The maturing of Ronin

From Axie to Ragnarok

Third time was the charm in terms of Sky Mavis co-founder Jeff ‘Jihoz’ Zirlin’s latest appearance on Blockchain Gaming World.

We mainly talked about how the Ronin blockchain is maturing from the chain on which Axie Infinity launched in 2021 to a proper gaming ecosystem with dozens of games in various stages of development and deployment.

Of course, this is only the start of the process with Zirlin talking about how Ronin will eventually become a permissionless blockchain, something that will be first enabled when its zkrollup tech goes live in 2025.

Most interesting for me, however, were a couple of titbits about how Axie Infinity is now performing economically.

Zirlin said that the game’s treasury is now generating around $300,000 per month as players are spending AXS tokens to upgrade their Axie NFTs to make them more powerful in-game, while the utility SLP token is now deflationary. Neither of these is significant in-and-off-itself but demonstrates progress.

More generally, he said that although the growth of Axie Infinity in terms of its daily onchain activity — now around 80,000 unique wallets daily — has been driven by giving away more AXS tokens, 70% of those tokens are either being staked — gaining up to 46% APY — or hodled, suggesting the sell pressure on the token from these incentives is much lower than I would have expected.

As ever, you can check out a transcript of our conversation at BlockchainGamer.biz.

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Calendar

• Today’s free mint for its Mythic Seeds goes live — 17th October

• Decentraland releases beta of first desktop client — 22nd October

• Ubisoft’s Champions Tactics goes live — 23rd October

• Planet Mojo’s free NFT mint on Base — 23rd October

• Ragnarok: Monster World play-to-airdrop ends — 7th November

• Next FOMC meeting: 50bps cut now not expected — 7th November

• Blast Royale’s NOOB token goes live — 13th November

• The Sandbox Alpha Season 4 ends — 17th December

More Azra Games’ Musings news

• It’s been interesting to ponder further about Azra Games’ announcement of its $43 million Series A funding. One notable point is the crypto-heavy composition of the investors with Pantera leading plus participation from a16z crypto, both of which are crypto-only investors.

However, there was no mention of crypto or blockchain in the press release. Instead the long comment from Azra CEO Mark Otero was:

“We aim to define what I call the 4th generation of mobile RPGs. The first generation emerged with mobile app stores, characterized by text-based RPGs with 2D graphics constrained by limited memory and weak processors.

The second generation saw enhancements in UI, richer icons, and auto battles with basic animations. The third capitalized on advanced smartphone technology, offering 3D graphics, interactive turn-based battles, and more sophisticated controls.

“I believe the 4th generation of mobile RPGs is competing with PC and console RPGs, featuring open worlds, over-the-shoulder camera perspectives, real-time battles, and extended PvE campaigns. It signifies a significant paradigm shift in mobile gaming. With our expanding expert team and robust funding, we are excited to bring Western gamers true console/PC-quality PRG experiences on their mobile devices.”

Of course, Pantera’s Franklin Bi mentioned “open-world economies” and a16z crypto’s Arianna Simpson “the digital ownership of blockchain”, but certainly the PR positioning was to downplay any mention of blockchain.

Instead, probably the most interesting part of the press release was the mention of Azra Labs — “a small R&D team led by co-founder and CTO Travis Boudreaux in the application of AI to accelerate the development of AAA mobile content at scale by industrializing the RPG development process”.

I like the use of the term “industrializing” when it clearly means using genAI to “automate” the development process. The reveal of the most recent game character looks genAI-ish to me [YT].

Still, the scale of the funding round means that Azra seems to have gotten away with good headlines, despite building on two of the technologies most hated by gaming’s thought police.

A P2Eer Responds To Gabe Leydon news

• Earlier in the week, Limit Break’s Gabe Leydon rejoiced at the early success of Off The Grid with the statement “P2E is over! Kill it with fire”. However, a more nuanced argument comes from Pixels’ CEO Luke Barwikowski who comments on its “steady progress towards solving the fundamentals of play-to-earn”.

It’s worth reading the thread, which ends:

So how’s Off The Grid Doing? news

• It’s certainly not the only metric, but looking at reported Twitch data, the first blockchain game on console has now hit 2.5 million hours watched but activity is down a lot compared to Saturday’s peak.

As for onchain data, the total of lifetime wallets on the Gunz testnet is now over 6.5 million.