Axie Infinity’s Lunar New Year giveaway is ending on February 20th. Players still have a few days to release their Axies to Luna’s Landing and get limited edition land items and tickets for the Legendary raffle in return. So far over 130,000 Axie NFTs have been released into the wild.
To celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year Axie Infinity will give players a guaranteed reward in exchange for releasing their battle Axie into the wild. The event started on January 31st and ends this Sunday, February 20th.
Players can win from a range of gifts, some rarer and more valuable than others. Participants will also receive three tickets for the Legendary raffle. Will the promise of Heroic Prizes be enough to entice people to set free their much-loved Axies?
Players can win one of five land items for each Axie they release. The chance of winning each one depends on the item’s rarity:
- Assorted Firecrackers (35%)
- Traditional Snack Box (35%)
- Blossom Tree (20%)
- Lucky Lantern (9%)
- Crimson Tiger (1%)
At the time of writing, over 46,000 Axie Infinity players have burned more than 130,000 Axie NFTs. And the rarity of the released Axie has no bearing on the prize a player receives. So no matter what Axie you let go, that valuable Crimson Tiger could still be yours.
Axie Infinity comes down from last year’s high
Last year, Axie Infinity was the talk of the town. But the distorting pressures of speculation affected the Axie economy in ways the platform is now trying to rectify. This Lunar New Year giveaway looks to be part of a coordinated strategy by Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis to manage the deflationary effects of oversupply in a jittery marketplace.
As well as offering people prizes for taking their Axies off the market, Sky Mavis has changed the rewards system in Adventure Mode of Season 20 so that players can no longer win Smooth Love Potion (SLP) by completing simple missions. Gamers need SLP to breed new Axies and the SLP token has its own resale value on the secondary market. Gamers were playing for hours and earning thousands of SLPs. This eventually led to an oversupply of both Axies and SLP. Coupled with recent drop in crypto prices, players saw the value of their assets fall considerably.
All of Sky Mavis’s recent moves are based on the fact that Axie Infinity is driven by growth. The chance to earn lots of money relies on new players constantly joining and creating more demand. And since prices have gone down, there’s less incentive for people to join. This deflationary negative feedback loop is not good for Axie Infintiy’s long-term outlook.
As the year goes on, it will be interesting to see how Sky Mavis copes with this balancing act of managing a sizable economy while creating a suite of entertaining games that keep players hooked. Sky Mavis recently invited third parties to develop games based on the Axie ecosystem. More moves like this will be key to the game’s future.
