ZoA: Leading the gaming industry 🕹
What is the P2E craze and where does ZoA fit in?
It’s a beautiful albeit peculiar time to be in tech. Each of the sector’s nooks and crannies are seeing their own light of day and what were once obscure niches have evolved into cultural phenomena taking the world by storm.
We’ve watched online gaming transcend from a fad looked down upon by most to a near-trillion-dollar tech segment leading a cultural revolution. The average gamer now spends a whopping 8+ hours per week playing in the digital realm. Top e-sports teams and streamers are raking in millions, partnering with massive brands and commanding the viewership of billions across the globe. Being is a pro gamer has now become a dream for many, and the crème of the crop are looked up to like heroes.
Crypto has seen a similar maturation. What started as the technoanarchists’ pipedream solution to 2008’s global financial crisis manifested into the dark web’s default medium of exchange and has since become something much greater. Nation states like El Salvador now accept Bitcoin as legal tender, the biggest celebs in the world have verified NFTs as their Twitter profile pictures and incredible use cases like Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Play-to-Earn (P2E) games have emerged.
Paying players to play 💸
The simple idea behind P2E games is to reward players for their time spent in the game with tokens — both fungible and non-fungible. Let’s take a look at Axie Infinity–the P2E market leader–for an example of how P2E works.
Axie is a Pokémon-esque game that allows players across the globe to pit monsters — known as Axies — against each other in turn-based battles. The catch? Every unique monster is an NFT that can be bought and sold for cryptocurrency in an open marketplace, and you need at least one team of three to start playing.
Axies aren’t cheap either. Right now the cheapest one you can find online is around $800 — and the most powerful Axies have been known to sell for upwards of $600,000. Why would anyone spend almost a small fortune on a digital fighting monster?
First and foremost, Axie Infinity is fun. It’s Pokémon, but you can own your completely unique monsters, breed them, battle anyone in the world and play in highly competitive tournaments streamed across the globe. For those of us who grew up playing Gameboys this pitch alone sounds like a dream. But the real reason Axie has garnered global attention is because the game itself rewards with players with $SLP tokens during gameplay which can be traded for real currency at an exchange. And the amounts players are earning is nothing to scoff at, with many of them taking home well above their countries’ median wage.
Smart tech investors are paying close attention, with many having already taken the plunge. The P2E sector has grown like wildfire and its multi-billion-dollar valuation appears set to take an increasingly large piece of the $175 billion gaming market. Yet with questions looming about the long-term sustainability of Axie Infinity’s tokenomics with its $SLP token down over 90% from its all-time highs, this feels like the perfect time for a new challenger to step up to the plate.
Mercenary warriors, 50,000 years in the future 💪
Zone of Avoidance’s exciting yet strategic gameplay couples with unique tokenomic design to deliver a new standard for P2E experiences. On your journey towards the Zone of Avoidance, in your very own NFT spaceship filled with your strategically chosen squad of heroes, you’ll encounter increasingly formidable enemies protecting the Ethen, Onium and Berithium you’ll be hunting for. These resources will allow you to upgrade your spaceship, your heroes and even their arsenal of weaponry. These three resources are what we call internal resources because they’re earned exclusively through PVE campaigns and cannot be traded externally.
Instead, the NFTs you’re upgrading — spaceships, heroes and items — can all be traded on the open market. So while the resources you’re upgrading with don’t leave the ZoA universe directly, the NFTs you’re upgrading do, and it is the trading of these that forms the basis of ZoA’s P2E economy.
Check out our deep dive into ZoA NFTs and specifically how they are crafted and upgraded: Items and Hero Customization.
The most effective heroes and items for the battlefield will be constantly changing with ZoA’s constantly evolving meta. Players able to adapt will thrive while the one-trick ponies fall by the wayside in competitive play. Players will always be looking to the marketplace to find the items and heroes they’ll need to compete, and those supplying this demand won’t be us: they’ll be players.
Facilitating this entire economy is the $ZOA token. Players will earn $ZOA by winning fights, and high-level item crafting and hero upgrades will require them to spend $ZOA. And like Axie’s $SLP token, $ZOA can be cashed out or bought on crypto exchanges, giving players a way of earning real income just by playing the game.
Play for fun 🎮
Just like any game, ZoA needs to be fun. Playability is the driving ethos behind our game design and mechanics. Outside of crypto this would be the obvious thing to do, but with the sheer number of P2E games getting pumped out these days, many seem to have lost sight of what’s important. We love gaming, and we’ve been playing ZoA a bunch. And while our opinion may be a little biased, we think it’s a ton of fun and we’re excited for you to join us very soon. Stay tuned to our social media to keep up with the latest on how you can get involved, and check out our newly updated website here.
