Axie Infinity: NFT's posterchild

 Wow, 'The Entwined Future of Gaming and financial freedom' kinda sucks.

I'm always ragging on the NFT scene, and it's typically for good reason. I didn't just wake up one day, throw a dart at a wall and decide this was going to be the movement that I hated for the foreseeable future, rather I found the concept to be silly and then stumbled upon example after example of bad actors scamming the heck out of silly investors with it. Of course I'm going to develop something of an adversity towards them given the sheer amount of rug pulls they've become synonymous with; heck, I've learned the definition of a boat load of scam-terms due to the proliferation of NFTs alone. But, indeed, not every single NFT project out there is a born and bread scam. Bored Ape Yacht club isn't a scam, it's just terrible art getting undeserved value because of it's association to the speculative market. And Axie Infinity is, too, an honest to goodness NFT game with all the bells and whistles!

There is no joke to this set-up; this is an real breathing game that incorporates NFTs into it's gameplay structure and actually exists as a feature semi-complete and playable product, which might just make it one of a kind amongst the sea of discarded startups which litter this topic. And the game itself is actually- well it's fine. It's sort of like a Pokemon style game of collecting this little monsters but then there's a deck builder element thrown in there as well. It doesn't quite look like something on the same level as 'Slay the Spire', or even 'Guild of Dungeoneering'; but it looks like a professionally polished and dusted project. And I know that shouldn't be something I'm so aghast by, but you've seen this subdivision of the industry; you know the total tosh they try to pull; anything that looks passable is a godsend. So good job there.

But trust me when I say that as much it may look like it, I'm not hear today to celebrate mediocrity; besides this entire blog is like a golden-plated monument to the great god of 'average' as it is. No, I'm here to unfortunately inform you that even in the throes of 'mostly decent' and 'this isn't half bad', we've got ourselves yet another controversy that has cost its customers dearly, through one of the single biggest wire heists ever pulled; only possible because of our platform's friendly little sojourn with all things cryptocurrency. Yes, it seems that even with the best intentions in mind the gods of Karma won't let an NFT project lie, or as 'best' as one's intentions could be when devising a game with shoved in NFT features that add nothing unique to the actual gameplay and more just nakedly highlights the developer's key-most goal: praying this speculative market turns into a runaway success story.

As the lovely reporters over at TheVerge have summarised it: Axie's operator 'Sky Mavis' got blasted for 600 million, and it was kinda their fault. Now from what little I could parse with my little pea brain, it seems that the hacker managed to slide into the transfer bridge between Axie and their various cryptocurrency platforms entirely unnoticed thanks to a sort of secondary crypto-market that Axie setup called Ronin in order to circumvent high gas fees for their customers. As this secondary market wasn't actually moving money but rather representative tokens of money, our exploiter was able to silently siphon off funds through that backdoor connection without anyone realising for six days; although the only reason this was possible is because Sky Mavis relaxed security back in December whilst the game was blowing up and forgot to purge their code strings once the surge had calmed down. People flew to the game with such ferocity that it became some folk's full time job, and Sky Mavis couldn't possible live with themselves if they didn't open some shortcuts to take advantage of a gig like that! (Oh, and don't go filing your own resignation just yet: the economy of the Axie Infinity is shockingly similar to the real world in that rich rule the roost and everyone else scrapes by to survive.) And so from the height of pride, do the mighty fall.

It marks a huge blow to those cheerleaders of the play-to-earn concept, showing us that no literally no facet of this movement has clean hands. Either you're dealing with scammer or incompetents, and I'm still trying to figure out which side Ubisoft is currently sitting on. (I picture them teetering between the two.) The folks in charge seem to want to brush this beside them, essentially chalking it up to a roadbump in their journey of revolution; you know, the way you take a roadbump and a $600 million note just falls out your pocket. What makes things even more dire is that for better or for worse there were people who dedicated their livelihoods to the income generated in this game, and as Axie scrambles to reimburse those afflicted, these people are in a turmoil trying to figure out what to do to make ends meet. Such is the responsibility that play-to-earn concepts assume with their very being, one which I know very few are honestly willing and ready to adopt.

And though I've gone a big way to calling Axie Infinity 'not a scam', I must admit to talking a little bit out the side of mouth. I wanted to soften the image that I was about to shatter before your eyes with my sledgehammer, whilst the truth is a little more murky then that. I'd categorise this game under the same sort of umbrella as Earth 2 or Star Citizen; in that none of these projects are spearheaded with the intention to scam in mind, but through mismanagement, incompetence, or short-sightedness, it sort of falls into the category anyway. For Axie Infinity, the problem is frightening simple: the characters of the game are sold on a speculation market; which makes their primary purpose to be sold onward to make money. There are ways to generate funds through playing the actual game, but that hasn't been genuinely profitable since just after launch; nowadays the only way to turn a profit is to quickly flip an Axie and then get out of the game. Of course, you need people to buy that 'Axie' who then wants to sell it on to someone else. So the game needs to keep drawing in new player/buyers in order for the existing players to be able to make their investment worthwhile by selling on their Axie's and everyone is just praying they're not the last one holding the bag and- wait, why does this sound so familiar? Could it be because I just described a Ponzi Scheme?

I genuinely think that every two-bit wannabe economist who has stumbled upon a Ponzi scheme absolutely believes themselves to be a trend setter who has revolutionised finance with this 'unique, new concept' of financial hot potato. Only to find out that it's not only older than sin, but also decently illegal. And for the moment Axie Infinity, maybe despite itself, slides directly into that niche as the actual lukewarm game being presented here falls second to the potential for money making that draws the majority of this game's crowd. Further proof, if ever it were needed, that NFT games aren't made for gamers; they're made for investors. Of course, the slightly askew angle of the whole 'game with cryptocurrency' idea is certainly going to obfuscate Sky Maven's potentially unintentional grift from the dinosaurs over in the financial affairs office, so maybe they'll get away with it. (The scallywags.)

But not to worry about all of this turmoil and torment which has been drummed up around this NFT game of late, because the developers have the sure-fire solution to making things better for everyone: they released another game. This one's free! Okay, to be absolutely fair, it would seem that this is something they were already working on and it's just unfortunate timing that this new project was announced during the clean-up period from their historic heist- but my god does it make for skewered optics. ('Dev loses 600 Million in player's money, uses the reimbursements checks to launch a new game' The headlines write themselves.) And so the great green hope of the NFT space turns out to be decently broken in it's own way, and the search for the one true blockchain game to usher in the WEB3 future goes on. Will it materialise before the trend fizzles out and dies? I certainly think not, however... I've seen enough Anime to know that we need to wait at least 100 exact years since the term NFT was first coined before we count them properly out. (It's only fair.)