Dec 1, 2022
AXES METAVERSE CEO ANDREW ABRAMOV ANSWERS COMMUNITY’S QUESTIONS
2 weeks ago we launched the official release of Axes Metaverse on the mainnet. Right after Season 1 started, we set up a video AMA on our Twitch channel with Andrew Abramov — the CEO of Axes Metaverse.
We would like to share the most intriguing and interesting questions that were asked by our community. Stock up on some popcorn, we are starting now!
- Axes was released globally one week ago. More than one year on an unstable market. What is the story behind this? What are your team priorities right now?
“First of all, I want to thank all the members of the Axes team for their passion and effort in helping the game to be released.
Within one year, everything completely changed compared to how it was in November 2021. The market had completely changed, the GameFi area had completely changed, the majority of the p2e projects that were up and running and were successful overhyped a year ago now are not doing that good. It was a very interesting road since we had to constantly reconsider what we are doing with Axes.
In the end we came up to the conclusion that the economic model of the first wave of GameFi and p2e projects has failed, and we have to admit this. The model didn’t work. Since we want to be a long-term project that is sustainable and successful, we have to reconsider the economic basis of Axes. We had to reconsider what is the right way to launch and we got the idea that we want to create a hypered product for Axes where traditional game meets web3 game. And this approach led to the fact that we are okay to launch on the current market and we don’t care much about the whole stuff with FTX with BTC price. We want to acquire traditional gamers, bring them to Axes and mix them with the web3 gamers, as a crypto game that we have constantly been gathering for the whole previous year.”
2. Can you tell us a little bit more about what makes Axes Metaverse different from other games that involve people from web2 to web3? How exactly do you plan to breach the gap between web2 audience and web3 gamers?
“Right from the start we wanted to focus on the game part of the whole p2e or blockchain based games we make. So we totally understand that current projects that are on the market are not that entertaining to play. They have low retention, low lifetime of users. We wanted to take as a basis the product that is entertaining, catchy and fun to play and then try to tokenize it.
The second aspect here is that Axes is a skill based game, at least the battleground one. It depends on the player’s skill, it means that it’s not enough just to pay and invest and be like one among all of the early adopters to be successful in Axes. You have to be good inside the game. Since its skill based it is okay to onboard web2 gamers inside Axes. At the start, the majority of them do not invest or start investing overtime”
3. We already have a lot of bakers on our side and among them we’ve got Merit Circle, YGG SEA, HODL and IVC. What kind of partnerships with different projects, with different approaches, platforms or protocols can we expect from Axes Metaverse in the near future?
“It is another interesting point how the market has changed during the last year. When we started Axes, there were a number of huge gaming guilds and their part of the business was overhyped and during the last year majority of them were heavily investing in NFTs, tokens.
But during the last year the business model of the majority of gaming guilds has changed. They have the audience and they are thinking how to monetize it and they don’t rely much on scholarships as it was a year ago. So it was like about the previous and exciting partnership. About future ones, since we are okay with the game development and the speed we have.
The interesting upcoming partnership, since we are a functioning product, will be focused on collaborations with other GameFi related products to mix the audience and see how we can work together. It’s from the marketing perspective. From the technical perspective there is a constant development of interesting solutions in the renting space and in the NFT space. We are constantly looking for something interesting we can partner with and collaborate inside Axes.
Collaborations bring a lot of ideas which are already implemented among some web3 stores or other interesting marketing stuff. You can expect a lot of things from us during the Q1 and Q2 next year for sure and upcoming December will bring up some interesting stuff too.”
4. Can you tell us about our long-term plans, what are we currently working on, our future plans to expand Axes Metaverse into more games?
“We released the game on a crashing market and we are okay with that completely. Since the game is ready and functioning, as I said before, we want to acquire a traditional gaming audience. It’s one of the key targets we have inside the team for the next three months. The first thing we want to do is to increase the number of daily active users and then step-by-step we will try to adapt them to the web3 world. We will tell them about wallets, NFTs. How off-chain and on-chain heroes differ. In the end we are going to onboard them to the web3 space. We want to achieve that obviously before we launch the token.
As I said before, in the current market and the data we have from other projects it is very hard to rely on the web3 audience. It is very limited and its nearly 1.2 million web3 players and its 100 or 1000 times less than the number of traditional gamers. Obviously we want the balance between web3 and web2 audience. Once we will have enough traditional gamers and enough daily active users and the metrics will satisfy us we will be ready to launch the token. Probably by that time the market will recover. It would be completely insane to launch the token on the current market but we can launch the game and we can get a core audience during this period. It would be reasonable to wait.”
5. Back to the long-term plans. Are there any new modes in Axes planned?
“We are working on it as we stated a number of times. We will develop Axes into a metaverse step-by-step and you will probably see that we already have a PVP chapter which wouldn’t fit all types of player or segments and it’s not that deep in terms of the gameplay. We will release chapter by chapter adding more features that are tied together.
For example, Axes Islands are focused on grinding the resources, crafting stuff and items. This stuff can be reused in Axes Metaverse. We want some depth for the game and other game modes will add more and more content inside Axes.”
6. Any idea to add a Guild / Clan feature in Axes? Like Guild vs Guild or “tournament” feature in which a fixed set of players would play several matches and earn points in each match depending on their position.
“Yes, we will do it at some point, it is the logical development of the game. But first of all we have to grow the user base. Once the user base is big enough to create guilds, they will be created organically — in Discord, in Telegram chats, etc., and when this point is reached, we will implement the guilds inside the game.”
7. Are there any plans to turn Axes into a competitive esports game? Will there be an implementation of the fight mode with friends? So that you can add friends by nickname and invite them to the battle
“Yes, definititely. It also depends on the initial user base. We promised to create tournaments inside the game and it will definitely happen in the near future, I hope. It provides not only custom battles for players but also additional opportunities for marketing and collaborations since we would be able to create tournaments for example for certain guilds or between the guilds.”
8. Do you plan to launch an ambassador program to expand the popularity of the game in different regions of the world? Right now you have an active English-speaking community, and what about other languages?
“The Ambassador program is in development right now. Hopefully, its terms and conditions will be finalized by the end of the year. Once we see the interaction, we will know how and in which directions
to expand it. Spanish community and Turkish community are active but still very limited. When we see them growing, maybe with the help of The Ambassador program, volunteer or referral stuff, we will help to continue this growth.”
9. Also, what do you think: Gamers Guilds are good for GameFi projects or hurt their economy?
“From the business perspective it’s a win-win situation: Guilds are recruiting new players for the project and taking a huge amount of work onboarding and teaching these players on them. From that perspective it’s good. The situation gets worse when the Guilds completely overtake the whole early stage of the game. But I would say that’s not the case for us. First of all, we are a skill-based project.
Second, there are many opportunities and different ways to earn, one of which is leaderboards, where it’s hard to predict the outcome of each season. Another one is farming resources and selling them on marketplace: potions and crafting components that will be introduced in next game modes. So, we do not focus on a single way of earning the token.”
10. When are you planning to launch the token and how will you increase its value? How will you get players to accumulate tokens instead of selling them?
“As for the IDO, at the moment we have a web3 community. We also want to attract traditional gamers. Once we reach a certain number of installs, daily active users and daily active wallets, we will be ready to conduct an IDO.
We are expecting it to happen in Q1 2023 but aside from the things that depend on us we also have to pay attention to market conditions which we cannot influence in any way. We had an original idea to conduct an IDO in September and had lots of calls with our partners and investors about it. Most of them told us that it’s completely unreasonable to launch the token on the current market.”
11. What effective marketing tools will you use to promote Axes?
“We’re not focusing on the web3 audience since we already acquired it during this year. We are now looking into traditional audiences. We are published in AppStore and Google Play and can run acquisition campaigns with low costs and acquire thousands of installs daily.
That’s our main focus for now, but aside from that, we are working on partnerships and interacting with influencers and streamers.”
You can watch the AMA stream record on our Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/axesmetaverse
Feel free to ask more questions to our moderators on social media:
Telegram: https://t.me/axes_metaverse_news
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/axes-metaverse
Twitter: https://twitter.com/axesmetaverse
Official website: https://axes.io/
