We have all played many online games throughout the ages. Be it solo playing games hosted by websites or multiplayer games that we can play with our friends and other random players on the internet; online gaming has its own place amongst several genres in the gaming world.
Most online games are simple, short, and often meant to be played for the sake of fun and pleasure in leisure. Others are extensive with their own stories and in-game world-building, which require the player to expend hours to achieve certain goals and compete against other players.
However, despite the social interaction and experiences these games have to offer, rarely are they rewarding in real-life terms. The most any games have been rewarding is through the process of competitions and championships, where players can win to earn real-world prize money and other awards. However, this is a rare case as not every individual is capable of making the best of these opportunities.
However, we do have some fortunate news. Thanks to the cutting edge of Blockchain being implemented into the gaming world, gamers too can benefit from playing various games. The games will feature a reward-system mechanism that will allow players to earn cryptocurrency by playing these games. Today, we are going to talk about one such title that has made its presence and coincidently caused a bit of a stir in the world of NFTs and cryptocurrency. The game is titled Axie Infinity.
The game Axie Infinity, released by Sky Mavis, takes its basic roots in the mechanisms that have been the reason for success for many timelessly popular titles such as Pokémon and Tamagotchi. It comprises a virtual world full of fantasy creatures called Axies, that can be tamed as pets by players who collect them, raise them, use them to battle, and trade them with other players for their Axies. These Axies can be bred to create new Axies that have their own unique characteristics. The game involves a class mechanism, similar to the Types mechanism from Pokémon, which determines the matchup’s efficiency and weaknesses for different Axies. The player can also buy Axie land to create their own Kingdom, farm for resources, and other purposes. All these add up to provide the player with a lot of elements that can have a player get addicted easily and invest several hours into the game. However, these hours invested will end up yielding the player real-world profit in the form of cryptocurrency.
So how does the game relate to cryptocurrency? Well, the thing here is that like most other games, this game too has many in-game transactions. It has its very own marketplace where players can buy and sell their Axies, items, and other things. These transactions can be done in Ether (ETH), an alternative coin cryptocurrency, or altcoin, which exists as one of the most popular ones after Bitcoin. In order to do transactions, the player must have a crypto wallet account connected to their game profile, such as Metamask or Coingate. You can earn crypto necessary to play this game by selling currency of other games such as RS3 GP and ESO gold in exchange for crypto via marketplaces such as Eldorado.
The game puts a condition on new players to acquire at least three Axies from the marketplace to start playing the game. However, once they start playing, the Axies can be bred and multiplied to have more assets. These assets, which include Axies, items, land blocks, and other collectibles, can be bought and sold for Ether, which is then directly transferred or deducted from their crypto wallet. The assets themselves can also be stored in the crypto wallets, as each of them exists as an NFT (Non-fungible token). This ensures that every Axie and other assets ever created will be unique and cannot be duplicated using unfair means. NFTs carry the owner's data in the form of a digital signature, along with other information that stays as a form of identification as well as ensures their uniqueness.
The game, however, is not the first of its kind that implemented cryptocurrency in-game as a mechanism to handle transactions. The developer of Axie Infinity, Trung Nguyen, was obsessed with and inspired by a game called Cryptokitties. The game Cryptokitties consisted of collecting, breeding, buying, and selling cats called cryptokitties, which each are unique, indifferent, and validated through Ethereum. The whole mechanism inspired 20-year-old Nguyen to pursue a dream of creating his own Blockchain game. Over the course of the next several months, Axie Infinity began to take form, implementing the core ideas of Cryptokitties along with mechanics from games such as the Pokémon series, Tamagotchi and Neopets.
This was just the beginning, as with time, the game continued to grow, to the point it became a sensation, particularly in the world of NFTs. The game currently holds the record for one of the top ten most expensive NFTs as well. Being an unexpected hit, the game rose fast in fame since its beta release in mid-2018. Henceforth, it carries over a million in digital asset sales and around 2 million from merchandise sales in the marketplace.
What Nguyen plans to do with Axie Infinity is to bring cryptocurrency into the norm in the gaming world. He wishes to make the games feel like the rest of the games so that more players would be comfortable playing Axie Infinity and other titles that implement Blockchain. Nguyen wishes to erase the realization that it is a cryptocurrency game and diminish that barrier that separates them from other online games.
While Axie Infinity continues to grow thanks to the effort of Nguyen and his team, be sure to not miss out on it at all. Grab some Ether and start training your own Axies! We hope you have a pleasant experience gaming!