P2E Games Secure its Dominance. Will Dragon Mainland become another Axie?

Time flies, the year 2021 has come to its final quarter. Many investors hope to search for a new direction by checking their market history in the Q3 and planning for the Q4. Based on available reports on the crypto market, gaming still tops the development choices of the blockchain industry in the Q4. Combining the ecosystem of PlayToEarn(P2E) and NFT, blockchain gaming has drawn a large amount of new users into the crypto world in the Q3.

Topped by Axie Infinity, P2E games have won huge success all around the world, especially in southeast Asia, where P2E has become one of unignorable ecosystems in the crypto market. Someone even predicted that P2E will become the next sensation in the gaming industry. Users will own their properties by earning real-world money while playing games. P2E games will sustain its momentum outside the crypto market.

Ever since Axie Infinity became a hit, an enormous amount of P2E games were created in the Q3. Only those going through challenges and difficulties can dominate a fair market share, and competitions are everywhere. Dragon Mainland is one of the popular P2E games in recent days. Similar to Axie Infinity, it launches a big airdrop event on Oct. 09. A presale of Dragon egg NFT will kick off on Oct. 15. Are you expecting Dragon Mainland with its attractive airdrop event? This article will compare Axie Infinity with Dragon Mainland and tell you whether this game will become another sensation.

Behind the popularity of Axie Infinity: the unlimited potential of GameFi

Axie Infinity is a game with virtual pet simulation and fights, it allows its players to collect, raise, breed, fight against and trade pets based on the Token. Its gross income in the Q3 is $781.6 million dollars, 48 times more than the gross income of $15.9 million dollars in the Q2, with its DAU increased over 10 to 100 times.

Axie Infinity’s value of Eco Token AXS has reached its peak at $155 dollars from the $0.54 dollars since the start of this year, an over-300-time increase. Even buying AXS in less than 10 dollars, before July of this year, without increasing the stake, will give you a near-20-time profit. At the end of September, AXS had increased over $100 dollars with an unstoppable trend of increase. Both corporate investors and retail investors have maintained their enthusiasm toward the game. Recently, a16z has led the investment into the developer of Axie Infinity - Sky Mavis - with $152 million dollars, and the daily trading volume on AXS has increased over $900 million dollars.

Different from the traditional free-to-play mode, Axie Infinity has created a brand-new model, Play-to-Earn, which will reward players for their time and energy spent in playing the game and building the ecosystem of the game, which realizes the P2E. 95% of trading profits belongs to players in Axie Infinity, and it puts emphasis on rewarding the players. This is the fundamental difference between Axie Infinity and traditional games and the reason why it became so popular within such a short time.

More importantly, the new gaming mode created by Axie Infinity has become a new economy model. Under the influence of the COVID-19, the P2E has brought new ways for people with low income or no income resource to make their ends meet, which even drew official attention from the Philippine government. Nowadays, the number of people joining the P2E ecosystem is increasing.

Through Axie Infinity, we are seeing the great potential of GameFi. The Website of CoinMarketCap has set up a special page for the P2E, an indicator of its popularity. Among the top 10 projects of the P2E sector, five of them have their trading volumes reached over $100 million dollars within 24 hours, and the other projects have theirs over 1 trillion dollars.

According to Dappradar, as for the size of users, the DAU of the two most popular games -- Splinterlands and Axie Infinity -- reached 300,000 active wallets addresses. Gaming DApp has attracted 754,000 active wallet addresses daily in the Q3, a 140% increase from the Q2. At the end of September, users in GameFi had increased to nearly 1 million, 200 times more than the start of last year. From the perspective of investment and financing, game developers or projects such as Animoca Brands、Dapper Labs、Virtually Human Studio、The Sandbox have won over millions of U.S. dollars from investors. As of the end of September, investments to GameFi have surpassed $1 billion dollars, and it was only $720 million dollars in 2020, fewer than $100 million dollars, a 10-time increase.

Ride on the tide, will Dragon Mainland be a surprise?

The explosion in popularity of P2E starts from the Q2, and the P2E was dominant in the whole Q3 without any sign of decline. Both from the increase of the user size and high amount of trading in gaming DApp, the P2E will remain at the top of the crypto market in the Q4. Based on the sustainability of P2E and the success of Axie Infinity, Dragon Mainland is halfway to its final success under the P2E.

Comparison of game mechanics

In Axie Infinity, players can collect and raise their own virtual pets Axies and use it to fight with other axies by choosing the mode PvP or PvE. Every single Axie is different, but they all have four basic traits: Health, Morale, Skill and Speed, which define their characteristics in fights.

In the fights, both sides can use their Axies cards to attack their opponent in turn, and different cards will produce different effects, which depends on the type of the chosen Axie. As of breeding, it takes 1 AXS (4 AXS as default) and a certain amount of SLP to breed, and every Axie can breed only 7 times.

Dragon Mainland is also a crypto game which includes the PvP and PvE modes in which players can fight, breed, trade and collect Dragon. In the game, Dragons can be upgraded and traded, and at the same time fight freely and breed. Different Dragons have different genes, which determines Dragon’s skills, traits and appearance. Every Dragon has five basic combat traits: Attack, Defense, Health, Speed and Live Force, which all base on their genes and hierarchy.

​​In the fights, both sides can use their Dragon cards to attack their opponent. Different Dragons have different powers. Dragons can breed with each other, but to avoid producing too many Dragons, every single Dragon can only breed 7 times and every reproduction takes a certain time interval. Besides, the reproduction consumes a certain amount of $DMP and $DMS, and how much it consumes depends on how many reproductions the Dragon has.

In order to ensure that the breeding of dragon conforms to nature's rule of superiority and suppress the proliferation of dragons, some dragons with poorer attributes will be able to be destroyed by being devoured. Only dragons with the same attributes can be devoured by each other and then it will be destroyed directly and cannot be recovered, for every dragon of the same attribute consumed, one of the four skills can be randomly upgraded. This mechanism will increase the rarity of the dragons and their value.

The basic design of Dragon Mainland and Axie Infinity is similar as of their game framework. Similar to Axie, players in Dragon Mainland can develop their own Dragon and breed and let their Dragons fight under the guidance of the Dragon Master, and the simulation and combat types are similar too.

The difference is that, Dragon Mainland has added multiple innovations in its design and elements, which made it an enhanced version of Axie Infinity.

Mystery box + 3D: an upgrade and innovation of gaming experience

In comparison to Axie Infinity, Dragon Mainland has made some significant innovations on the game design: firstly, the 3D game design provides gamers an immersive and virtual 3D world and a more real and fluent gaming experience. The NFT was also designed in 3D which gives it more dimensions; secondly, the mystery box of the “Dragon treasure box” has also added more mysteries to the game. The design of the mystery box conforms to the psychological states of younger players and keeps up with the fashion.  

Yield Aggregator: get the maximum out of the financial trait

Dragon Mainland has included DeFi features such as the staking mining in its ecosystem. Based on the speical strategy of liquidity mining in the DeFi ecosystem, Dragon Mainland has matched the DeFi perfectly with the game via the Dragon egg NFT. Compared with Axie Infinity, Dragon Mainland has strengthened its financial trait and will give user the best financial returns by using the best automatic compound interest strategy.

Players have two staking and mining options, single token stake or liquidity stake. The single token stake is to use DMS as the stake to gain objective profits. With the Dragon egg NFT, players can increase their original mining ability and increase their incomes. DMS(Dragon Mainland Shards) is the Eco token of the game, which can be used for payment, consumption, governance, staking, liquidity mining and dividends etc. in the game.

The liquidity mining is to add players in the revenue pool (ETH pool or USDT pool) which has liquidity and can be staked in order to win the DMS rewards. Through this double reward, players will not only earn trading fees but also other rewards by using DMS and other tokens.

Dragon egg NFT: a significant part to enlarge the ecosystem

The Genesis Dragon eggs produce the Dragon. On Oct. 15, Dragon Mainland will start the presale of the Dragon egg NFT, with an estimated 10,000 Geneses with which players can kick off their journey in the Dragon Mainland. Dragon Mainland has five types of different Dragon eggs, which are the Fire dragon, Water dragon, Rock dragon, Storm dragon, Thunder dragon, each with different attack and defense traits, and they can breed and attack each other to maintain the equilibrium of forces.

The Genesis Dragon Eggs is like the Axie in Axie Infinity, which has 140,000 Axies currently and every Axie has its own traits -- a NFT with different traits and strengths. There are over 380,000 Axies as the NFT, but there are only 10,000 Genesis Dragon Eggs. The NFT is fundamentally about the scarcity, the fewer the pricier. With only one 38 of the amount of Axie, if the Genesis Dragon Eggs releases its full strength, how much more valuable will it be than the Axie?

Conclusion

In the Q3 of 2021, Axie Infinity has successfully developed its own territory in the competitive crypto market by the P2E and led and dominated the development of the whole market.

Riding on the tide of this, the new generation game, Dragon Mainland, has gone on the stage, and it aims to build a completely decentralized and autonomous world of blockchain games which was created by open-source codes. If the game is deployed, developers will not be able to control it anymore. The community of DAO will be able to confirm all stuff and operations without the participation of the third party. Dragon Mainland has not only enriched the gaming ecosystem, allowing users to have richer gaming experience and income options, but also expanded the market territory of the blockchain game, promoting it to develop further.

With the renewal and upgrade of the P2E, crypto games will gradually involve more users and enter into the mainstream market. Its spillover effect will bring more users to the blockchain world, allowing the ecosystem to have a more diverse development with more possibilities.