Is the Philippines Leading the Next Wave in Web3 Gaming? 🎮🎲
OPINION: The Philippines is shaping the future of web3 gaming, exemplified by the rise of new popular games and the country's significant online presence.
This is an opinion post by Leah Callon-Butler
Pixels, a farming game on the Ronin blockchain, recently became the first web3 game since Axie Infinity to surpass 100,000 daily active users (DAU). Shooting from 4,000 to 111,000 DAU in the space of a week, some skeptics poked holes in the figures, accusing the users of being bots. Even the Pixels CEO conceded that likely only 40% of their DAU were real people.
But, during his keynote at the YGG Web3 Games Summit (W3GS) last month in Manila, Philippines, Jeffrey ‘Jihoz’ Zirlin, co-founder of Sky Mavis, the company behind Ronin and Axie Infinity, pointed to Google Analytics data to show that over 82,000 visitors, or more than 25% of all traffic to the Pixels’ website, was coming from the Philippines. The players, he boldly claimed, were not bots. They were Filipinos.
For any game with financial incentives, there will always be bots. And DAU is an easy measurement to fudge as it can be very difficult to tell the difference between a bot and a real person. But I have reason to believe that the Pixels’ player base could indeed be more flesh and blood than it is chips and algos. Because at the beginning of the last cycle, back in mid 2020, the way I learned of the burgeoning web3 gaming phenomenon before most had introduced the term “NFT” to their everyday vocabulary was through another “Filipinos-not-bots” scenario.
The Game That Started It All
At the time, I was living in the rural Philippines and I’d heard along the grapevine that a family in the next province got banned from playing a little-known blockchain game called Axie Infinity. When the gamemaker, Sky Mavis, saw up to 20 accounts playing around the clock on a single IP address, they kicked them out.
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Disclosure: Leah Callon-Butler is the Director of Emfarsis, a consulting firm based in Southeast Asia that has represented web3 gaming sector clients including Yield Guild Games, Animoca Brands, Laguna Games (Crypto Unicorns), AMGI Studios (My Pet Hooligan), Blockchain Game Alliance and others. As an investor in the web3 gaming space, the author has long term crypto holdings in a variety of gaming tokens including YGG and AXS, which are both issued by companies discussed in this article.