In Brief:
- Sky Mavis said a spectator mode is coming to Axie Infinity: Atia's Legacy and that it expects the feature ready for the MMO‘s next playtest.
- The mode will let players cast matches, follow tournaments and watch friends, filling a gap exposed by Playtest 3, which ran July 1 to 3 as a PvP-only build with no in-game way to observe.
- Spectating feeds the game’s competitive layer: Playtest 3’s Trial of Eight carried a 2,500 bAXS prize pool and a 1 AXS entry fee, but non-players could only follow it through a Discord Stage.
Sky Mavis is adding a spectator mode to Axie Infinity: Atia’s Legacy and expects it to be ready for the next playtest, the team said in a post on X.
“Cast matches, follow tournaments, or just watch your friends dominate (or get rekt),” the post said.
Spectator mode is coming to Atia’s Legacy
Cast matches, follow tournaments, or just watch your friends dominate (or get rekt).
We expect this to be ready for the next playtest!Axie InfinityView on X ↗
No date was given for that playtest. The third test wrapped July 3, and Sky Mavis hasn’t announced a fourth.
Why it matters now
Atia’s Legacy has had no way for anyone to watch a match from inside the game. Sky Mavis has instead pushed viewers to third-party streams. During the first playtest, players without access codes were told to watch creators on Twitch and YouTube. For Playtest 3, the team ran an Axie Discord Stage with Jihoz, JaseTheWizard and Cruise_SM.
That workaround got harder to defend once the build turned competitive.
What Playtest 3 tested
The July test dropped dungeons entirely and ran on real-time PvP. Matches put eight players in a free-for-all on a five-minute timer, first to 10 kills, with kill-to-death ratio settling the rest. Every player used identical stats. Mushroom buffs scattered around the arena granted movement speed, attack damage or HP regeneration.
Five weapons were in rotation: axe, dagger, tome, bow and lantern.
Sessions were curated across the four days rather than left open, and Sky Mavis said the point was to stress-test latency and see whether servers held when players queued at once.
The competitive layer
The Trial of Eight ran alongside the playtest on DOJO, the community competitive hub, which added an Atia’s Legacy tracker for it. Entry cost 1 AXS and unlocked all three prize events against a 2,500 bAXS pool.
One event ranked players on wins, kills and K/D across reward sessions. Another counted eliminations. The third was a spelling race: every five kills earned a roll for a random letter, and players competed to spell out “TRIAL OF EIGHT” first. Rolls opened July 2 at 04:00 UTC and closed July 4 at 18:00 UTC. Entry had to be confirmed before Session 3.
All of it happened without an observer camera.
Where the game stands
Each playtest has looked different from the one before it. The first ran Sept. 25 to Oct. 2, 2025, mobile only, capped at about 1,000 community members, with players grinding Gold off enemies in Lunacia’s forests and spending it in a shop.
Playtest 2 landed April 8 after slipping from mid-March. It rebuilt combat around single-Axie control with a basic attack, an ultimate and a dash, cut Auto Combat entirely and added a 10-stage extraction dungeon where losing all HP meant losing equipped items and risking permanent Axie deletion. Roughly 6,000 players took part. Campaigns carried a 1,500 bAXS pool, and a referral promotion split 25,000 AXS among the top 200 referrers.
Sky Mavis has been building the game since May 2024 under the pitch “New Game, Same DNA,” with a global launch planned for 2026 and PC support planned for that launch.
The company is working against a brutal stretch for the sector. Twenty-seven named blockchain games shut down in 2025, with more than 300 others going dark without an announcement. Sky Mavis co-founder and chief growth officer Jeffrey “Jihoz” Zirlin said Axie was “too conservative” that year and plans to take much larger risks in 2026.