Two Apartments and a Lost Salary: The Filipino Players Who Earned Real Money From Axie

In March 2021, a 22-year-old university student in the Philippines named John Aaron Ramos did something most people his age only dream of. He bought two apartments south of Manila for his parents. He had paid for them by playing a video game.

Ramos had started playing Axie Infinity in November 2020, earning up to 300 pesos (about $6) a day. Over the next four months, as the price of ether climbed, his earnings rose roughly tenfold. Bloomberg found him in August 2021, by which point he had also bought insurance plans and was thinking about investing in stocks.

His story was real, and it was not unique. For a few months in 2021, play-to-earn genuinely changed lives in the Philippines. This is a look at the players who earned real money, verified by reporting at the time, and at what happened to them when the economy behind the game unravelled.

A game in the middle of a lockdown

The Philippines went through some of the longest Covid-19 lockdowns in the world. Roughly one in 11 people was unemployed. Into that came a game in which a team of three cute creatures could earn a token, Smooth Love Potion (SLP), that players could sell on exchanges and turn into pesos.

In May 2021, CNBC visited Cabanatuan City, north of Manila, where Axie had spread through the town. A mother of three said the game had "sustained our daily needs, paid our bills, and debts". A 75-year-old shopkeeper played between customers. A pedicab driver and a recent graduate were also playing. That same month, a short documentary called Play-to-Earn, made with the support of the guild Yield Guild Games, took the Cabanatuan story worldwide.

The players who earned

Among the best-documented stories:

• Vincent Gallarte, 25, an IT analyst in Manila, was laid off in July 2021. He started playing the same day his contract ended, using Axies borrowed from the Real Deal Guild, which kept 30%. In his first two weeks he made more than 37,000 pesos (about $732), around three times what he had earned at his old job.
• John Aaron Ramos, the student, went from a borrowed team to running his own group, lending Axies to 15 players and keeping 30% of their earnings (how the managers made money).
• In Cabanatuan, families used the income for food, bills and debt during months with no other work.

These were not paper fortunes. Players were selling their SLP for cash, often every few weeks, and spending it on rent, groceries and, in Ramos's case, property.

The money around the players

It helps to see the scholars' earnings next to the money moving around them. By August 2021, players had created more than 2 million Axies, and trading in them had passed $1 billion. Every trade and every breeding paid fees to the game's makers and its treasury. Guilds and managers took their cut of each scholar's SLP. Above them, investors were valuing Sky Mavis at about $3 billion by October (the founders' story).

The scholars were at the bottom of that pyramid, and they were the only ones whose income depended day to day on the SLP price. A manager or a studio could ride out a bad month. A scholar who needed this week's pay for rent could not. That imbalance is why the same game could make some people rich and leave others worse off within a single year.

Success also attracted attention. In 2021, the Philippine government reminded players that their profits were subject to income tax, and Rest of World reported that Axie players were "facing taxes" for the first time on what many had treated as casual gaming income. For players who had never filed taxes on irregular income, it was a jolt: the game had become a job in the eyes of the state.

When the token fell

The weakness of the model was simple. SLP held its value only while new players kept arriving to buy Axies and the tokens needed to breed them. When growth slowed, the price fell, and every player's daily income fell with it.

The numbers from Reuters' Context in April 2023 tell the story:

• SLP was worth about 3 pesos when many players joined, peaked at about 20 pesos, and had fallen to about 0.16 pesos.
• Daily SLP earnings fell from about 150 to about 50.
• Daily players fell from 2.7 million at the peak to about 250,000.

As early as September 2021, many scholars were already earning less than the national minimum wage. Then, in March 2022, the Ronin network that carried the game's money was hacked for more than $600 million (the hack in detail).

The players who lost

Elaine Tinio, a marketing professional in Manila, played up to four hours a day. After early profits, she spent heavily on new characters. When the market turned, she lost about 200,000 pesos (around $3,600), roughly five months of her salary.

Her experience was common. The players who did best were those who started early, cashed out regularly and did not reinvest at the top. The players who did worst often joined late, or used their winnings to buy more Axies just before prices collapsed. By 2023, a YGG Philippines manager said scholarships were far less needed, because Axies had become cheap enough for anyone to buy.

By the numbers

• 300 pesos: Ramos's early daily earnings, November 2020
• 2: apartments he bought for his parents, March 2021
• 37,000 pesos: Gallarte's first two weeks, about triple his old job
• 1 in 11: Filipinos unemployed during the pandemic
• 2.7 million: Axie's peak daily players
• 20 to 0.16 pesos: SLP's fall from peak to April 2023
• 200,000 pesos: what Elaine Tinio lost
• $485 million: Sky Mavis earnings in the weeks after 1 July 2021

Why it matters, and what to watch

The Axie scholars are the strongest evidence that blockchain games can put real money in real players' pockets, and the strongest warning about how fast it can disappear. The players who earned were not foolish, and the ones who lost were not either. They were responding rationally to a game that, for a few months, paid more than many jobs. What they could not see, and what the game did not tell them, was that their wages depended entirely on the next player arriving.

Sky Mavis has moved Axie away from paying players to play, and its next game, Atia's Legacy, is being built around fun first (the latest on it). Many former scholars have moved on to other work, and some to newer crypto games. If a new play-to-earn boom comes, the 2021 record is worth remembering: rewards that depend on new players buying in have, so far, never lasted.

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.