Why We Are Building ZX Online 2.0

To be honest, I don't really like the word "marketplace." It sounds as if games are just SKUs on a shelf, and the people who make them are a line on an invoice. At ZX Online things are a little different. Or at least, we want them to be.

I've noticed one thing for a long time. When you open a game's page, you almost always see the same thing: a cover, a description, a price, and a "buy" button. It's all correct, all convenient. But behind that page is a team that spent months drawing, writing music, building levels, testing, redoing, arguing, and doing it all over again. Usually you can't see that. You only see the result.

And yet a game isn't just a file. It's the journey that led to it.

The problem isn't that there are too few games

There are plenty of games on the ZX Spectrum. The problem is how they live on the internet.

Often it all ends with a product card. The game came out, you can buy it and download it — and that's where the story ends. The team stays somewhere in the background. Devlogs live separately, discussions separately, updates separately. It's hard for a player to understand who is behind a game, what's happening with the project, and what to expect next. It's hard for an author to build an audience before release: until the game is out, there's almost nowhere to talk about it.

It's a strange thing. A game is a process, but the platform only shows the result.

We wanted to bring the process, the team, and the game together in one place.

2022

In 2022 the well-known events happened, and as a result many connections between countries were severed. That includes the delivery chains that let fans get new games on cassettes and SD cards, and the billing systems that stopped working around the world. ZX Online faced a tough question: shut down or keep climbing.

We thought about it for a long time. I won't pretend the decision was easy. At some point it seemed easier to stop: the future looked murky. But closing the service would mean losing more than just a website. Behind it were people, games, years of work, and a community that hadn't gone anywhere.

We decided not only to keep ZX Online but to transform it into something bigger — attractive, modern, and international. That decision is what version 2.0 grew out of. Not because we suddenly wanted a "redesign," but because the old platform didn't need a touch-up — it needed to be rebuilt.

What ZX Online is

ZX Online is a platform for ZX Spectrum games and teams. But not "yet another file catalog."

Here a game has a page: cover, description, screenshots, system requirements, versions, files, demo. A game has reviews and a rating. There's a wishlist — so you don't lose a game that isn't out yet or that you want to play later. There are updates you can follow.

Here a team has a public page: name, description, members, roles, projects. Not a personal account hidden behind a login, but the team's face. What a player sees when they want to understand who they're trusting.

And here there's a path: team → project → devlog → wishlist → purchase. Not a set of disconnected screens, but a story.

A team is not a "content provider"

In a regular store, a team is a line on a product card. Sometimes even without names. I think that's wrong.

A team isn't an accessory to a game. It's the people who make it. They have roles: coder, artist, musician, writer. They have projects at different stages: concept, development, alpha, beta, release. They have devlogs where they can talk about the process, show the first screenshot, explain why something was redone, share music or a discovery.

This matters not only for the authors. Players are interested too. When they see how a game is being made, they relate to it differently. They wait for the release instead of just noticing it in a feed. Seeing a familiar nickname of a well-known musician or artist in the credits, they immediately understand: this won't be a throwaway little game, but at the very least a masterpiece.

That's why at ZX Online a team is a full participant. It has a page, projects, devlogs, crowdfunding campaigns, subscribers. A player can follow a team even if they haven't bought a single one of its games yet.

We call this "the team as a product." Not in the sense of "selling the team," but in the sense of "showing it as carefully as the game."

What's already in ZXO 2.0

We started with the storefront, but we didn't stop there.

ZX Online 2.0 has a new catalog: search, filters, game cards, featured collections on the home page. There are new releases, top-rated, popular, games in development, and games you can play right in your browser. We tried to make sure the same game doesn't repeat across different collections and that fresh releases don't disappear after a month.

Game and team pages have appeared. Purchases, gifting, library, license keys. Reviews, ratings, wishlist. Devlogs. Crowdfunding campaigns and goals. Media: covers, screenshots, videos.

A team dashboard has appeared — ZX Online Forge, or "ZX Online's Forge." Here a team manages projects, shows stages, publishes devlogs, and tracks finances.

Money has appeared, and we want to talk about it openly. The service keeps 25%. Those 25% cover a lot: taxes, currency conversions, payment system fees, hosting, AI translations into other languages, and the work of the team that develops ZX Online. The rest goes to the authors. Revenue is distributed among team members automatically, according to the shares the team has configured. A developer has two wallets: top-ups and earnings. That makes it easier not to mix your own money with income from sales.

In the best year, ZX Online authors together received about €15,000 after service deductions. This isn't a promise to everyone and isn't a forecast. It's an example of what the platform can give teams if they make games and find their audience.

Notifications have appeared. Not one general stream, but a choice: which events matter and where they arrive — by email or in Telegram. You can set up notifications for yourself, or you can connect a team's Telegram group and receive news about orders, projects, and summaries there. The notification language is the language of the user or the chat.

Four languages have appeared: Russian, English, Spanish, and Chinese. A game and its text can be available in the reader's language. Machine translation helps you get started, but the final word stays with the author: translation is an assistant, not a replacement for an editor.

And one more important thing: the editor. One where you can calmly insert a table, an image, or a link and not discover that the layout has fallen apart. Text should look the way the author intended, not the way the editor turned out.

This is only the beginning

It's now completely obvious that 2.0 isn't the final destination. It's more like the first big step.

There will be more tools for teams, a better catalog, more opportunities for the community. Some things already work, some are still ahead. We'll listen to feedback and we don't promise "everything at once." But we do promise not to disappear.

ZX Online isn't just games. It's the people who make them. And the people who play them.

If you're a player — find a game you want to try. Add it to your wishlist: that way you'll see when the team releases an update or a release.

If you're an author — tell people about your team. Register it, add a project, and start a devlog. An audience doesn't begin with a release. It begins with the first story about what you're making.

ZX Online is people. Join us: as a player, as an author, or as someone who notices what could be done better.