Inside the Philippines: A Key Window for Observing Web3 Gaming Trends
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Inside the Philippines: A Key Window for Observing Web3 Gaming Trends
The Philippines leads the world in the development of Web3 gaming.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Leah Callon-Butler
Translation: TechFlow
The Web3 gaming sector is on the verge of another explosion—just like Axie Infinity—and by looking at the situation in the Philippines, we can understand how Web3 gaming evolves.
The Philippines leads the world in Web3 gaming adoption.
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). In just one week, its DAU surged from 4,000 to 111,000. However, some have expressed skepticism, suggesting these figures might be inflated by bots. Even Pixels’ CEO admits that only around 40% of those DAUs may be real human players.
Yet, at last month’s YGG Web3 Gaming Summit in Manila, Philippines, Sky Mavis co-founder Jeffrey ‘Jihoz’ Zirlin pointed out that Google Analytics showed over 82,000 visitors—more than 25% of all traffic to the Pixels website—came from the Philippines. He boldly claimed these players aren’t bots—they’re Filipinos.
Bots are inevitable in any game with financial incentives, and DAU is an easily inflated metric because distinguishing bots from real users is difficult. But I have good reason to believe that Pixels’ user base may indeed consist largely of real people rather than bots. Back in the early days of the previous cycle—around mid-2020—I lived in rural Philippines and first witnessed firsthand how popular Web3 games were there.
Axie Infinity—the Beginning of Web3 Gaming
At the time, I was living in a rural area of the Philippines when I heard about a family in a neighboring province being banned from playing a little-known blockchain game called Axie Infinity. The game’s developer, Sky Mavis, had detected up to 20 accounts operating from the same IP address around the clock, prompting them to suspend the entire household’s access.
To appeal their ban, the family shared a video showing multiple generations sitting together on the floor, each actively battling in the PvP arena. It turned out they were all real human players. In hindsight, this video may have been the world’s first evidence of multi-generational DeFi users.
Back then, interest in the game was minimal—Axie had fewer than 500 daily active users in July 2020—but I found the idea of earning income through blockchain gaming fascinating enough to write a commentary piece about it. I had no idea what would follow.
After news spread that players could earn money from the game, millions of non-bot Filipinos joined. By July 2021, Axie’s DAU approached 3 million, with at least 40% coming from the Philippines. According to our estimates, their monthly in-game earnings reached approximately 2 billion Philippine pesos—about $40 million—equivalent to the total amount overseas Filipino workers sent home from Hong Kong that month.
As a result, Filipino gamers began referring to themselves as MFWs (Metaverse Filipino Workers). Axie’s utility token, SLP, became widely used for cross-border remittances, was listed on all major local licensed exchanges, and accepted by merchants ranging from dentists to dumpling shops. Hundreds of Web3 gaming guilds emerged across the Philippine archipelago, starting with Yield Guild Games (YGG), which raised over $21 million in venture capital funding, becoming the first Philippines-led startup backed by a16z Crypto. By November 2021, 17% of MetaMask’s 21 million users were based in the Philippines.
This boom triggered a media frenzy, drawing attention from other emerging economies such as Indonesia, India, Venezuela, Brazil, and Nigeria, all of which soon followed the path pioneered by the Philippines. I learned that whatever happens in the Philippines often serves as a precursor to global Web3 gaming adoption.
Why the Philippines Was Ready for Web3 Gaming
According to CoinGecko, for three consecutive years, the Philippines ranked first globally in interest in Web3 gaming, driven by its young population, high digital literacy, large unbanked population, and strong remittance culture.
As early as 2015, blockchain’s primary use case in the country was crypto-backed remittances, significantly reducing the cost and time for overseas Filipino workers to send money home. So when Axie broke through, people in remote areas across the Philippines needed almost no onboarding—they were already familiar with and comfortable using cryptocurrency.
Still, the sophistication of early Axie players surprised even the most enthusiastic supporters of blockchain in the Philippines. On any given day, a player might exchange pesos for ETH via official exchanges like Coins.ph or PDAX, transfer ETH to MetaMask, purchase NFT assets on open markets, send them into the PvP arena to earn SLP tokens, swap their earnings back to ETH via DEXs like Uniswap, and then cash out.
Axie’s Return to the Philippines
Even after Axie suspended its financial rewards in 2022, a small group of Filipinos continued playing purely for fun. That’s why Jihoz chose Manila to announce the return of Axie Classic with financial incentives. Because Filipinos are pioneers in Web3 gaming. And despite harsh criticism elsewhere for lacking entertainment value, the original version of Axie has remained deeply beloved by Filipinos.
When Axie Classic returned, some of my Filipino friends were genuinely excited. This was the game that changed their lives; this was the game that showed them the future possibilities of gaming.
The Market at a Turning Point
Based on past experience, I believe we are at a pivotal moment—on the brink of another explosive growth phase in Web3 gaming. The earliest stage of this cycle will be fueled by Web3-native innovations, such as the ERC-6551 standard we’ve seen. Then, once a new game or model gains traction, thousands of imitators will emerge—for instance, I’ve already seen proposals for GameFi versions of Friend.Tech.
Just as in the last cycle, many projects will appear. As the market nears its peak, everyone who left Web3 during the bear market for AI will return with polished pitch decks. This time, some will secure funding and experience massive but unsustainable growth. Eventually, when the market inevitably corrects, strong projects will see their prices and popularity decline—but not collapse entirely.
Everything that rises eventually settles—but at a level significantly higher than where it started, having gained more community members and more daily active users. This is a familiar journey for seasoned crypto veterans, but likely a first-time experience for many current Web3 enthusiasts.
Looking back to the start of the last bull run, I remember a Filipino family playing Axie on their living room floor. Now, as we enter the early phase of the next bull cycle, top Web3 game Pixels has surpassed 100,000 daily active users, and the debate over bots versus real players is raging.
This time, the price surge and evolution of Web3 gaming may be even more dramatic—but the signals are the same, and they all originate in the Philippines.
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