Two years after the bubble burst, are play-to-earn games still relevant in South-east Asia?

THE heyday of Axie Infinity now seems like a distant fever dream, filled with tales of people quitting their jobs to earn a full-time living from this colourful, Pokemon-like cartoon battle game.

During the last crypto bull run amid pandemic shutdowns, play-to-earn (P2E) games surged in popularity as alternative income sources, especially in emerging economies such as the Philippines. Leading the pack was Axie Infinity, a game developed by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis. At its peak, players from the Philippines made up 40 per cent of Axie Infinity’s user base.

The earning potential was so significant that it created a new category of workers known as “Metaverse Filipino Workers” – in July 2021 alone, their in-game earnings totalled roughly two billion pesos (S$46 million), equivalent to the remittances sent home by all overseas Filipino workers from Hong Kong.