Phil's New Years Reflections on Axie Infinity
What a crazy year for Sky Mavis and Lunacians!
As we kick-off 2023 I wanted to share some of my personal reflections with the community around the crazy year since I joined and thoughts on the future.
When I used to work on Pokemon GO I felt the community was fanatical… but after joining Axie Infinity I learned I didn’t yet know what fanatical meant. I’ve had the privilege to meet so many community members now, and everyone’s passion continues to amaze and inspire me. Thank you to all the Lunacians still sticking with us and supporting the ecosystem after all this time!
Accomplishments
We accomplished so much this year. On the games side we shipped:
Two huge and completely new games in Origins and Homeland alpha. They both have an insane amount of complex gameplay, UX, and technical designs that the team put in countless hours of work into so they can be enjoyed by the community.
The Raylights mini-game with Quicksave where Landowners have gotten to collaborate with each other to discover unique plants and design the coolest Land plots.
The Builders Program which now has multiple builders creating awesome experiences for our community, such as Defenders of Lunacian Land (DoLL) where I regularly see people pushing for top Leaderboard spots.
This is not to mention everything that was done outside of core games for components such as the Marketplace, Axie Core, Katana, Ronin, wallet, and creator programs!
Challenges & Growth
There’s been no shortage of adversity too. In March, we experienced the Ronin Hack, which brought significant uncertainty. Thankfully our leadership team navigated with grace and a steady hand that enabled a swift recovery. Also within my first couple months I was basically boo’d off stream when I shared how Land had evolved, but today I'm delighted to hear the positive feedback from many of our landowners loving the newly released Homeland Alpha gameplay! Origins is still a work in progress, and has not yet reached our quality bar in terms of fun. It’s taking more major iterations and longer than we’d like, and we feel the community's frustrations, but we’ve been making major strides to get there as soon as possible. We know that Classic took 20 Seasons to reach a good state and many typical games soft launch for years before ironing out issues and fully launching, we are trying to move much faster than that.
Making software products is hard. Making games is even harder. Building games in public with massive scale on the blockchain with a ton of history takes things to a completely different level. When I joined Sky Mavis, I started working on unreleased games that had base mechanics and a lot of development complete. This, combined with high expectations from the community, was a new professional challenge. Also, as a company and product scales there are constantly new problems and systems that need to be put in place, and Sky Mavis scaled FAST. It’s been amazing to observe the company grow so much in personnel and capability across all areas including technical, design, communication, project management, marketing, operations, community management, strategy, business development, and art. However, there’s still a lot more room to grow and realistically, we’ll never be satisfied!
2023 A Look Ahead
We keep pushing because we are passionate about ushering in the new world of gaming where players have immutable ownership of their assets, and where this ownership allows for completely new types of fun game mechanics and models. This is a huge paradigm shift that continues to excite me. As the saying goes - anything worth doing is difficult.
As the web3 space got hit hard by the recession and the mercenaries that came during the hype cycle left, we saw our active player numbers and volume decline. This is expected and does not phase us. The community members that stayed are the missionaries who are aligned with the same long-term vision that drives us. We’re still only scratching the surface and have a very long journey ahead. I'm glad to have our community with us who understands the ups and downs that will come with building at the frontier of technology. Our focus for this year is to build strong foundations that will enable us to grow sustainably, and then put emphasis on growth. For example, before we drop millions of dollars on ads we need to make sure our onboarding and new player experience is extremely strong.
On that note, onboarding will be a major focus for Origins this year. Once the core game is ready we will pour a lot more resources into improving progression, accessibility, tutorials, and learning systems. There are also two layers of onboarding with web3 games, onboarding to the game but then also to web3 components that are unfamiliar to traditional gamers. We have to find ways to make this intuitive and seamless. I want a free player who doesn’t spend at all to be able to join our ecosystem, progress in-game, learn, enjoy, and eventually slowly onboard to web3 components at their own comfort with little friction. This will require some major changes to the game where it becomes increasingly accessible with more Axies, Runes, Charms, archetypes, and resources that players can obtain for free, but to become the most competitive, they will need to spend and interact with web3 components. This is necessary to allow us to grow both players in the game and people participating in our larger marketplaces and ecosystem.
Once we nail the base game and onboarding, then we can really start innovating more with unique web3 game modes and mechanics that can only be done with web3 games. This is where we will be able to get very creative to introduce game mechanics that no one has ever seen and web2 games would not be able to emulate. It’s one of the most exciting parts of being in web3 cause there’s so much to discover in this area that is still unexplored!
The same principles generally apply with Land too, but with a much longer time-frame. We still have many base game features we want to add like allowing players to use their NFT Axies in-game, the AXS game loop, and being able to just hangout in the Land metaverse together. Once we establish more of the basics we’ll eventually be able to add in the non-Landowner game mode which is the real unlock that will allow Land to be accessible to everyone. It’s a long road to get there but it gets me super pumped just thinking about the unique asymmetric gameplay we’ll be trying to introduce to the world.
We need more people at Sky Mavis to accomplish all of this. As companies have frozen their hiring, we continue to look for top talent for key roles in areas including Engineering, Game Design, and UX Design. Some of the challenges we’ve had can be attributed to resourcing issues and that’s something myself and others in the company are actively looking to solve. The people we have are amazing but we need more, so please refer any experienced rockstars you know in those areas!
As always, I expect the road will be bumpy but I look forward to another year of major milestones being hit, and getting a big step closer to our vision of a world where gamers have ownership of assets and can experience extraordinary experiences born out of that. LFG!!!