Behind Pegaxy’s rapid rise and crash

Two years ago, Pegaxy co-founder Corey Wilton wasn’t looking to make video games. He just wanted to find more people who would play F1 Delta Time with him.

F1 Delta Time was one of the earliest play-to-earn (P2E) video games and the first to actually have licensed content. It debuted in 2019 and built a small, niche audience. To attract more players, Wilton used a very millennial strategy – he made videos about his playing experience.

It was his first time to make a video on the topic. “I just wanted to help some people come into the game and that was about it,” he says.

Vietnamese businessmen Ken Pham and Steve Nguyen were among the people who did see Wilton’s video, and they reached out to him on F1 Delta Time’s Discord server. Nguyen and Pham were already researching P2E games and considering building a horse-racing game.

Inspired by Axie Infinity

The three founded games studio Mirai Labs in March 2021. The company has produced Pegaxy, a P2E game based on the concept of racing non-fungible tokens of horses called Pega, which are supposedly the descendants of Pegasus, the immortal winged stallion in Greek mythology.

Pegaxy would quickly become one of the hottest games in the P2E space. It also taught the fledgling game studio a lot about what does and doesn’t work – and how to deal with a flawed product and crashing token prices. While the game has fallen from the peak – like many of its P2E peers have – around 53,000 people still play Pegaxy weekly, according to DappRadar, a platform specializing in decentralized apps.

But in early 2021, Mirai Labs was still thinking small: It had a modest goal of launching the game with only between 10,000 and 20,000 players.

Nguyen has experience in the games industry: He was CTO of Appota Group, a technology solutions and digital entertainment company based in Vietnam. As part of Appota, he helped develop Gamota, one of the country’s biggest mobile game publishers with over 15 million users.

This made him the natural fit to be Mirai Labs’ CTO. Pham was named as the CEO while Wilton, whose background is in branding and marketing, became the chief marketing officer and the face of Pegaxy.

Wilton points out that his confidence online, previous experience doing videos for other companies in Australia, and ability to hold his tongue when things get stressful made it easy for him to take on the spokesperson role.

“If I’m honest, that was a natural progression, and people just came to me for the voice,” he says. Tech in Asia reached out to Nguyen and Pham for this article but did not get a response.

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