How to Get Your Friends and Family Playing Axie!
With the launch of the Alpha, we’ve seen healthy growth in the Axie community and have even started seeing mainstream users learning to play!
This week, we sat down with Muhd Amrullah, an Axie player that’s had a lot of success on-boarding crypto newbies to our application.
Amrullah’s on-boarding efforts first caught our attention when he posted a tweet of outlining his mother’s Axie adventure.
How did your Mom get started with Axie?
Getting mom’s adoption for anything crypto was tough but I had a plan. When I started playing Axie intensely, I made sure the catch music could be heard throughout my household. Everyone in my family got curious: “why isn’t Amrullah at his meetings or out to work?” So I told my mom that I’d play all day and treat her to food with the little Axie-earned ETH I earned. She was like, “that’s possible? From a game?”. So I began showing her how to kill the monsters.
She was very skeptical, but it was on the 3rd day that she came around and started asking me to download the game for her on her phone. With new users, you absolutely want to handhold them throughout during the download process. I had the Metamask mobile wallet set up, and we opened a laptop to look at the 3 Axies she needed. I explained that we should just look for Axies with high damage so we can kill the monsters faster. So she went about looking for it by herself and in 10 mins time, she came back and picked 3 that she liked. I paid for her Axies, and she started playing. But I told her I’ll need those Axies back. So that also worked because she knew that those Axies are inherently valuable.
How did you pitch Axie?
The gameplay with the battle sounds, music and the animations is amazing. That added a layer of fun that immersed my mom. Yes, she shrieks and gets frustrated whenever the monsters killed the first Axie, but good games take you through the ups and downs. Good job on getting the difficulty right!
Fast forward a few weeks, she still plays Axie. Sometimes I needed her Axies back but she always asked for it back by evening. so she could play in between her chores or work.
So key lessons:
Play with the music on.
Play as much as possible.
When someone shows a sign of interest, take the opportunity to download the game immediately on their phone. The game has a natural level of stickiness to it so let them be after that.
Let them earn those SLPs. They’ll love it.
The last few weeks had been fun because everyone that met me ended up playing Axie. It was hilarious. The fact that folks were comfortable interacting with Uniswap, Metamask after playing Axie was a big win for me.
What are you most excited about and what will help growth gain momentum?
I think there’s a small and steady momentum of using SLP to bootstrap users in Axie. I totally understand that it started out as an experiment, but I think it had a level of adoption that just means it needs more rocket fuel to it. More ETH or DAI inflow into the SLP economy will help players I feel. One way is to get breeders to prepare the starter Axie pack for beginners and let them pay and burn SLP to have “Promoted Axies” on the marketplace. Everyone’s gonna compete for attention and it can even be sorted with tags. This way the ETH/DAI stays within the ecosystem.
Folks I introduced to Axie are still playing Axie today. They like the gameplay, they like the PvP battles and they like that they are incentivized to keep playing. One thing that lacks is the internal communication experience within the game or out of the game. I’d like to be able to send a link to a friend (this can be a copied link that I can send over WhatsApp or FB to invite for a battle that immediately opens the app for the other party.)
More new animation, more content, more fun-ness too won’t hurt!
Any last thoughts?
Axie filled a gap that I felt was lacking in crypto adoption for newcomers ~ the ability for someone to earn their first crypto in a low pressure, forgiving kinda way. No need to punch in a card, no need to worry about what crypto is.
Perhaps now it’s time to onboard the 1.3 billion people on Earth who are stranded or quarantined at their homes 😉
We hope you enjoyed this interview with Amrullah!
The Axie Infinity Team
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