AxieCon Barcelona
Delivered Sky Mavis' first in-person global conference — a sold-out, 1,000+ attendee event in Barcelona with a $1M esports prize pool, extended to Southeast Asia through an official watch party in Manila.
The challenge
Sky Mavis, the studio behind Axie Infinity, had grown one of the largest web3 gaming communities in the world — almost entirely online. AxieCon Barcelona was its first global, in-person conference: a chance to turn a distributed digital community into a shared physical experience, while still broadcasting every moment to the players who couldn’t attend.
That meant orchestrating a multi-day program across competitive play, panels and community activations, with a live stream that had to feel as polished on a screen in Manila as it did in the room in Barcelona.
My role
I worked as host and production lead, sitting at the intersection of operations and broadcast:
- Stage hosting & casting — anchoring sessions on stage and on stream, keeping energy high across long broadcast days.
- Production coordination — aligning the run-of-show across stages, talent, and the live-stream team so segments started and ended cleanly.
- Community framing — making sure the event spoke the community’s language, not just the company’s.
Approach
- Built a clear run-of-show that mapped every segment to a stage, a time slot, and an owner — the same process discipline I bring to operations work.
- Coordinated with the streaming team so the broadcast had a coherent narrative thread across days, rather than a series of disconnected sessions.
- Treated the in-room audience and the remote audience as two first-class audiences with different needs.
Outcome
AxieCon Barcelona sold out its in-person tickets despite the broader crypto downturn through 2022 — $150 tickets could be bought directly with crypto over the Ronin network, a payment experience native to the community it served. Over 1,000 people attended in person, bringing together the global player base, guild investors, and Sky Mavis leadership face to face for the first time.
To extend the event’s reach past the cost of travel to Europe, we partnered with regional players close to the game’s biggest markets. The Philippines accounts for roughly 40% of the game’s active user base, so local mobile-finance platform Coins.ph ran an official watch party — the AxieCon Watch Party — at Draper Startup House in Manila, drawing ~100 attendees (content creators, P2E guild reps, and local competitive players) with live narration through the finals. It’s a hybrid model that shows how a geographically distributed, decentralized game can extend a physical activation into the emerging markets where its player base actually lives.
Esports: a $1M prize pool across three tournaments
The competitive track ran on an aggregate $1,000,000 prize pool, paid entirely in AXS, produced in partnership with Community Gaming as the official tournament platform. The three-tournament structure was designed to do two things at once: give the “Classic” V2 game a proper send-off, and drive the competitive scene’s migration to the new Origins (V3) card-battle engine.
| Tournament | Prize pool | Scale | Champion | Format role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Axie: Classic World Championship | $500,000 | 64,000 registered in online qualifiers; 16 finalists flown in | Sebastián “Superchería” Pozzo (METAT8 Esports) | Official competitive send-off for V2 “Classic” after 21 seasons |
| Axie: Origin BYOD Tournament | $400,000 | 2,000 in-person players, own devices | Theeban “1437” Siva (METAT8 Esports); 3rd: Yield Guild Games (YGG) Elite | Launched the V3 “Origins” competitive scene in an open in-person format |
| Axie: Origin Stadium Series | $100,000 | Up to 1,024 in-person players/day | 2nd & 3rd: Yield Guild Games (YGG) Elite | Daily Swiss format where unbeaten players faced Sky Mavis leadership |
Classic World Championship — the closing chapter for 21 seasons of the V2 game. Online qualifiers ran July 28–August 21, 2022 across East and West divisions, drawing 64,000 players; half the pool ($250,000) was paid out directly during qualifying, while the top 16 won a fully-sponsored trip to Barcelona for the in-person finals. The title went to Sebastián “Superchería” Pozzo of METAT8 Esports — a former competitive Magic: The Gathering player who came out of a brief competitive retirement to win it.
Origin BYOD Tournament — crowned the first world champion of the V3 card-battle system, open only to in-person ticket holders competing on their own devices across multiple elimination rounds; 2,000 people competed in Barcelona. Theeban “1437” Siva, also of METAT8 Esports and a former pro Dota 2 player (Cloud9), ran a 12-set undefeated streak before winning a tight 3–2 final against @spamandrice.
Origin Stadium Series — a daily-access Swiss-format mini-tournament meant to open competitive play to attendees of every level. Players who finished a day’s rounds unbeaten earned the right to face Sky Mavis leadership (the “Axie Final Four”: Nguyen Thanh Trung, Jiho, Psycheout, and Zyori). Yield Guild Games fielded its “YGG Elite” roster here despite several members missing due to visa issues, still taking 2nd and 3rd place — and 3rd in the BYOD tournament as well.
Watch the broadcast: Days 1 & 2 · Days 3 & 4
