Ember Sword
A modernized RuneScape playable in the browser.
Ember Sword wants to be a F2P sandbox MMORPG as RuneScape is. The game was built as gameplay first, will feature end-game PvE, hardcore PvP, an economy, level and crafting system, dungeons and much more. The game is running on its own proprietary game engine.
Dev Team
The BrightStar studio behind this game has its Headquarters in Denmark. LinkedIn shows 69 employees and on the website they have currently over 12 open positions. In this current uncertain economic situation could suggest a well-managed company and runway. The company was rated as the best company for internship in Denmark in 2021. A lot is run and developed remotely though source is glassdoor.com.
Land
As funding for development and runway land was sold off at already two instances with special early backing price of $40 per regular plot. There are four different types of plots and each will have different economic benefits in game. There is a total of 40.000 in Solarwood which is one of the four planned districts. Regular plots are not so rare. There should be around 37.285 regular plots (~0.08E), 1468 settlements (~0.7E), 384 cities (~11E), 348 towns (~3.5E) and 100 capitals (~NA) be in one district. It seems to me that besides the regular plots, every other higher tier land plot has already been heavily accumulated. Most likely by the bigger guilds as Animoca, yield guild etc. but that’s pure speculation as I have not done closer research to it and there could be alpha.
Utility of land
As a player, you will benefit from activities done surrounding your plot and all the other global plots. Players will basically share revenue via this system within the in game marketplace and player trading system. Depending on user adoption, large land plots as cities and for example capitals could literally be potential money printers.
Places to buy land or badges are for example Opensea, tokentrove and IMX marketplace. The listed NFTs on Opensea are on the Polygon network tho so you have to bridge your assets to the IMX network via the Ember Sword website. It gets burned on Polygon and recreated on IMX and takes around a day. Originally the game wanted to use Polygon and later on transitioned to ImmutableX. On tokentrove you will find a map where you're able to inspect where the actual positions of the plots are. I personally buy directly on the IMX marketplace. There are also no gas fees at all. I also believe in the long-term success of IMX also just because of this very simple reason (be careful about speculating on the token because of the insane unlocks happening till end of 2024). Gamers are not going to pay gas fees.
The land shows a distribution of 27% unique holders.
Badges (& the *Ember Token)
As I’m personally done accumulating these NFTs. I would recommend buying badges instead of land. There will be another three instances when land is sold, most likely as previous prices and discount suggest at $80 maybe $99 inflation adjusted. Meaning there could potentially be 160.000 plots of land coming out. Badges are promised to not be sold again and these have already been limited during the sale (5000 bronze, 2500 silver, 1000 gold and 100 platinum badges). There are four different types as seen in the picture. With each badge, you will also get airdropped a certain amount of Ember tokens over time. 10% on release and then 10% each subsequent month. One could argue that this Is some sort of ICO (if the token isn’t unlimited and easily obtainable in game).
The badges show a distribution of 75% unique holders. Which is quite good. Also knowing and buying during the sale, I could see this as being very accurate because it was quite frankly hard to do so. I think people miss the aspect that you most likely get the gaming tokes before everyone else and one could speculate on rare early in game items or purely on the dollar price of the coin. As the tokenomics are still unknown, it could be that the token is easily obtainable. There could be quite an quite high asymmetric R/R in this trade.
The prices of most of the badges are, as of writing, still under retail. The tokenomics of the Ember token are completely unknown. The token will be the currency for trading cosmetics, land, pets and rare items most likely other stuff as well. The airdrop and release of the token will begin with the release of the beta.
The developers stated that they will integrate player created content via something like the Steam Workshop. So, there could potentially be an endless flow of good ideas for skin, maps, game modes et cetera. Same as CounterStrike already have. Content creators get paid a certain amount upfront for their IP and then share a certain amount of revenue on the case and key sale. This model worked very well for Valve and the art team literally outsourced the entire development of the CS:GO skins to 3rd party artists.
Release
Early access to the alpha is early 2023 and with the beta update comes the white paper. You get access via holding a plot of land or holding a badge.
In a recent Discord AMA the developers stated that it’s really difficult to give a specific date and everyone should consider the release date and each step towards it to be completely open.
My personal opinion and conclusion
I trade in game items since the early release of the player-to-player trading system in Team Fortress 2 and I still do speculate on price movements and developments in the CS:GO economy. I could see this game doing well in general and really important that this game also has potential to do well in ROTW but mainly in Asia.
The development in the CounterStrike economy since the introduction to the Chinese market have clearly shown how well a player-to-player trading system can benefit players and traders alike with the success of a game in Asia if players are able to openly trade. Chinese love to drop money on ingame items and prices skyrocketed. Player owned assets are not only really sticky and fun for the community, a cash cow for the developers and also more then likely a big part of a fututre iteration of video games.
This game will be released on mobile and desktop, accessible via the browser. The crypto aspect in this game comes from the desire to freely trade in game items and was not build to accommodate crypto “game-fi” narratives. The game was already in development previous to the decision to integrate blockchain technology.
I also played the early alpha of a version of this game. Super easy to access, very fast into a game and character creation, smooth sword gameplay but just not much else to do then running and jumping around. There are videos of the alpha version on YouTube.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t trade between players and I haven’t seen any preview of the player-to-player trading system or the marketplace. I asked the developers in Discord if they could show something, but they haven’t until now. Usually, content updates are on Wednesdays in their Discord and in the subreddit.
#NFT #NFTs #GameFi #EmberSword #gaming
#IMX #Ethereum #blcokchaingames #mmorpg
#Thread #crypto
Like, comment and subscribe.