According to Jeffrey Zirlin, Axie Infinity intends to expand in South Korea, which they view as one of the most significant gaming marketplaces in the world.
Despite the legislative obstacles, Sky Mavis, the company behind Play-to-Earn (P2E) industry leader Axie Infinity, plans to “double down” and ramp up adoption in South Korea.
Sky Mavis co-founder and growth head Jeffrey Zirlin said on August 9 (local time) during the Korea Blockchain Week that despite the domestic P2E game restriction still being in effect, the “Korean market is one of the most important gaming markets in the world, and we have tons of players in South Korea.”
Zirlin continued, saying that the company is presently considering how to modify the Axie Infinity game for its group of Korean players:
“I think you know, we want to double down. We want to localize for example, Koreans don’t speak much English, right? So there are actually a lot of barriers to actually getting the game into the hands of Korean players.”
“But a lot of our top players on the leaderboard are Korean […] Koreans are some of the best gamers in the world,” he added.
Due to their rigorous anti-gambling rules, South Korea’s Game Rating and Administration Committee forbids the release of local blockchain P2E games. The government also made a move to prevent Google Play and the Apple Store from featuring such games in Korea in December.
“In terms of the regulation, it’s still quite early. It’s similar to the app stores where you know, it’s gonna be a process of negotiation and education,” Zirlin noted, adding that he hopes P2E adoption is enough to sway the government to walk back its hawkish regulation in the future:
“It’s really Uber as an approach right? They just launched, they got it into the hands of as many people as possible and once they had a critical mass the regulators had to go with it.”
The Axie Infinity project has not yet released an app through the Apple Store or Google Play; it is still in the early access phase. The number of players that logged in to play the game last month, according to Active Player, was around 766,000, a significant decline from the peak of 2.7 million seen in January of this year.
Currently, Axie Infinity is attempting to increase adoption — both in Korea and internationally — by enhancing the game experience and broadening its ecosystem with new fight modes like Origin, which as of mid-June had surpassed 600,000 signups.
“Origin is our main focus right now. So building that out and making it more immersive, adding in vertical progression, like runes and charms and body part upgrades to act as sustainable sinks [burning mechanisms] for tokens and making it more fun.”
“Origin crucially comes with three free starter Axies (NFT characters) so that people can fall in love with the game [without having] to make any economic or financial decisions,” he added.
