With crypto-backed play-to-earn games steadily declining since the beginning of the year, many believe these projects are doomed to fail.
A prime example of a game-to-earn gaming project that suffers from gamer apathy is Axie Infinity. Following the boom in 2021, a year when the project hit record highs, the year so far has been marked by a slowdown in the growth of the Axie Infinity world.
A continued decline in ecosystem statistics
According to Axie Growth Data, the gaming project has shown a significant decline on many growth rates this year. This can mainly be attributed to the crypto winter, one that has ravaged the general market and the failure of the project to sustain gamers’ interest.
As of August 1, daily active users on the platform stood at 260,246 gamers. This was a far cry from the all-time high of 2,718,810 active users recorded on November 15, 2021.
On May 10, following a 14.27% drop in active users that week, Jeffrey Zirlin, co-founder of Axie Infinity noticed that the gaming platform “had been here before and knew what to do”.
We have been here before and know what to do.
The fear is normal. pic.twitter.com/eXPk2mS1H3
— The Jiho.eth 🦇🔊 (@Jihoz_Axie) May 10, 2022
This has not been the case, however, as attempts to rekindle gamers’ interest have met lasting failure. For example, following the release of Axie Infinity V2 on May 23, active players on the network dropped rapidly by 21% in the 14 days that followed.
In addition to the gradual decline of active gamers on the platform, the realized sales volume on the network also decreased significantly. As of August 1, this was $7,438,174. This represented a drop of more than 10,000% from its all-time high sales volume of $1,030,753,400. The latter figure was recorded in August last year.
The number of landowners on Axie Infinity has also gradually declined since the beginning of the year. With only 623 landowners as of August 1, a 77% decline has been registered since January.
AXS has seen better days
In the past year, token transfers on the network, unique senders on time, and unique receivers on time on Axie Infinity have all declined.
$AXS Onchain summary in 1 year! pic.twitter.com/eRE5p3EUvo
— Daily Ronin (@daily_ronin) August 2, 2022
A year ago, AXS was valued at $42.66. The gaming token, which traded at $18.22 at the time of writing, has fallen by half in the past 365 days.
Ranked 41st by market cap at the time of writing, the market cap dropped from $2.59 billion to $1.51 billion.
Source: Santiment
Interestingly, despite the aforementioned price drop, whales gradually increased their holdings with 10,000 to 10,000,000 AXS tokens.
At the time of going to press, it was 84.57 million – a 10% increase from the 76.32 million AXS tokens held by this category of whales a year ago.
Source: Santiment
In addition, AXS’ 365-day MVRV appeared to have fallen significantly at -55.38%. This suggested that many investors failed to make a profit in the past year.
Source: Santiment.