i am not arguing for either side and tried to point out that yes, for growth, new users are a must. it's just a fascinating story to me that $1.3B could spring up in 6 months and i posted that since revenue came solely from sales, they obviously needed new blood coming in. it will be interesting to see if something like this can stabilize. For the massive user profits, it 100% needs new players coming in. just like any other MMO game out there. but unlike Activision/Blizzard reaping 100% of the profits, players could partake in some of the profits.
It is not a 'recruiting' thing and you have the mechanics wrong. players did not seek out people to sell your nfts to and there was no residual income coming in from selling to others. There was so much demand that if you wanted to sell the nfts, you just listed on the marketplace and people coming in could buy them. after that sale, there are no financial ties between the 2 parties. The lure of quick 'easy' money was brining in new players by the 1000s each day. Everyone wanted to be a super user and set up several teams so the demand stayed strong.
The recruiting was from super users (people who put up $20K-$100K to buy 100s of nfts to create dozens of teams) recruiting mostly 3rd world citizens to play the game for them like a job and split the earnings. Each team made maybe $20-$50 a day depending on the strength of the team and how well and how long the user played. so outsourcing the labor for dozens of teams could pay off over time. Just like people playing hearthstone/pokeman, there were also 'professional' gamers that could make a lot more just from playing, but for the people who ran it like a business and outsourced the game playing, they just wanted a team that was 'good enough'.
unlike traditional games, which prohibit selling accounts/items/etc.. you could sell your nfts because you owned them without violating the Ts&Cs. RE: gas fees, aside from initially moving an L1 currency into the side chain, the gas fees were negligible (pennies) for all the gaming transactions. if a game resided on the Eth mainnet, you are right and it would not be viable. But almost all blockchain games use a side chain for in-game transactions for this very reason.
Axie is a real game that some play for fun, some play to earn a few shekels and a lot more are in it to try and extract a profit because they saw other do it before them.