Billionaire and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban is weighing in on how blockchain-based play-to-earn (P2E) games can revamp their economy.
In a new interview with Bankless, Cuban, who’s an investor in Axie Infinity (AXIE), says that the game needs to find a business model that generates enough revenue so that it can create sustainable incentives for its users.
“I told them unless you’re able to create enough of an economy that you’re able to create productivity, meaning you have enough users that you can sell ads and sponsorships and NFTs [non-fungible tokens] and earn income from all those things, in order to buy the SLPs and the tokens, the Axie tokens from users, meaning its earned to buy them, then you’re going to run into problems.”
In Axie Infinity, users breed, trade and fight creatures called Axies. The game supports two crypto assets: AXS, the game’s native token, and Smooth Love Potion (SLP), which is the token needed to breed new creatures. Both AXS and SLP both massively down from their all-time highs.
At time of writing, AXS is trading at $17.63, down nearly 90% from its all-time high of $159.76. Meanwhile, SLP is currently valued at $0.004, a 99% devaluation from its peak of $0.36.
Cuban says there’s still hope for play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity to revive their economies.
“So we went from play-to-earn being this great thing, and it helped people in the Philippines, to ‘Okay, it’s barely hanging on.’ And no new play-to-earn platforms have succeeded that I know of.
If Axie would’ve gone in, and they still can do it and I hope they do – even though I’m an investor, I don’t really have that kind of connection with them to tell them what to do. If they’re out there selling ads and sponsorships and taking that money and buying tokens from the people who are playing to earn so that there’s some replenished economy, that works. If I buy one of those NFTs, you take my money you buy some SLP.”
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