'Play-to-earn' workers abandon hacked NFT game, stranding digital 'landlords'

gamesradar.com:

After suffering a hack topping $600 million in stolen cryptocurrency (opens in new tab), NFT game Axie Infinity is now dealing with a loss of "play-to-earn" workers which has essentially left the digital equivalent of landlords with a shortage of renters. 

The situation was neatly summed up in a recent tweet (opens in new tab) from Dan Olson, owner of the YouTube channel Folding Ideas. "The Axie Infinity devs' mentions are full of digital landlords pissed that their 'scholars' are all quitting the game and no-showing their weekly quotas," Olson explained.

While many players only view it as an economy to be gamed, Axie Infinity is nominally a creature-collecting RPG where players can trade their Axies, as well as the Smooth Love Potions (SLP) used to breed them, for cryptocurrencies worth real money. It's like a for-profit Pokemon breeder with a Farmville-style backdrop. The game's "scholarship" program was pitched as a way to loan out Axies to other players while collecting a portion of the resources borrowers generate, but because it's leashed to the value of SLP, its popularity has declined alongside the game's core currency. 

If this sounds like the way some people make a living by farming gold in games like Old School Runescape or World of Warcraft, often as an alternative to decimated local economies (Runescape, for example, became a home for Venezuelan gold farmers), that's because it kind of is, only it's been spliced with feudalism this time. The difference is that instead of land allotted by royalty, the wheels of the system are greased by NFTs. 

The state of the Axie Infinity Scholarships subreddit (opens in new tab) suggests that there are generally more people seeking scholars than looking for scholarships,