INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
People seem to love the concept of the battle pass.
Largely popularized by Fortnite, battle passes reward players for playing well, and
The better you do, the more XP you earn; the more XP you earn, the more stuff (new looks for your character, or victory dances to fire off
at the end of a gunfight) you unlock
Willing to cough up a few bucks for an optional &premium& battle pass? That&ll open up a whole new set of rewards
The model has made its way into countless games over the last couple of years, from PUBG to Rocket League.
Zelos, an LA-based company out of
Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch, is aiming to make that same concept work across multiple games
Tackle challenges in one game, earn rewards for another — or use your points to buy new games altogether.
Each day, Zelos offers up a
handful of challenges across each of the games it supports, like dealing 10,000 damage in League of Legends or getting five kills with
Completing a challenge earns you &zips&; most challenges I&ve seen will earn the player somewhere between 15 and 150 zips, depending on how
tough it is to pull off.
Once you&ve pooled up a pile of zips, they can be redeemed for all sorts of virtual goodies
The more something would cost otherwise, the more zips it&ll require
For example, 60,000 zips gets you a $5 Steam gift card — or 90,000 zips for $10 worth of Apex Coins
Once you get into the 50,000-200,000 zip range, you can redeem them for digital download codes for games like Rainbow Six Siege, Monster
Hunter: World and Tabletop Simulator
Getting the good stuff can mean completing a lot of challenges, but remember: these are games people are playing anyway.
In addition to
zips, each challenge earns the player a bit of EXP
EXP levels up your Zelos profile; with each level, you unlock a bundle of zips, additional challenges and items for your Zelos avatar.
Zelos
is currently issuing challenges and tracking stats across seven games: Fortnite, Apex, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, DOTA 2, Counter
Strike: GO and Clash Royale
Stat tracking works a bit better in some games than it does in others, depending on how open a game developers are with the data
With League of Legends, for example, they&re able to ping Riot Games& dedicated API for a rich backlog of match data; with Apex, on the
other hand, they&re limited to pulling stats based on a handful of unlockable trackers players can flip on between matches.
Zelos co-founder
Jeffrey Tong tells me they&re focused on ensuring they stay above board with the data they pull, making sure they comply with each provider
That makes sense, of course: Getting on a developer bad side could mean losing access to the data firehouse, in turn squashing Zelos&
ability to support a game
The more popular games Zelos can support, the better the whole idea works.
So if they&re giving stuff away based on challenges in games they
themselves aren&t selling… how will they make money? The same way the aforementioned games do: a premium battle pass
Tong tells me that they&re currently testing a subscription-based battle pass that&ll unlock new challenges, award more prizes and increase
the rate at which points are earned.
This isn&t Tong first foray into the gaming space; he previously built and sold OverStats, an analytics
system for tracking a player esports stats over time
Co-founder Derek Chiang, meanwhile, was previously a senior software engineer at the decentralized computing company Dfinity.
Tong tells me
they raised $2.8 million in the days after YC demo day, eyeing expansion of the platform, supported games and their team
The Zelos team is currently three people, with plans to hire another &six or seven& in the coming weeks
They&re currently seeing more than 50,000 weekly active users, with 55% of their users playing two or more games on the platform.
