Season 21 of Axie Infinity is now live. But in a surprising announcement on Twitter and Discord, the Sky Mavis team says this will be the final season for Axie Infinity Classic. They said in their announcement they wanted to end the season with a bang so they are preparing larger rewards for the top players.
Axie Infinity is a blockchain-enabled NFT game with a play-to-earn model that has been operating since 2018. Players are able to raise and breed Axies where they can battle other players for monetary rewards. Currently, the classic game is in version 2 (v2).
The team also just released Axie Infinity Origin last April 7, its the newest iteration, sometimes referred to as version 3 or v3. The game does not have AXS or SLP rewards activated as of yet.
The Axie team has increased the prize pool to 130,171.90 AXS. The team wanted to sweeten the pot for the final Axie Infinity season, so the prizes have been increased for all players. The top 10 players will also see a significantly higher reward this season with the top player getting 500 AXS which is more than twice larger than final season’s 203 AXS. For those interested, they may view the full details of the prize pool here.
This announcement comes as a surprise for many players though not completely unexpected. With the release of Origin, there was an expectation that the play-to-earn model will eventually transition over to the new version of the game. However, when this was going to happen was a mystery to many in the community.
The Axie Team believes that the competitive scene or PVP has infinite potential and is likely to increase AXS prizes over time as the game develops further. They further hinted that this move will accelerate as more patches and upgrades are seen in Axie Origin.
We reported in the past that part of Axie Infinity Origin’s roadmap included the integration of SLP and AXS rewards in future patches. With the declaration of this being the final season, there is much speculation that rewards for Origin are soon coming and perhaps will arrive at the end of the final season.
Axie Infinity is the largest NFT game in the market right now so the transition from Classic to Origin is under a close watch by the community and those invested in blockchain games. Their success may have a wider effect on the blockchain game industry as a whole.