A lot of mobile/web games usually let you pick, either you watch an ad or you pay a one-time fee to skip ads and get the same benefits, i.e. they go for the moneygrab over longterm adrevenue. We could've easily opted for a one-time zing burn or burning zing to avoid watching ads when getting the same convenience benefits, i.e. instead of waiting for your roster to revive you can just burn 10 cents of zing or watch an ad. We decided however that we'd prefer the game not to become a "whale's game" as we've seen how that affects a lot of games in the past.

Tbh burns doesn't make sense for such things, if the dev can't mint and sell the token on open market. Ads generate revenue for the dev, burns do not. What that means is that you can continue fund the development of the game with ad revenue, while token burns do not create any way to continue funding of the game.

I think you should consider HBD payments for skipping ads, you could even make it slightly more expensive than the ad revenue you would get. (If you get 0.01 per view, you can set the skip ads payment at 0.015) I don't think skipping ads would make the it a "whale game", because watchin ads or paying to skip them is essentially the same thing.