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1992: Bestselling writer Neal Stephenson uses the term "metaverse" in his novel "Snow Crash" for the very first time.
2021: Facebook changes its name to Meta and hires 10,000 employees to create the metaverse.
Thirty years later, Stephenson's idea becomes reality and the financial market reacts positively. Projects like Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity are definitely exploding, creating a high workforce demand. Game development, cybersecurity, blockchain, data analysis, the list goes on. McKinsey forecast shows that the metaverse has the potential to grow up to $5 trillion by 2030. The IT industry is set to build the digital future.
What is Axie Infinity?
Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based video game created by Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese development studio. Axie Infinity, released in 2018, ran on the Ethereum blockchain. Afterwards, thanks to its huge success, Sky Mavis developed a sidechain, Ronin Network, exclusively built for gaming projects and much useful for scalability improvement. The game uses non-fungible tokens (NFTs), unique digital assets which, unlike cryptocurrencies, are not replicable. Therefore, each individual NFT represents a specific game element. In Axie Infinity, players collect Axies, cute digital pets, mostly inspired by the world of Pokémon. Sky Mavis CEO and co-founder, Nguyen Thanh Trung, said that in 2017, during Axie Infinity development, he took his cues by playing CryptoKitties, the first phenomenon of the NFT gaming genre and also the first successful game based on the Ethereum blockchain.
By collecting at least three Axies, players can join turn-based battles against the CPU or other players (in asynchronous mode). The game mechanics are traditional, inspired by sagas like Final Fantasy Tactics and the card battle genre. By winning battles, players earn SLP, one of the two cryptocurrencies in the game. As for buying and selling Axies, users can take advantage of the marketplace on the official Axie Infinity website. The cryptocurrency used to trade NFTs is AXS.
The game still has regular updates and, one of the latest added features, is a new type of NFT within the game, Lands. Lands are basically digital plots of land, which can be purchased through the marketplace. Owning one is not a necessary requirement, however it does give bonuses and boosts to its owner. From a simple turn-based game, Axie Infinity has become a fully-fledged metaverse within three years.
NFT Gaming prospects
The 2021 crypto market boom and the resulting success of NFTs have caught media attention and led millions of people to earn money by playing. A strange and unique case has happened in the Philippines: at the end of 2021, Axie Infinity users were mainly Filipino; that’s because the high value of SLP and AXS allowed them to earn figures that exceed the average Philippines salary, giving also "job" opportunities to all those facing unemployment. However, bull market means expensive Axies. Some Axie types hit thousands of dollars. So this situation escalated in unexpected ways: those who bought Axie before the market boom started to lend their Axie to all the users who were planning to enter the game during the market rally. Thus, users from poorer countries were able to earn money (by sharing a small percentage with the Axie owner) thanks to lent Axies.
The development of NFT video games therefore arouses high interest and if we put the growing adoption of the metaverse into context, it is clear that the future of blockchain gaming can only be promising. What still does not convince critics today is the minimal gameplay. However, investments in blockchain gaming are constantly increasing and game mechanics improvements will only be a matter of time.
A digital evolution
The pandemic has dramatically speed up the development of new emerging technologies. Plus, thanks to the rebrand of Facebook in Meta, the push towards the metaverse is the result of the digital transformation: jobs have been transitioning to platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet; the blockchain development and the adoption of cryptocurrencies are symptoms of the aforementioned digital transformation; the metaverse seems to be an imminent reality, not a mere futuristic concept. Furthermore, 87% of Generation Z has an average weekly playtime of around 7 hours.
Don't live the future as a sidekick... be a superhero! Discover Geeks Academy’s training offer in Gaming & Metaverse:
Into the Metaverse is an in-depth series about the metaverse and its development. Below a comprehensive list of the video games we have been talking about:
Sources:
https://nftnow.com/guides/inside-axie-infinity-a-deep-dive-into-the-worlds-largest-p2e-game/
https://whitepaper.axieinfinity.com/
https://www.skymavis.com/