Crouched at the ocean’s edge, her skeletal figure was a rude juxtaposition against the idyllic scenery of Seven Commandos Beach, a tiny island skirting the west Philippine archipelago. Once a tourist hotspot with hundreds of visitors dropping delicious pizza crusts and burger scraps daily, none had stepped foot there since the country closed over a year earlier.
It was always the plan to get them adopted. While we would have preferred to keep them, sadly, pet ownership doesn't gel well with a career that calls for constant global travel; I’m sure crypto people can relate. And now, with borders open, we are rarely at home. So, of course, I’m grateful that we were able to find forever homes for our rescue dogs, but saying goodbye was immensely difficult, and now there’s a giant gaping hole in my life where my pets used to be.
To put this into context: Imagine you bought a puppy from the pet store, but you can’t take it home. You can play with it anytime you like, you just have to go back into the pet store and interact with the animal inside its permanent enclosure. Most people will scoff at that, as they should! It’s ludicrous. But it underscores the difference between the Web2 and Web3 experience of ownership. Web2 pets never get out of the pet store, while Web3 pets are free to roam.
This is the frustration and devastation experienced by players of Web2 games that go down for extended periods of time or shutter altogether, and the graveyard of games past is strewn with tombstones of virtual pet titles. Like Club Penguin, a Disney-owned social network that had 200 million users in 2013, but didn’t allow any of them to port over their game items or coins when a new site was
During the first chat I ever had with Jihoz, in August 2020, he talked a lot about his vision for Axies to be thought of as virtual pets. He had a strong rationale, too, pointing to the amount that people spent on real-world pets – the global pet-care market isto grow to $326 billion in 2028 from $223 billion in 2021 – and how part of that spending could be captured by the virtual pet market since people were living more and more of their lives online.