'I Felt Like a Drug Lord': The Axie Managers Who Earned From Other People's Play

At the height of the Axie Infinity boom, Christopher Cruz, a 36-year-old Filipino businessman and crypto trader, was managing about 200 players. He took 60% of what they earned. On his best days, he told reporters for the Thomson Reuters Foundation's Context, he made as much as 600,000 pesos a day, about $10,800.

"I felt like a drug lord," he said.

Cruz was one of the people in the play-to-earn economy who made real money not by playing, but by owning. This is the story of the scholarship managers: the middle layer between the game, the guilds and the millions of players who could not afford to start.

How the scholarship business worked

To play Axie Infinity in 2021, you needed three Axies. In mid-2021 they cost about $200 each, and the buy-in later rose past $600. For most players in the Philippines, where roughly one in 11 people was unemployed during the pandemic, that was out of reach.

Managers solved the problem. They bought teams and lent them to "scholars", who played and handed over a share of their SLP reward tokens. The split varied widely:

• Yield Guild Games paid 70% to scholars, 20% to their community manager and kept 10% (the guild's founders).
• The Real Deal Guild, which sponsored hundreds of players, kept 30%, according to Bloomberg.
• Some sponsors kept as much as 90%, and some demanded earning quotas.

The managers who got rich

For managers with dozens or hundreds of scholars, the economics were extraordinary while SLP held its price. Every team they owned produced a stream of tokens every day, and they kept a cut of every one.

Cruz's scholars, mostly high-school students and gig workers from poor provinces, earned about 450 pesos a day, just below the 470-peso minimum wage outside Manila. His share, across 200 players, is what produced his biggest days. Elsewhere, a Filipino doctor who managed scholars during the pandemic told Context her earnings were similar to her regular salary.

None of these people is a billionaire, and none has a net worth in any rich list. But for a few months in 2021, the scholarship business was one of the most profitable small businesses in the Philippines.

The managers who lost

The same structure worked in reverse when the token fell. SLP was worth about 3 pesos when many players joined, peaked at about 20 pesos, and was down to roughly 0.16 pesos by April 2023. Daily SLP earnings fell from about 150 to about 50.

Gian Carlo McGlay, 32, a migrant worker who had once worked as a fisherman in Alaska, led a team of scholars who at first earned 5,000 to 10,000 pesos a week. He said he kept no profit himself, then lost about 1 million pesos, roughly $18,000, and ended up giving away his worthless Axie assets.

Why it was controversial

Critics compared managers to landlords, collecting rent on other people's labour, and some arrangements were tough on scholars. Commissions could reach 75%, and by September 2021, many scholars' earnings had fallen below the national minimum wage. Sky Mavis also banned several thousand accounts for breaking its rules during the 2021 boom.

Supporters answered that managers took the financial risk, and that the scholarships gave people with no savings a way into a game they otherwise could not afford.

WGC's take

The scholarship managers are the clearest example of who really earned during play-to-earn: the people who owned the assets. Some, like Cruz, made a fortune for a few months. Others, like McGlay, lost money they could not afford. Either way, the system depended on SLP holding its price, and when that broke, the whole ladder came down at once (the scholars' own story).

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