developing countries such as the Philippines due to an earning potential that could allow people to earn more than minimum wage.
Despite the falling prices of SLP to below P1 per token, Axie Infinity continues to thrive with around 2.7 million Axie players monthly compared to the 1 million last March 2021.
Overall, Axie Infinity takes up nearly 19% of all NFT transactions recorded for the year 2021 making it possibly the largest single entity with NFT transactions and is clearly leading the way for games to overtake the market.
United Gamers Analysis and Perspective
What does this mean for Axie Infinity and the entire NFT game space?
Axie Infinity’s performance in sales and revenue gives credibility to the company as a working play-to-earn model in NFT.
Axie Infinity is by no means the first pioneer in the NFT gaming space. Etheria and CryptoKitties are often touted as the first and second NFT game ever. It is Axie Infinity, however, that has paved the way for many players and crypto enthusiasts to take notice of the emerging trend and has allowed many new developers to try their luck in developing their own NFT game.
2021 has proven that NFT is not just for art and collectibles but has made way for a new way to play games. Now, players are just as heavily invested in the games they play because they have put in real money to buy their own characters or buy their own items in order to play the game.
Personally, I used to think many play-to-earn games were just scams where you invest so much of your time and sometimes money with little to no rewards. But NFT games such as Axie Infinity have proven that to be wrong. It is now a legitimate form of gaming that more and more players are going to.
This massive sales trend has also allowed for more money to invest in newer and better technologies when it comes to NFT and Web 3 applications. We are seeing a large number of investments that are bound to revolutionize the NFT space and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
While Web 3 is relatively still new, games like Axie Infinity and other NFT games are showing that it’s here to stay and that it is the emerging future of the gaming industry. Traditional gaming isn’t going away any time soon but even huge companies such as Square Enix and Microsoft are looking to integrate NFTs into their games and their platforms as well.
NFT game transactions are sure to increase this 2022 with so many games in development and many platforms to facilitate real AAA games that will introduce NFT gaming to the wider gaming market. We’ll also see a trend of people who had no idea what NFTs are getting interested in what it’s all about and how it will affect their gaming experience.
Only time will tell how much more the boom will be for NFT games like Axie Infinity is going to be but with newer games such as the launch of Axie Infinity Origin and other NFT game titles on the market, it’s going to be an exciting year.