Centralized web2 gaming industry incentives are designed to provide publishers and developers with a majority share of the success of any game. Gamers, as end-users, invest significant time and capital in these games but are left with minimal monetary incentives. Participants are forced to interact with a system that they have no control over. Traditionally, gamers have had no means to benefit from their investment of time and money. These one-sided incentives have necessitated the creation of a decentralized gaming ecosystem.

ZONE was created to give back to the gamers who interact the most with the games. The ZONE PlayFi platform aims to bridge the gap between web2 and web3 gaming by taking advantage of the best tools available for both.

To allow greater player engagement and bring new gamers to the platform, the Zone platform plans to support multiple blockchains.

Players from multiple blockchains will be able to play a variety of games together on ZONE without leaving their native blockchain. Users would only need to connect their wallets to the platform to begin playing.

ZONE is designed to be a leading cross-chain Playfi platform on Algorand with on-chain gaming challenges, game farms & NFT. Zone has created a free-to-play & play-and-earn ecosystem with real money prizes. The Zone protocol which powers the Zone platform is envisioned to be the open, decentralised competition layer of web3. The platform is architected to empower game developers from hypercasual to AAA esports to create competitions and simplify payouts from Zone’s PlayFi stack, allowing them to be accessible in a simple, non-complicated manner on web3. All this while giving back value to the end users for engaging with these games and allocating their time and monetary resources.

This unrestricted nature of Zone has the potential to become the hub for web3’s global gaming competition layer.

Game Types On Zone

Broadly, games on the Zone platform can be classified into the following categories:

Hypercasual/Casual Games such as Rummy, Solitaire, etc.
Skill-based board and card games like Chess and Poker.
AAA Esports.
Fantasy sports for Cricket, Football, Bowling etc.

Hypercasual and casual gaming

Easy to learn & play, addictive, minimalistic in nature, and made for every demographic — Hypercasual and casual games are witnessing unprecedented growth.

In 2017, the hypercasual genre took a 17% share of downloads in the mobile gaming sector among the top 1,000 titles. One year later, hypercasual games became the largest genre for downloads, and the sector has continued to expand its share further in 2020 to 31% of all installs.

(Source: https://sensortower.com/blog/mobile-game-taxonomy-report-2021)

Revenues in hypercasual games have also seen a considerable rise over the past couple of years. It is evident that hypercasual games have established their dominance in the gaming industry and changed the way gamers engage. Zone’s hypercasual games have been structured by keeping the user experience as the highest priority. Unlike several other clunky and hard-to-use blockchain gaming projects, games have a low barrier to entry and payouts are super-fast.

Zone’s accelerated development roadmap has seen the integration of nine casual and hypercasual games into the Zone playfi platform with over 14 other games planned for release. Keeping with the hypercasual spirit, the gameplay and participation mechanics on Zone are structured to be powered by micro-transactions of as little as 10 cents along with free-to-play pools.

Current Casual and Hypercasual Games on Zone:

Cubeform
Hoop Star
Bird Bump
X-Trench Run
Flip Jump
Zombies Are Coming
Knife Dart
Flappy Super Kitty
Samurai Rampage

Current Casual and Hypercasual Games on Zone

Skill-based board and card games

Board games are timeless classics that have been enjoyed by people for hundreds of years and have become a part of global gaming culture. Chess, perhaps the most popular strategic board game in the world with millions of daily players and over 2,000 distinct variants, is a testament to its popularity.

“From October 2020 to April 2022, Chess.com saw their number of monthly active users double from roughly 8 million to nearly 17 million.” — https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/crosswords/chess/chess-is-booming.html

The statistics for Poker are equally staggering. To provide some insight into how many people play poker, the World Poker Tour (or WPT) states that from online poker alone, there are 100 million online poker players worldwide, with 60 million in the United States alone.

Both Chess and Poker will soon be integrated into the Zone platform along with other popular games. Gamers will be able to participate in tournaments and monetize an activity that they participate in almost daily.

Interested gamers will also be able to host private tournaments by staking ZONE and inviting their friends to participate in them with Zone serving as the hosting and reward platform.

AAA Esports

The Zone protocol is designed to integrate with Triple-A games where relevant. These games are typically limited to only web2 participation and competition. The centralized incentives that we have talked about are usually the strongest in this category with the publishers having complete control over player economies, disallowing gamers to transport value out of such systems freely. Gamers could spend hundreds of hours and dollars in the game and still have no monetary advantage at the end of it. Web3 gaming on the other hand still lacks gaming titles that can compete in popularity with their AAA web2 counterparts.

The Zone protocol integrates these AAA games into the Zone platform using their API endpoints. Gamers only need to connect their game accounts such as Steam accounts to participate in Zone’s AAA Ladder tournaments. This allows gamers to continue playing their favourite AAA games in their native environment without installing additional software or changing their gaming style and earn rewards in crypto.

The ranking criteria for different AAA games are different and allow different types of competitions on Zone such as a ladder for the most kills in a week or the most assists in a game. The possibilities are endless and we aim to allow ZONE holders to be able to vote on formats in the future.

DOTA 2 is the first AAA game to go live on Zone! DOTA 2 players can now participate in ladder tournaments to play and earn ZONE and ALGO!

Fantasy sports

Fantasy sports participants manage and draft virtual teams of real professional sports players. Users compete against the fantasy teams of other players, over an entire sports league or season. Users that score the maximum points win money based on the performance of real professional sports players.

The global Fantasy Sports market size is estimated to be worth USD 19930 million in 2021 and is forecast to a readjusted size of USD 47940 million by 2028 with a CAGR of 13.2% during the forecast period 2022–2028. https://www.absolutereports.com/global-fantasy-sports-market-21040755

Clearly, fantasy sports are primed to be brought to the web3 gaming ecosystem. Web3 offers massive advantages over web2 fantasy sports by reducing fraud as every transaction is stored on the blockchain and data points can be verified using chain-based oracles. The immediate finality of blockchains such as Algorand also ensures that players are paid immediately and they don’t have to wait for traditional payment providers to verify and process their winnings which sometimes can take days to arrive. Web3 platforms can also allow players to invest not just in the games, teams and players, but also in other players, by earning a share of their winnings.

Zone will bring its unique web3 stack to Fantasy sports as well. A core idea of gaming on Zone is that players can play games in their native environment while Zone becomes the competition layer that connects players from around the world. Playing fantasy on Zone would not require complicated blockchain shenanigans. Zone will allow the creation of virtual teams right from the Zone platform in an environment that players are already familiar with. Fantasy players would be able to earn rewards from a dedicated reward pool that increases as more players join.

Zone Fantasy Sports, on-chain fantasy leagues powered by the Zone protocol.

Form virtual sports teams, stack up fantasy points
Emulate your favourite fantasy leagues on the blockchain
The best teams and players win the league and the prize pool.

Zone will soon launch web3 fantasy for football and cricket on the platform.

Gaming Modes On Zone

Zone has multiple gaming modes that allow for different types of competitions and tournaments. These gaming modes are how players challenge and compete with other players. Beyond introducing exciting ways to compete, the various gaming modes also ensure that gamers of all levels of skill can compete and earn on Zone. Various game types have different gaming modes on the Zone platform.

Gaming modes for hypercasual and casual games:

Zone Battleground — Team vs Team game mode
Zone Top Gun — Solo leaderboard ranking game mode

Both game modes are time-bound pools, i.e. players have to play and score within the given timeframe.
The rewards are given from the total prize pool.

Zone Battleground: Zone Battleground is a Team vs Team tournament that allows players to compete in teams.

Players are randomly divided into 2 teams.
The players in the winning team are rewarded equally.
Players receive multiple tries to score points and ultimately only their highest score counts toward their team score.
The team score is the average of all the players’ highest scores for a certain pool.
The pool can accommodate thousands of players simultaneously and the pool prizes grow dynamically as more players participate.

2. Zone Top Gun: Zone Top Gun is the solo player mode that allows players to compete directly for the top position on leaderboards.

Top players are rewarded with varying percentages of the pool prize according to their ranks in the pool.
Players receive multiple tries to score points and ultimately only their highest score will count towards their leaderboard score.
The pool can accommodate thousands of players simultaneously and the pool prizes grow dynamically as more players participate.

Gaming modes for skill-based board and card games

PvP mode — Player vs Player game mode
Team Challenge — Team vs Team game mode

Both game modes are time-bound pools, i.e. players will have to play and score within the given timeframe.
The rewards will be given from the total pool prize pool.

PvP mode: This is a direct player-to-player game mode. The outcome for PvP mode is decided on the basis of the final scores of each player. The player with the highest score is declared the winner and receives the reward from the total prize pool.
Team Challenge: This is a team vs team game mode. The outcome of team challenges is decided on the basis of final team scores. The team with the highest score is declared the winner and receives the reward from the total prize pool.

Gaming mode for AAA Esports

Ladder Tournaments: AAA games typically have various in-game modes such as classic, ranked, casual, practice, etc.

Zone Ladder Tournaments are tournaments that are scored based on player performance in such in-game modes of AAA game titles. Players connect their game account to Zone and join the Ladder Tournament for the AAA game they want to compete in and play games as they normally would. The Zone platform automatically calculates their scores and updates standings on the Ladder.

The players are rewarded with varying percentages of the total prize pool based on their final rankings on the ladder.

Link your gaming account

Join a Ladder Tournament

Compete and track your progress

Gaming mode for Fantasy Sports

In Zone Fantasy Sports, players choose a team of real-life players(draft), to create their own fantasy team. Zone then uses the statistics from the players’ actual games to compare and see how various fantasy teams have performed over the match or league. Rewards are then given out based on fantasy team performance.

Players can track how their fantasy team is doing using the Zone platform. Players can join leagues with friends and compete against only people they know or join public leagues hosted by Zone and compete against other gamers.

Zone Game Farms

Zone recently introduced a revolutionary gamefi primitive called Game Farms on its platform. Game farms allow gamers to play and earn with zero upfront costs, making web3 gaming more accessible to a global audience.

Game Farms allow players to farm various tokens by playing games without paying an entry fee while building their gamer stats and profile. Players can now play and earn across various games on the platform for a chance to participate in mega pools and future Zone PlayFi tournaments.

Partner Game Farms

Zone has been building strong partnerships in the Algorand ecosystem and has become the web3 gaming partner for top projects such as Pera Wallet, Folks Finance and AlgoStake. The partnerships see special Game Farms where gamers can farm tokens of our partner projects.

AFK Game Farms

Beyond normal gaming pools, Zone also offers exclusive gaming pools reserved for the holders of AFK Elephants, the native playfi NFTs of the Zone ecosystem. The AFK Elephants NFTs have various power-ups that increase with their rarity and class. The rarer the NFTs, the higher and more prominent the powerups become.

Learn more about AFKs here. Do you have an AFK Elephant yet? Buy your AFK here.

Zone Leaderboards

Zone Leaderboards track and show the performance of the best players on the Zone platform across various games and gaming modes. Players who top the leaderboards receive additional rewards such as bonus ALGOs and Gift Cards.

The Zone leaderboard also has various criteria that reward users that engage with the platform the most, such as players with the most games played, cumulative scores, most losses, etc, such that even players who don’t necessarily win every match can still be rewarded for their gaming effort!

In essence, the better someone’s gamer profile and gaming history, the better their chances of unlocking special rewards.

Gamers can track their performance on Zone with Leaderboards!

Zone Marketplace

The Zone platform features a marketplace for gift cards, vouchers, NFTs and other special rewards.

Players can easily buy various items on the Zone marketplace such as Steam gift cards, Google Play gift cards, Amazon gift cards, Riot and Valorant Points, PUBG Battle Pass, Free Fire Diamonds, etc using the tokens they have won and accumulated on the Zone platform.

AFK Elephant holders also receive special discounts and offer on the Zone Marketplace according to the rarity of their NFT.

For updates, make sure you follow us across our socials to keep up with the latest news as it happens. Don’t forget to leave a clap for us here on Medium while you’re at it!

Play and earn now at https://zone.game!

A Primer For Games and Gaming Modes On Zone: Everything From Hyper Casual Games, AAA esports, to Fantasy sports On Web3

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