On-chain grand strategy MMO Influence is officially releasing on Thursday, June 27th, allowing anyone to jump in and participate in a player-driven economy by buying a starter pack through the game's store on the Starknet L2 network in order to play to earn the Web3 title's only token: $SWAY.

How to Play and Earn $SWAY on Launch

For this first official launch titled “Exploitation” players will be forming the browser-based space game’s economy by expanding throughout an asteroid belt called the Adalia system. Players will do this by forming a crew of 5 different characters – you need at least one to start playing. You can have multiple crews. Crewmates come in 5 different classes: Miner, Merchant, Engineer, Scientist, and Pilot. The game’s wiki suggests new players to go with an Engineer and/or Miner-led crew. Purchasing the Basic Starter Pack will let you recruit 2 crewmates while giving you a starting amount of $SWAY and $ETH to help you get started. The Advanced Starter Pack lets you form a full crew while containing more of the aforementioned tokens.

With a crew now set up, you’re ready to settle in one of the 250k asteroids available in the space MMO. These are basically land of varying sizes that you’ll want to carefully and strategically choose as each of them contains different attributes and resources to mine. While asteroids can be owned by players, each asteroid also has a certain number of lots you can lease, so the lot you end up choosing will also have an effect on the resources you can gather. Leasing lots is a monthly payment in $SWAY. The token is also used to buy materials you need to construct buildings on your lot, such as a warehouse, refinery and extractor, all 3 of which are important to getting properly started in this on-chain sci-fi world. With them, you can start mining, refining and storing materials to sell on asteroid markets.

Since $SWAY is used as the core token for all in-game trading, and selling goods represents one of the ways in which you can earn the token. Other ways in which you can earn it include completing in-game missions and participating in in-game events, but also by providing liquidity and leasing asteroids and crewmates.

“Influence is for the player that loves the emergent gameplay and vibrant economy of Eve Online, the strategic focus of Stellaris, the sense of scale in the X-Series, and wants to own their experience and help shape their universe. It drives the player to answer the question: How will you expand your Influence?”

To encourage players to continuously expand across Adalia, there will be missions particularly focused on asteroid colonization, rewarding space explorers with up to 2.5 million $SWAY for being the first to settle on the asteroid. Making it to more asteroids however will require having a ship, which can be bought from other players using $SWAY or built by yourself at a Shipyard that you can construct on your lot. These Colonization Missions will be available for a limited, unspecified time.

After the release of “Exploitation” the developers will eventually move on to launch new phases that bring significant new features to the play-to-earn title. These are labelled as “Discovery” and “Conflict” and are said to introduce full-scale combat while allowing players to develop technologies and create new items.

What Are the Tokenomics of $SWAY?

$SWAY is the uncapped core token of Influence, designed to be fairly distributed based on the amount of player activity in an effort to “limit volatility and speculation.” This means that these actively-oriented emissions of the token grow depending on the activity of the playerbase, so the larger the playerbase, the more active players there likely are, in turn leading to a larger emission flow to “development and in-game incentives.”

As seen in the above tokenomics image and further pointed out in the official thread, the token’s supply comes with no investor allocation, and there are no tokens locked in pre-sales either, meaning more than 75% of the initial supply is going directly to the community while the rest will be possible for players to buy. 7.5% of the 130 billion supply has been allocated to a community-governed grants program called the Adalian Creator’s Collective, while 17.5 billion $SWAY will go to the future treasury of a new DAO that will be formed to succeed the current program.