To make all this clearer, I’m going to use a game some of you may be familiar with : Asphalt 8: Airborne. Other games can apply here as well but I chose asphalt due to my familiarity with it along with its currency system lining up perfectly with how money in Zim works right now.

The game has 3 main currencies: The golden basic credits, the purple Fusion Coins, and the  blue colored Tokens.  I’ll be calling the latter two purple and blue coins for both our ease while I’ll call the golden credits just credits because I wouldn’t want them getting confused with our (far more valuable and prestigious) actual gold coins, which also have an equivalent in the game. Now if you take these 3 currencies and try to equate them to our own money situation, you basically end up here:

• Credits = EcoCash/ Bank RTGS : usually the easiest to obtain and most common form of currency, general value depreciates all the time due to the real world/in-game economy and you need a crazy amount of it to buy anything of value.
• Purple Fusion Coins = Bond notes: slightly higher in value due to local economics, more viable than the preceding currency but can’t exactly be used everywhere. End up being used for specific uses.
• Blue Token = USD: most valuable general currency in the game, and has a rate that changes all the time in comparison to the other 2.

There’s other currencies and exceptions of course but the basic rules here hold up. The general credits have the lowest value, tend to be the easiest to obtain, can be used in the most situations and lose value the most just like RTGS/Mobile money. Even now Ecocash’s rate against even Bond notes is $200-300 more against the USD.

This is why the purple coins can be classified as bond notes, they don’t have much higher value than credits, but they can be useful for specific purchases in game that make the experience better like boosts in performance and customization for your car.

This is similar to how bond notes are the best option when taking public transport or buying vegetables at a flee market for example. However just like credits and RTGS, you’ll probably need quite a lot of them to buy anything significant, and in that case using credits or RTGS might be easier as they’re more easily obtainable.

And finally we get to our USD equivalent, the blue Tokens. They have the most value, can buy the best cars and perks in the game, and the other two currencies basically shift their value based on blue tokens . They’re also the hardest to obtain, something the average Zimbo can definitely equate to USD and ironically, you can use actual USD to buy these , with a whole system there that essentially warrants another deep dive.

But basically that’s the system, and it’s crazy how that in-game economy matches ours almost perfectly. Even more amusing (or frightening depending on your take) is how the game’s in-game economy has had it’s own “inflation” and multiple currency rebalances that have affected the pricing, rates and accessibility of all the game’s cars as well. Due to this being a mobile free to play game these changes were obviously made to optimize how the game can make actual money , but just like Zimbos aren’t fans of how our economy runs, very few Asphalt players tend to like a lot of these shifts, because unless you can horde blue tokens akin to Zimbos hoarding USD, you shouldn’t be surprised if a car that went for 80,000 credits in the game will be 500,000 credits after a major update.