Axie Infinity is getting so popular it has struggled to stay running

I sighed with frustration as I restarted Axie Infinity for the fifth time. 

I’d been trying to get into the game all day, but despite my repeated attempts, my screen was stuck on its homepage. My three Axies — colorful, blob-shaped cartoon creatures, each with unique traits — stood on wooden logs, bouncing up and down to the tune of a medieval melody.

In case you aren’t a regular on Crypto Twitter or are not obsessed with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Axie Infinity is a game whose main characters are each one-of-a-kind, with their authenticity registered on the Ethereum blockchain.

It’s also skyrocketing in popularity. Since the end of June, Axie Infinity, developed by Singapore-based game studio Sky Mavis, has seen its total number of daily active users increase by over 233%. In July, the platform surpassed 900,000 daily active users. As of August 2, the 30-day rolling volume was $8.4 billion.

In fact, this is why I was having such a hard time getting into the game. The platform has grown at such a staggering rate that its server has struggled to keep up. That’s caused several slowdowns in the last two weeks.

But why is the game so popular? And can it scale fast enough to keep up?

Small love potions = big popularity 

In search of an answer to the first question, I decided to try playing the game myself. 

To begin, I needed three “Axies” — creatures with unique traits like class (for instance: dawn, dusk, or mech), type (such as aquatic, beast, or bird) or body pattern (including fuzzy, spiky or curly). 

Axies can get pricey. At the time of this writing, the cheapest one was 0.1 ETH (about $262). That means that building a team, which requires a minimum of three Axies, can cost around $1,000 — and that’s for a team of the cheapest Axies. 

Axie prices are determined by several factors. The “purer” an Axie is, or the more body parts that are from the same class, the more valuable it is. For instance, if a Reptile Axie — one of the classes of Axie — has a pureness of 3/6, three out of six of its body parts are also Reptile type. A Reptile Axie with a pureness of 6/6 would be more valuable than an Axie with one of 2/6. 

The Axie’s breed count, or the number of times the Axie has given birth to a young Axie, also determines its value. Axies can breed up to seven times, and the most valuable are the ones that have never had offspring. 

The most expensive Axie sold for $131,000.

Why would anyone spend so much just to play a game? Because, by completing tasks in the game, they can earn that money back — and possibly even make a profit.

Crucial are Axie Infinity’s in-game tokens, called small love potions ($SLPs). These tokens can be used to breed new Axies. But the tokens are also tradeable for real money. At the time of publication, SLPs are trading at $0.197. 

Players can earn SLPs by completing daily quests, for instance by completing ten levels or simply by logging into the game. They can also accumulate tokens by winning battles against other players. 

Battles are played in “Arena” mode. They are turn-based and the objective is to come up with a battleplan to destroy the competing team. Players are dealt different cards for each Axie which they can use to fight the opposing team. Once a player decides their battle strategy, the Axies will attack each other in turns. Some Axies are better at battling than others based on their battle stats, which are determined by their unique combinations.  

A player can earn a maximum of 200 SLP per day, or 6000 SLP ($1,182 at current prices) a month. 

Because of its earning potential, Axie Infinity has drawn players from countries with relatively low wages who are hoping to use the game to supplement their income.

According to the Axie team, 53 percent of the over 900,000 players on the platform are from the Philippines, where the average daily salary is about 415 pesos, or $20, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. Four percent are from Brazil, four percent from Venezuela, two percent from Argentina, and three percent are from the United States.

Growing pains

To help people overcome the high cost of entry into the game, several scholarship programs have emerged to help talented gamers purchase their first Axies team. 

Yield Guild Games (YGG) is one such organization, and it supports players through a program called Axie University (AxU). It’s a pretty straightforward partnership: players are paired with scholarship managers, who oversee their progress. Players get to keep 70% of the tokens they earn, while the managers keep 30%. 

I’m far from a talented gamer, but the YGG team was gracious enough to hook me up with my own Scholar account, complete with three Axies. I was ready to play! 

Thanks to a tutorial from a YGG scholarship manager, I started to get a hang of things. After clearing three levels — and earning three SLP — I logged off for the day. 

The next day, I logged back on determined to earn more cash. But I couldn’t get past the home screen. I pinged the YGG team on Discord, asking for help. They told me it was most likely because the server was down.  “It has unfortunately been unstable for almost a week now,” one of the scholarship managers messaged me.

According to Axie Infinity co-founder and COO Aleksander Larsen, his team started encountering issues on July 11, when the game surpassed 500,000 daily active users. 

Larsen said that while he knew there was a lot of pent-up demand for the platform, what caught him and his team off guard was how quickly the game grew in popularity, considering there hadn’t been any major upgrades to the game in over 16 months. “Players weren’t just playing every day, they were also playing for a long time. So our internal database hit a scaling ceiling,” he said. 

Given that people rely on Axie Infinity for income, this isn’t your typical video game server outage.

Axie Scholar Silvan Tuliao started the program around the same time the server began to fail. During the pandemic, the 36-year-old struggled to find clients in his full-time job as a video editor. After returning home to the Philippines, Tuliao decided to give Axie Infinity a shot, hoping to make some extra income. But there were multiple times when he couldn’t play due to the server being down. Because of this, he hasn’t made as much money as he had hoped to.

“I don’t know if other players are feeling this, but if I wasn’t able to finish my daily quests in a day, it would get me really frustrated,” he said. “It’s too early to say if I’m going to keep playing. I’m giving it some time.”

27-year-old Reygie Javier, who is also an Axie Scholar, said she also wasn’t able to finish her daily quests on several occasions. But she also added that despite the technical difficulties, she felt supported by the Axie Infinity team. 

“They were constantly updating us on Discord. I appreciate their efforts because I know they’re doing their best to turn it back to how it was before,” she said. “I trust them and trust there won’t be problems anymore.”

In a recent update on the Axie Infinity Telegram group, the team said it has hired more engineers to work on server scaling, as well as someone from within the Axie community to lead and build out their support system. 

“We aren’t sure when things will go back to normal, it could be days or perhaps weeks,” the team wrote. “It's important for us that everyone in the community understands that we are operating on the bleeding edge of a new industry. If we could solve our problems by simply turning on a new server or staggering logins we would have already done that.”

Since the server outage, the Axie Infinity team has also released several game updates meant to keep things running smoothly. 

For now, the changes seem to be working. But in the event that the game encounters technical issues again, the Axie Infinity team has a message for its players:

“If you find yourself becoming frustrated and want to lash out please take a deep breath and remember that Axie Infinity is still in an alpha state.”