In the NFT game “Axie Infinity” there is a strange system: rich players from the West employ players from the Philippines, Venezuela or Thailand as “Scholars”. A German YouTuber explains how much money he made with this in August 2021: 15% return was a great passive income. But now the market is collapsing.
What is this game?
- Axie Infinity is a “Pokémon”-like game in which everything revolves around “SLP”, the “Smooth Love Potion”: a currency that can be exchanged for money
- In the game there are Pokémon-like creatures, the “Axie”, with which the players can fight and you can breed them
- In 2021, there was a hype about Axie Infinity. The game looked like it was going to be the flagship game for “Play2Earn” games, games that let you make money. But now it’s in for a rude awakening.
Axie are the creatures that everything revolves around. Image source: zipmex
Investors lend Axie, want 30-70% of profits from their “scholars”
How do rich Westerners make money from this? To play Axie Infinity, you have to buy 3 Axies at the beginning. These 3 Axies cost about $1,000 at the height of the game, now the prices have dropped. But it’s still too expensive for many games. Because Axie Infinity is popular especially in regions where people don’t earn much (via playercounter):
- 40% of Axie Infinity’s players are from the Philippines
- 6.3% from Venezuela
- 5.7 % from the USA
- 4.7 % from Thailand
Investors with lots of money in real life buy Axies and lend their Axies to players from “poor regions” to let them earn the “Smooth Love Potions”. They then collect their share of their farmers’ earnings each month.
According to a co-founder of Axie, the usual share is between 30% and 70% (via vice).
The investors then call themselves “managers” – their people called them “scholars”.
German YouTuber Sw1pe Axie showed in a video from August 2021 (via youtube) that 16 “Scholars” played for him. The best earned 5,886 SLP (about €586), while the worst made 739 SLP (about €74). Sw1pe explained that he gives his Scholars 50% of their profit.
Investor dreams of “passive income” – 3.000 € profit per month with 20.000 € investment
Why does he do this? According to the YouTuber, he gets a great return of 15% a month that way:
“3,000 euros is a lot of money at first. But if you add to that the fact that I only spent about €20,000 on all the teams together – I think it was even less, only €18,000 – that’s about a 15% return or profit I made on it a month.”
How did that continue for him? Sw1pe released 2 more videos with his earnings. They showed that he continued to expand his program and doubled the number of “Scholars”, while his income remained relatively constant, because in the same time the price of the “Smooth Love Potion” halved in relation to the Euro.
- in September 2021, 23 Scholars were working for him – he earned 2895 €, by which time the price of one SLP had already dropped from 10 cents to 6 cents
- in October 2021 31 Scholars worked for him – he made 3463 €
- however, as of November Sw1pe stopped publishing videos about his “Scholarship” earnings – during November and December 2021 the value of an SLP dropped from 6 cents to 2 cents
Man in Venezuela feeds his family by playing a very old MMORPG
“Scholars” instead of China farmers
What’s the difference with “China farmers”?”China farmer” is a term used in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. It implies that Chinese people in sweatshops are forced to farm an MMORPG for a pittance in order to sell the content to rich players in the West.
The difference with Axie is that there is no “company” behind it, but private individuals from the West who want to generate “Passive Income” as crypto-investors. Moreover, their scholars are apparently not from China, but from Thailand, Venezuela and the Philippines.
This is what it looks like when you really play Axie Infinity:
“Digital colonialism” or “relationship that benefits all”?
Isn’t it all a bit weird? Yes, of course it is. This is about rich people who let people from poor areas gamble a video game for very little money a month.
One journalist, looking in on the strange relationship from the outside, calls it “digital colonialism.”
But the investors see themselves as benefactors. The site Vice quotes a manager who employs up to 200 Scholars. He says the agreement is in mutual benefit after all:
“I make money from them using my NFTs and they make money by playing with them. Charity is something I’ve never experienced myself. But the messages I get from my Scholars is how they use their profit to pay their bills, buy a washing machine, or new teeth for grandma.”
Market collapses and the “Scholars” quit
What is the problem? The video with Sw1pe Axie’s bill is from August 2021 – back then a “Smooth Love Potion” was still worth 10 cents. But since then, the value of a Smooth Love Potion has plummeted:
- At its peak on July 24, 2021, one SLP was still worth 29 cents
- On August 8, there was at least 15 cents for it – that is, just under half
- On September 21, the price had fallen to 5 cents – still about one-sixth
- Today, on April 22, 2022, there is still 1.4 cents for an SLP – only one-twentieth of the maximum price
As a result, the “investors” like Axie Swipe LP are losing their cheap labor by the dozen right now, because no one wants to farm for that money anymore.
On Twitter, some investors are complaining that their “Scholars” are quitting and they are now stuck with their Axies. One says it is now too time-consuming to look for new Scholars because they quit faster than he can find new ones.
Managers are now discussing whether they can dump all the Axie now and live with the loss, or hope the price will go up again. But prices seem to be so far down that “giving up” is simply out of the question for many.
Also the German “Sw1pe Axie” seems to continue to put full on the game. In the last month alone, 7 new videos appeared on the subject. But with the fall of the course, it seems that the dreams of the YouTube career also burst:
- While the video about his earnings with the “Scholar program” in August 2021 still has 3,300 views
- The last videos only got between 70 and 430 views
WIr have reported about Axie before when the game was hacked for a lot of money:
Hackers steal €550 million from NFT game – Pokémon-like game was unfortunately too successful
Follow us and check out our social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook & YouTube ►
● on Twitter ► esport.directory
● Facebook ► esport.directory
● Youtube ► esport.directory
ValorantTeams, Valorant , Heroes&WIKI, ValorantTeam, ValorantPlayer, ValorantPlayers, ValorantTeamBuilding, ValorantTeamGuide