In Brief:
- Sky Mavis has confirmed that spectator mode is headed to Axie Infinity: Atia’s Legacy, with the studio expecting the feature to land in time for the MMO’s next playtest.
- Casting matches, following tournaments and watching friends will all be possible through the mode — closing a gap laid bare by Playtest 3, a PvP-only build that ran July 1 to 3 with no way to observe from inside the game.
- The competitive side of the game stands to benefit most: Playtest 3’s Trial of Eight came with a 2,500 bAXS prize pool and a 1 AXS entry fee, yet anyone not playing could only follow along via a Discord Stage.
In a post on X, the team said Sky Mavis is adding a spectator mode to Axie Infinity: Atia’s Legacy, and that it should be ready by the time the next playtest begins.
“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 ↗
When that playtest happens remains unclear. The third round finished on July 3, and no fourth has been announced by Sky Mavis.
Why it matters now
Up to now, nobody has been able to watch an Atia’s Legacy match from within the game itself. Sky Mavis has routed viewers to third-party streams instead. Players locked out of the first playtest for lack of an access code were pointed toward creators on Twitch and YouTube. Come Playtest 3, the team hosted an Axie Discord Stage featuring Jihoz, JaseTheWizard and Cruise_SM.
Once the build turned competitive, that stopgap became a lot harder to justify.
What Playtest 3 tested
Dungeons were cut from the July test altogether, leaving real-time PvP as the focus. Each match threw eight players into a free-for-all under a five-minute clock, with the first to 10 kills taking it and kill-to-death ratio deciding the remaining placements. Stats were identical for everyone. Mushroom buffs dotted around the arena handed out movement speed, attack damage or HP regeneration.
The weapon rotation held five options: axe, dagger, tome, bow and lantern.
Rather than leaving things open, Sky Mavis curated sessions across the four days, saying the aim was to stress-test latency and find out how servers coped with simultaneous queuing.
The competitive layer
Running in parallel with the playtest was the Trial of Eight, hosted on DOJO, the community competitive hub, which built an Atia’s Legacy tracker for the occasion. A 1 AXS entry fee opened up all three prize events, which shared a 2,500 bAXS pool.
Wins, kills and K/D across reward sessions determined the ranking in one event. A second tallied eliminations. The third took the form of a spelling race: each five kills earned a roll for a random letter, with players racing to spell “TRIAL OF EIGHT” before anyone else. Rolls began July 2 at 04:00 UTC and ended July 4 at 18:00 UTC, and entries had to be confirmed ahead of Session 3.
None of it could be watched through an observer camera.
Where the game stands
No two playtests have resembled each other. The first, mobile only and limited to roughly 1,000 community members, ran Sept. 25 to Oct. 2, 2025, and had players farming Gold from enemies in Lunacia’s forests to spend in a shop.
After slipping from a mid-March target, Playtest 2 arrived April 8. It reworked combat around controlling a single Axie equipped with a basic attack, an ultimate and a dash, removed Auto Combat outright, and introduced a 10-stage extraction dungeon in which running out of HP cost players their equipped items and carried the risk of permanent Axie deletion. Participation reached roughly 6,000 players. A 1,500 bAXS pool backed the campaigns, while a referral promotion divided 25,000 AXS between the top 200 referrers.
Development began in May 2024 under the “New Game, Same DNA” pitch, with Sky Mavis targeting a global launch in 2026 and PC support arriving alongside it.
All of this comes during a punishing period for the sector. Twenty-seven named blockchain games closed down in 2025, while over 300 more went dark with no announcement at all. Sky Mavis co-founder and chief growth officer Jeffrey “Jihoz” Zirlin has said Axie was “too conservative” over the course of that year and intends to take far bigger risks in 2026.