An interview with Sky Mavis co-founder Aleksander Larsen on staying play-to-earn after the hack, unfair criticisms, improving security, raising funds, and more
Ryan Weeks / The Block : Tweets: @lhm1 and @emilyjnicolle Tweets: @lhm1 : V good read on the play-to-earn darling that thinks it's an underdog 👇 https://twitter.com/... Emily Nicolle / @emilyjnicolle : even after sunsetting the game that made it famous, Axie's sticking by the controversial pay-to-win model. players of new game Origins buy add-ons to make their Axies more powerful but expire every 6-8wks, meaning they'll keep spending to stay competitive https://www.theblock.co/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The interview lands at the end of a brutal arc for Sky Mavis: after quadrupling DAUs to 2M in October 2021, the studio suffered the ~$620M hack, watched its token economy and player earnings collapse, and began downplaying the game's financial aspects even as it pledged reimbursements. Now it has sunset the original Axie Infinity and relaunched around Origins.
What makes this interview newsworthy is the doubling-down: rather than abandoning play-to-earn or the pay-to-win mechanics critics flagged when Axie's economics were compared to a Ponzi scheme, Larsen is defending both — with Origins players buying power-boosting add-ons that expire every 6-8 weeks, converting one-time NFT purchases into recurring spend.
First-order effects
- Origins players are locked into a treadmill of repurchasing expiring add-ons every 6-8 weeks to stay competitive — a recurring-revenue structure replacing the old earn-and-cash-out loop.
- Axie 'managers' who loan NFTs to scholars in exchange for a profit cut face a shrinking pool of new entrants, since their model depended on constant player influx that the earnings crash has undercut.
Second-order effects
- Fundraising now happens against the hack's shadow: investors must price in both the security rebuild Sky Mavis has pledged and the credibility hit from the collapsed token economy, making capital costlier than during the 2021 growth run.
- Rivals in crypto gaming watching Axie's trajectory must choose between defending open-ended earning economies or copying the expiring-add-on model that trades community goodwill for predictable revenue.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crypto gaming splits into two structures: subscription-like games with controlled, recurring monetization versus open earning economies — with the latter's sustainability question still unresolved since analysts first flagged it in 2021.
- Security becomes table stakes rather than differentiator: after a single exploit erased roughly a third of a flagship game's treasury-scale value, studios and their backers will treat custody and bridge hardening as core infrastructure, not an afterthought.
The trend: Crypto game studios are pivoting from open-ended player-earning economies toward controlled, recurring-revenue models as they try to survive hacks and collapsing token incentives.