Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on capital inflows."

Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, where Axie is big.

Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token, PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a few months.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/

View on HN

I can't believe the buy in is $1000, it would have to be a AAAA game to demand that price tag, but it's not so it's just a disguised Ponzi scheme. The way the media have been reporting this as a way for Filipinos to earn income is disgusting, because they're tricking financially challenged people to fall for this Ponzi scheme by making it look legitimate with the media attention.

Just like herbalife or many of those MLM schemes, the initial entry fee does sound like scam.

I wonder how long it takes to earn back the initial entry fee?

And let's not forget the oldest of them all, Star Citizen. Bet another pandemic will come and go and that game will still be in alpha

> And let's not forget the oldest of them all, Star Citizen.

Definitely not the oldest..?

Did SC really promise financial returns? My impression was it did not.

They talk about the economics here and payback time: https://medium.com/coinmonks/axie-infinity-a-developing-worl...

It works kind of like Pokemon. You need some starter Axies to breed and fight.[1] There are people offering "scholarships" where they loan you Axies to grind. This was profitable last summer but is now a lose for both parties.

[1] https://leveldash.com/how-much-to-start-playing-axie-infinit...

Not just financially-challenged, but under-educated too. If your education was sub-par then it's easy to get tricked, especially with something as complex as the crypto world, where someone like me who had a great education, minted Satoshi's finest like they were water from a firehose, and almost 40 years of coding, still has a really hard time understanding the current plethora of blockchain shenanigans.

When you don’t have any evidence why an investment is sound, you simply should not invest.

You need education to know that.

It wasn’t included in my formal education, for sure.

This is a key thing that a lot of people are missing: most (if not all) of the top PlayToEarn games are literally just disguised ponzi schemes.

The only reason why their tokens have value is that you need those tokens to earn more tokens.

This. Axie Infinity only had traction, because the earned coin had speculative value. The traction was from people "playing-to-earn" as a job. I doubt that there are that many people playing for the fun of it. When the token loses value, there isn't a reason to continue playing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com