Sales of the Axie Infinity video game have reached a new milestone and now exceed $1 billion. This NFT work has steadily grown to take the lead in the industry, since its launch just over 3 years ago.
Axie Infinity’s summer record: breaking the billion dollar mark
Axie Infinity’s monstrous statistics once again confirm the increased interest of traders and investors in non-fungible tokens (NFT). According to CryptoSlam data, its sales have indeed surpassed $1 billion: a first for an NFT game. And this summer of 2021 is particularly hot for this NFT project, as almost 20% of Axie Infinity’s sales were made during the week of August 2, 2021 and 75% during the month of July 2021.
For readers who are new to Axie Infinity, it is a blockchain game developed by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis and is similar in some ways to Pokémon. The Axies are creatures bought, raised and trained by the players. Players use them to complete challenges or to fight online. The objective of the game is to obtain love filters – or small love potions (SLP) – which are cryptocurrencies that can be used to breed new Axies and can also be sold on exchanges.
However, Axies are much more expensive than Pokémon. A new Pokémon game costs less than 60 dollars for about 100 hours of adventure, while the price of an Axie alone reaches several hundred dollars. A single green shrub to enhance the game environment costs $60.
In crescendo: from virtual land to governance token
Sky Mavis has continued to improve its game since its launch. For example, the studio has launched a decentralized marketplace of 90,601 plots of land used by players to evolve in the game, collecting resources or crafting items. The selling price of these plots usually exceeds $10,000. The player using the alias Flying Falcon had even bought 9 digital land plots for 888.25 ETH worth $1,500,000 in February 2021.
The Vietnamese developer also launched the Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) governance token, in November 2020. This token gives players a vote in the future of the game.
With a market capitalization of $3,650,000,000, Axie Infinity thus leads the way in terms of sales in the NFT game sector, followed by “NBA Top Shot” – a trading card game running on the Flow blockchain. Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks came in third in this ranking.
Blockchain-based games are one of the main drivers of adoption of NFTs and cryptocurrencies in general. The gaming + NFT combo is raking in billions of dollars. Enough to justify Polygon’s (MATIC) decision to invest $100 million to create a branch dedicated to NFT and decentralized video games!