The love potion craze

They’re small bright-colored blob-looking creatures with giant eyes that seem ready to pop out. They’re called Axies and while they look silly, millions of Filipinos are actually making real money from the cartoonish-like digital pets.

Welcome to the Philippines, welcome to the world of play-to-earn gaming. Meet Axie Infinity.

I got interested in this growing phenomenon because a friend described her son as a gamer, playing this thing called Axie, even up to the wee hours of the morning and earning from it.

The more I researched, the more I found out how big a craze it had become during the pandemic, much like e-sabong, because everyone got cooped up at home with nothing to do, and for many, no means of earning a living.

For starters, Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based play-to-earn gaming universe created by Sky Mavis, a Vietnam-headquartered game developer that has millions of Filipinos hooked.

Four million Filipinos own Axies, said Nix Eniego, Philippines lead for Axie Infinity.

According to Nix, not all of the four million Axie owners play every day. The daily active users in the Philippines are just about 1.9 to two million, Nix said in a March 10 virtual talk organized by TGFI or The Global Filipino Investors, a community that advocates financial literacy. For context, at least five million Filipinos play e-sabong.

Note, however, that the talk happened before the March 29 jaw-dropping $625 million crypto heist.

Playing Axie is like playing a game of chess because it’s strategic, said an Axie gamer in a documentary by Emfarsis, an advisory firm in Asia Pacific focused on crypto, NFTs, etc.

One way to earn from it is to sell an in-game item called Smooth Love Potions. Think of it as the Axie currency. Players can then swap their SLPs with real money. As I write this, a single SLP is equivalent to P0.86.

Cabanatuan City: Axie capital

Cabanatuan City, population 327,000, may well be called the Philippines’ Axie Infinity capital, because in this city 162 kilometers away from Manila, there’s a big community hooked on the play-to-earn game.

Take Art, 28, for instance. Art is one of the first to discover Axie Infinity in Cabanatuan, the documentary, available on You Tube, narrated.

It all starts with three Axies for a player to be able to join the craze.

“At first, I was not convinced that this game is actually earned by playing, but I tried it. Out of curiosity, I bought three Axies. At that time, it was about $4 to $5 for three Axies. I earned and tried to sync and swap it with other cryptocurrencies like Etherium,” Art said in the documentary that  was filmed in early 2021.

He then used the BSP-regulated Coins.ph platform to swap Etherium into cash, earning roughly P1,000 for 15 days of playing the game – his first cash out.

Soon word spread and there were 100 Axie players in Art’s street alone. A gold rush of sorts happened. Even senior citizens who couldn’t go out because of the pandemic joined the craze, both to augment their income and perhaps to keep themselves entertained, as they narrated in the Emfarsis documentary.

Another player started earning P15,000, almost like a full-time job.

I asked my friend’s son who knows this play-to-earn game like the back of his hand, and this is what I got.

He said that Axie Infinity has managers and scholars – managers are the ones who buy Axies and let their scholars play the game. Every two weeks, the managers claim the rewards earned by the scholars and they split the earnings.

Axie university

Yield Guild Games (YGG), which invests in blockchain games and NFT assets, hitched a ride on the Axie Infinity craze and started lending out Axies to scholars who want to play and earn. In 2021, YGG was reportedly managing some 4,700 Axie Infinity scholars, according to a Philippine Star report.

The heist

Spending days and nights researching this new craze, I learned that it has really brought food on the table for many Filipinos.

Indeed, the circumstances are similar, in a sense, to how e-sabong became a craze – the pandemic happened and a lot of people lost their means of living. They needed something to put food on the table and perhaps, unwittingly, they needed a form of escape, too, to forget even for a moment, those depressing, debilitating, and difficult days and nights of the pandemic.

But it’s not all fun. As we learned, hackers stole cryptocurrency worth roughly $625 million from the Ronin Network, a key platform used in Axie Infinity.  The problem has yet to be resolved as of this writing, but Ronin said it would reimburse all affected users.

In the March 10 virtual talk before the heist, a warning from Axie’s Nix Eniego foreshadowed what was to come.

He said there will always be bad actors who will take advantage of technology, but it’s not fair, especially for developers who want to develop good products.

It’s not clear yet how the heist will affect the Axie craze, moving forward, but for sure, it’s not Sky Mavis’s investors such as billionaire Mark Cuban and Alexis Ohanian who will hurt the most, but the players themselves, some of whom aren’t really in the game for fun, but are simply trying to put food on the table.

Iris Gonzales’ email address is [email protected].Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at eyesgonzales.com.