Understand Gods Unchained, an Immutable Incubated Trading Card Blockchain Game in 5 Minutes

Source: Coinlist Blog

Compiled by: Gu Yu

Led by the former game director of Magic The Gathering: Arena, Gods Unchained is a free-to-play trading card game based on Ethereum, designed for both casual and competitive play. Players must strategically outsmart their opponents, earn cards, and build decks to counter various tactics. Unlike other games, players fully own their digital assets, allowing them to trade, sell, and use their cards freely—just like owning a real, tangible card.

Recently, Coinlist sat down with the Gods Unchained team to learn more about what they are building, the GODS token, and recent developments. Below is the translation of the original text by Chain Catcher:

1. What is Gods Unchained and how does it leverage blockchain?

Gods Unchained is a free trading card game where players engage in epic duels using fantasy cards. The game aims to fundamentally change how games operate; by using Ethereum technology, it provides players with true digital ownership and a way to earn truly valuable items. Gods Unchained offers true ownership of in-game items by converting them into ERC-721 tokens/NFTs. Players have the right to sell their items for real money, use them in Gods Unchained, and even embed them in third-party games and tools. This distinguishes Gods Unchained from the content offered in mainstream games.

2. Can you describe your target player? What types of players and use cases are best suited to leverage the economy and ecosystem of Gods Unchained?

Gods Unchained appeals to a global gaming audience. By combining AAA gameplay with leading blockchain technology, our vision is to pave a new path for trading card games and the gaming industry as a whole. This means we will attract all types of users, including but not limited to:

• Traditional trading card game players
• Play-to-earn players
• Digital TCG players
• Collectors
• General online gamers
• Influencers
• Creators

The trading card game (TCG) genre is a billion-dollar industry, and the time for disruption is ripe. The annual revenue of the digital trading card game market in 2017 was $1.3 billion, and it has been growing ever since. Gods Unchained is built and positioned as this disruptive force.

3. The competition in the blockchain gaming space is intensifying, with projects vying for players. Who are the competitors of Gods Unchained? How does Gods Unchained differentiate itself from these games?

At Gods Unchained, we don’t like to view other blockchain game projects as "competitors" in the traditional sense. There is a larger movement happening here, with the entire industry striving to change the current paradigm of player experience, where they derive no intrinsic value from their gaming time. We believe the following content will help us achieve this overall mission:

1. Exciting Gameplay: Led by former game director Chris Clay from Magic: The Gathering Arena, Gods Unchained offers a vibrant and competitive experience with a strong focus on strategy. We have thousands of players enjoying this game because it is fun, with gameplay and mechanics that rival mainstream titles.
2. True Digital Ownership: Gods Unchained provides true ownership of in-game items by converting them into ERC-721 tokens/NFTs. Players have the right to sell their items for real money, use them in Gods Unchained, and even embed them in third-party games and tools. This distinguishes Gods Unchained from the content offered in mainstream games.
3. Play to Earn: To foster competition and stimulate participation, players can earn meaningful currency and items simply by playing the game, including the ERC-20 GODS token. The ability to earn tangible rewards is a key driver of our future growth.
4. Epic Game Economy: The GODS token is designed to exist at the core of the economy, used by players to purchase new card packs and chests, craft their own NFT cards, and earn staking rewards. By incorporating GODS into key aspects of the Gods Unchained experience, it creates a sustainable ecosystem where players can achieve economic freedom to earn and contribute to the economy.
5. Built for Scalability on Ethereum: Our integration with Immutable X allows for gasless NFT minting and large-scale transactions with instant trade confirmations. This greatly enhances the user experience and enables the bulk trading of low-cost assets, which is a key feature of Gods Unchained.

4. What is the intrinsic value and use case of the native token GODS in Gods Unchained?

The GODS token is an ERC-20 token designed to be the core in-game currency of Gods Unchained. Similar to existing in-game currencies, the GODS token will be awarded to users through gameplay rewards, but unlike existing currencies, GODS will be scarce and tradable.

The four main use cases for the GODS token are:

• Crafting playable and tradable new NFTs: Players can use GODS tokens to craft new trading card NFTs that can be used in-game or traded on the marketplace.
• Staking: Staking rewards will be distributed to all users who qualify as active stakers. These rewards will be drawn from the Staking Rewards Pool, which includes GODS tokens captured in the Gods Unchained store, marketplace, and Forge (the system where players craft new NFTs).
• Purchasing Gods Unchained items: The GODS token can be used as partial payment for all purchases made in the Gods Unchained Store as well as marketplace fees. If users choose not to use GODS for payment or do not have enough tokens to cover the fees, 20% of the fees will be automatically swapped on the open market.
• Governance: Holding GODS enables users to participate in governance votes related to the overall development of the Gods Unchained ecosystem.

5. How will Immutable X enhance the player experience in Gods Unchained? How will it benefit the game's token economy?

As mentioned earlier, Immutable X enables Gods Unchained users to participate in gasless minting and large-scale transactions with instant trade confirmations. Since migrating Gods Unchained to Immutable X in late June 2021, community members have conducted over 744,000 secondary NFT transactions, all with zero gas fees.

This greatly improves the user experience, allowing any and all users to benefit from the bulk trading of low-cost assets, an option that was not feasible before the Immutable X solution became available. To become mainstream, we need to eliminate as many barriers as possible that may exist in the blockchain environment, and Immutable X's gasless transactions help us achieve that.

6. Many crypto games have gained popularity due to their earning mechanisms. How has your team won design by creating your game? What kind of user behavior are you trying to encourage?

With the launch of the GODS token, our team is very excited about the future of earning in Gods Unchained.

As we design the upcoming earning system, where players can earn $GODS from the game, we are focusing on several key challenges:

1. Keeping it free to play: This is important to us because we believe everyone, regardless of who they are, should be able to play our game, and we know many players currently enjoy Gods Unchained simply because they find the game super fun! Beyond that, we are looking for ways to engage our free-to-play players in our earning system.
2. Sustainability: Creating a sustainable game to earn within the gaming economy is challenging, and there are some important considerations to achieve it. For us, Gods Unchained must provide players with an engaging and enjoyable experience. It must never turn into a mindless click frenzy where players are just going through the motions to make money. Our goal is to create a game that lasts for decades. Therefore, we consider different audiences in our design: players who play to earn, players who play purely for fun, and players who value competitive gameplay. Our aim is to create enough value for the ecosystem and distribute it fairly among all types of participants, keeping the economy balanced.
3. Competitive Gameplay: As we scale our earning system, we will continue to introduce more ways for players to earn GODS. This includes ranking rewards and potential regular global tournaments where players can compete against each other for substantial prize pools.

7. How do traditional TCGs differ from blockchain/NFTs in the gaming economy? How do you ensure the in-game market operates freely while maintaining affordability in the game?

In the traditional card TCG gaming economy, players are limited by factors such as geography and accessibility. In the digital TCG gaming economy, players cannot earn value from their gaming time because they are essentially just granted permission by the game company to use cards in the game. At any time, digital TCGs can revoke users' access to their cards, which highlights the importance of blockchain in achieving true ownership. Additionally, the lack of ownership means that no digital TCG player can truly own their cards, and therefore cannot continue to sell them to earn value.

Regarding Gods Unchained, we focus on creating an in-game economy that everyone can use. By simply playing the game for free, users will be able to earn GODS, merge NFTs, and extract monetary value. This empowers them to choose whether to continue using that value to purchase additional cards or trade with peers. In terms of affordability, market prices are determined by users. Their accessibility is managed by them, as allowing as many people as possible to access the game and its assets aligns with their collective best interests. The larger the community, the greater the success for everyone.

8. What blockchain gaming trends are you most interested in for the remainder of 2021?

We are particularly excited about scholarship programs operated by different play-to-earn communities and look forward to exploring different ways we can introduce similar systems into Gods Unchained in the future.

Scholarship programs refer to individuals who own multiple in-game NFTs (managers) allowing free players (scholars) access to their in-game NFTs. This enables players to access various in-game NFTs that they can use to earn tokens in the game. The motivation for NFT owners is that they will be able to take a share of the tokens earned by the players.

We are very excited about this because it creates a whole new way for players to engage with the Gods Unchained ecosystem. Some individuals in Gods Unchained own thousands of Gods Unchained NFTs, and through scholarship programs, additional utility is introduced to NFTs, giving our community even more reason to continue building their NFT collections while we provide a new way for free players to access our future earning system with various NFT decks to choose from.