How the Model Works and Make Money with Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity is a Pokemon-style game with a cryptocurrency twist. Players raise creatures, known as Axies, then lead them into battle and/or trade or sell them for cryptocurrency.

Axie Infinity became one of the largest crypto apps on the Ethereum blockchain over the course of 2021 - and the trajectory continues to point up in 2022 and beyond.

There are two cryptocurrencies within Axie Infinity: Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), and Small Love Potion (SLP). You can buy and sell AXS on Coinmarketcap and other leading exchanges; you can gain SLP within the game and use it to breed new Axies.

The premise of the game focuses on breeding Axies and raising them for battle. That’s a standard video game premise. What makes this Axie different from normal turn-based battle games is each Axie is an NFT, which you can sell in the in-game NFT marketplace for real money.

How the Model Works

The prevailing business model for mobile games in the market today is “pay-to-win” — that is, in order to make real progress in the game or to be competitive in online play, you’ll need to pay money for upgrades, characters, and weapons. This model is profitable for companies but not particularly popular with players. Axie aimed to flip that model around to create a “play-to-earn” video game.

In order to play Axie Infinity, you must own at least three creatures, and the cheapest creature sits at around $200 (in Ethereum) in the Axie marketplace. You’ll need a digital wallet like Metamask in order to buy creatures, collect SLP, and play the game.

If you don't have a casual $600 of disposable income lying around to invest in a game, you can still get started on the game — you’ll just need to give up a portion of your winnings. Yield Guild Games (YGG) offer players the chance to loan out creatures and take 30% off their earnings in return. There are also scholarship options available

On its face, Axie Infinity gameplay is similar to a traditional turn-based battle game. You gain tokens for playing a battle and extra tokens for winning. You can then use these tokens to breed more creatures. But unlike traditional turn-based battle games, each creature is an NFT, so when you breed new ones, you are creating brand new unique NFTs.

Make Money with Axie Infinity

Breeding Pets

Perhaps the most common money-making option in Axie is to breed creatures. You can use SLP to breed animals from your starting creatures, each of them becoming a unique NFT. Each NFT creature has a specific value, so the more Axies you breed, the more you can make. 

For starters, by breeding more advanced Axies, you will be able to win more battles. As we have touched on already, winning battles provides you with SLP as a prize. So the more battles you win, the more crypto you can gather.

If you’d rather cash out your Axies fast, you can sell them in the game’s marketplace. This option will provide you with a quick source of one-off income, whereas the other two breeding money-making options will provide a steady stream of income over a longer period.

Reproduction Harvest

Every time you breed Axies, it costs you SLP, so you will need to gather enough SLP to continue breeding. 

You can breed different Axies to make more or less valuable Axies offspring, so before you sit your Axies down to have The Talk then send them off to breed like bunnies, do some research and calculate the best options available to you.

Axie Infinity uses Smooth Love Potions (SLP) as its digital currency. SLP enables you to breed more Axies - and breeding Axies is necessary for moving up in the game and making money. 

Prize

Axie Infinity has a high buy-in fee — one that can prohibit new players from joining in. With starter teams costing at least $600 — more than an entire video game system like a PlayStation 5 - many people can’t afford to play Axie Infinity.

When an experienced breeder offers other players free Axies, it’s known as a prize. The scholar uses those Axies to play the game and gain SLP, and the experienced breeder receives a cut of the winnings.

The final money-making option within Axie Infinity is to play the game. With each fight, you receive action cards at random. You can play these cards on your turn, depending on how much energy they cost and how much energy you have.

Players who spend numerous hours playing the game can expect to earn between $8 and $40 per day. This figure depends entirely on what Axies you possess, the powers those Axies have, and how many wins you collect each day. It also depends on how much time you have to devote to the game.

If you opt for the other methods to make money with Axie Infinity, such as breeding and selling your Axies, the potential to earn increases slightly. Fxstreet calculated the average NFT creature sells for $270 in the Axie marketplace. 

While crypto-earning games are a relatively new concept, as the technology develops rapidly, expect to see more blockchain-based apps and games. (There are already lots of options springing up if you want to make money playing video games.) So if you aim to earn money from playing games, research all the options available that best suit your needs.