Valuations for the comparisons in this article are in USD (US Dollar) and written from the perspective of an American crypto gamer.
If you’re like me, you probably find the new territory of cryptocurrency and gaming exciting… and a little disappointing. While I could talk about the countless “projects” that have people dumping funds into them when they have no playable or useful product, I’m going to focus on the costs to get started. More specifically, I’ll be showing you screenshots from Star Atlas (a sci-fi space game) and Aurory (basically a turn based Pokemon or Digimon).
Star Atlas
Star Atlas is on track to, one day, be an expansive universe in which you can fly around and potentially run an empire. Think of games like Eve Online or X4: Foundations if you’ve played those and you’ll have the idea. As of right now you can do a number of things related to this upcoming game:
Register with the game and choose a faction to be a part of. There are currently three to choose from.
Buy and sell ships, resources, structures, collectibles (like the comic series they run), and more.
Lend your ships to your chosen faction to earn ATLAS, the native cryptocurrency of the game. This means that you earn a currency that you can turn into actual money!
Claim land/space for your chosen faction, which also gives you ATLAS.
Test out the SAGE Pre-Alpha browser mini game. You fly around in one of your ships and collect loot that you find.
Play around in the Showroom. The client is downloadable from the Epic Games Launcher where you can install it and play around. You can only get access to this with a key. These keys are given to players who have earned badges from the Faction Fleet staking system and extra keys are given to those who have higher tiered badges, meaning they can be given out to other players.
If you’re unfamiliar with crypto games, you need NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) that are used in the game in order to play. Think of it like this: you want to be part of a race, but you need to buy the car you’d be racing in first. You want to play basketball, but you’d need to buy a basketball and a hoop to get started. Makes sense, right?
So what’s the cost of getting into Star Atlas? Let’s say that someone was kind enough to give you a key to the Showroom and all you want to do is fly something around. You need a ship! Well in this case you can just buy a space bike. Let’s go to the marketplace to get one.
There is actually a good variety of ships and equipment to use, buy, and sell.
The Fimbul Airbike is the cheapest vehicle you can buy. While the initial supply that’s seeded by the developer starts at $15, you can get one from a player for just a couple bucks. Awesome!
What if you want to fly something else? Of course, that’s up to you. Ship sizes range from XX Small to Capital and with varying rarities. If you really want to buy a capital sized ship, be prepared to spend of money. There are ships on the marketplace that are selling for over $30k. No, that’s not a joke.
Now if you want to send your chosen ship off to your faction to earn ATLAS, you’ll need to provision it with supplies (also available in the marketplace). This scales with the length of time the ship will be away, meaning that the more food, fuel, ammo, etc. that your ship has, the longer it can remain in service to the faction before you have to restock it. The good news is that these resources are very cheap, each being fractions of a penny per unit.
Just about everything on the site will use either USDC or ATLAS to buy and sell. Some SOL may be used for approving certain transactions and it is definitely used to sign off on changes to your profile (very small amount). At the time of writing this, ATLAS is going for $0.00273
You can start playing around with Star Atlas’ economy and the showroom with very little money, but you can definitely benefit by investing more and utilizing their staking structure. It is definitely worth checking out.
If you’re a fan of Pokemon or Digimon, you just might enjoy this game. This is a turn based battle between your team of monsters, called Nefties, and someone else’s team. Yes, you can battle other players right now! You don’t even have to download anything as it all works through the browser. It seems the Unity engine was used in creating the 3D space in which you play in so it looks decent and isn’t too demanding of your hadware. Let’s get into what you can do with the game right now:
Buy and sell Nefties, Aurorians (think Pokemon trainers), eggs, skins, and other items.
Hatch eggs into Nefties that you either buy or earn from expeditions.
Play through tutorials.
Play against an AI team for practice.
Play against another person’s team, earning OKA or TOKE if you win depending if you used purchased/hatched Nefties or the provided free ones. These turn into AUR after a time.
Run around the hub area. My only gripe about it is that it’s currently just a 3D representation of the web pages that you can just click around to navigate. Why render a 3D game when you can just render a web page?
Send your Aurorians and their team of Nefties out on expeditions. This lets you earn the game’s native currency, AUR.
Stake AUR, which currently earns 9% APR in the flexible pool. No lockup! They do have a locked pool, but it isn’t giving any rewards.
So how do you get started? You’ll be happy to know that you can start without paying anything! You can battle the AI or another player by using the free Nefties provided. They will have basic, low-end stats though, so you might consider getting some Nefties from the marketplace and filter your search for stats that you want to get results in your price range.
Nefties aren't expensive considering the rate for AUR is about $0.56
Where it gets a bit ridiculous is if you want to do expeditions. In order to do those, you not only need a full team of Nefties, but you’ll also need an Aurorian. Aurorians are basically your trainers of any other monster game/show/IP. Why is this a problem? Well, let’s take a look at the market right now.
Not $27.95, 27.95 SOL
A screenshot of the cheapest market listings
Now, if you don’t know anything about crypto, you might think that isn’t so bad.
At the time of writing this article, the rate for Solana is $21.84. This means that at floor price, the absolute cheapest listing on the market at the time of the screenshot, that Aurorian will cost you approximately $610.43. You can also buy one with AUR, but that’s worse and there’s fewer listings. In the last screenshot, the cheapest Aurorian would come out to be about $728.
Consider this next screenshot.
Now it should go without saying that without actually testing it, I cannot say for certain how much the reward varies and how many different expeditions there are. However, this is still a useful insight into the approximate rewards you could expect for a three hour timeframe. 0.19 AUR is about $0.11. Of course you can earn other rewards other than the AUR, but it’s still an important factor to consider.
Can you earn your way through battling to aquire an Aurorian? Yes, you could. It would take you quite some time to get there, even if you’re staking every bit of AUR you can to help earn rewards faster.
So maybe expeditions aren’t in your scope for now, that’s fine. Maybe you can just buy eggs, hatch them, and sell the excess Nefties on the market for a profit? Let’s check the market for eggs.
This is looking much better
Good news is that eggs are really cheap. However, this is a crypto game and you could imagine that like most things crypto, there’s a fee to minting an NFT (since that’s really what hatching is). Let’s confirm this.
Confirmed. It costs 40 AUR to hatch one egg. That about $22.40 an egg. Considering that you’ll likely get a weak Nefty from it, you can’t just turn around and sell it right away. You’d have to build it up to be worth a higher price. At the time of writing this, I have not confirmed if this is the case or how fast as I have only played one match against another person and ultimately lost (they were good enough the finish my whole team with their last Nefty). If it is true, it’s not a bad thing as it is a reason to play the game and essentially build up the stock you want to sell (or keep for your perfect team composition).
Aurory is an excellent choice for those who are new to crypto gaming because you have the option to play completely free. It’s a fun, turn based, match based game that many people can get into. The current downside to expeditions is the big paywall due to the price of the Aurorians. The flexible staking pool for your AUR is very nice because you can freely deposit and withdraw at any time with no minimum waiting period. Overall I would recommend this to everyone to at least try for yourself and see if it’s something you want to stick with.
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