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Marketplace Royalty Fees

By

Alex

Saccardo

2022-05-12

Hello Mortals,

It’s InFinitySquid, Product Manager of Monetization on Gods Unchained. My role is to support the long term health and growth of the Gods Unchained ecosystem. As the game matures, we are regularly working on new ways to achieve this growth. One of the avenues you might remember from the Gods Unchained White Paper was Royalty Fees for secondary market transactions.

The Immutable X Platform currently supports certain fees on transactions, and one of these is a royalty fee. These royalty fees reward the original creators of the items being traded by allowing them to retain a small percentage of the transactions involving items they created. Gods Unchained will now begin implementing royalty fees on secondary market transactions of cards. Newly minted cards will have the royalty fee applied and existing cards will have the fees applied retroactively over the coming weeks. More details on this process can be found below.
Providing value back to our players and community is always top of mind for us. As such, 20% of the royalty fee will be contributed to the $GODS staking pool as is outlined on page five of the White Paper. The goal of this is to help create a sustainable Play and Earn ecosystem where tokens can be redistributed as rewards to active players.

Why royalty fees?

When we developed the White Paper, we referred to Royalty Fees as one of the methods we’d be employing as part of the development of the game. This is because we view this change as core to the growth and stability of Gods Unchained. As a result, we wanted to make it a commitment from early on in the project’s lifecycle. The reason for this commitment is that one of the most exciting aspects of blockchain games is the alignment of incentives between developers and players. This has typically not been possible with legacy business models in the games industry. With the introduction of royalty fees, we have the opportunity to create an incentive model that directly benefits everyone, including players and creators. This is achieved by redistributing a percentage of these fees back to active members of the community through a reward pool of $GODS tokens when the staking feature becomes available. This will ensure that all active participants in the Gods Unchained ecosystem can benefit from the growth of the game and that the secondary market will remain thriving as the number of players who make use of it increases. Whether it be more players trading cards, more cards being traded per player, or cards being traded for a higher value – all of these will benefit the Gods Unchained community by increasing the available rewards for those who choose to stake their $GODS tokens and actively participate in the game.

Why now?

We have several short to medium-term goals for Gods Unchained, and one of these is to build a really strong economic foundation for the game so it can last for years and provide entertainment to gamers all around the world. As we have shared with you before, we’ve got features such as Staking, Governance, Shine Fusing and even more in the works. All of these interact with one another from a development point of view, as well as an economic one. While these are being created we want to ensure that Gods Unchained is as sustainable as possible to enable us to deliver a high-quality product to our players.

Royalty fees captured in this way will be added to the existing staking pool rewards, in addition to $GODS spent in the Forge which now equals approximately 300,000 $GODS and the 20% allocations from pack purchases, which now is more than $660,000 USD of $GODS to be purchased. This is the first phase of the process of introducing staking and will add additional value to the pool that wouldn’t otherwise be available to distribute as rewards when the feature is launched. It is critical for us to maintain a balanced economy, and the development and release of our features are carefully planned to ensure Gods Unchained is built upon a sustainable model that can weather the ups and downs of the market for years to come.

How will this work?

Royalty fees will apply automatically to all new cards that are created going forward. In the period following the release, we will also begin retroactively applying royalty fees to cards that have already been created. This will take up to 2 weeks after the royalty fees are initially applied to all newly minted cards. Existing cards will be updated randomly over this period until all existing cards have the new royalty fees reflected. This process will take time due to the sheer number of Gods Unchained cards that have been minted up until this point, so we thank you for your patience as this process is completed.

Here is a breakdown of what the fees will be for different Gods Unchained cards:

  • Meteorite cards are the most common on the Marketplace and they can be purchased for the lowest cost.
  • We want to ensure our incentives as developers are focused on making cards more widely available, so having the bulk of our royalty fee revenue come from Meteorite cards is a great alignment between developer and player.
  • Diamond cards have a reduced fee compared to the other Shine levels due to the rarity of these cards, and the increased demand there is for cards of this Quality. We want to allow players to trade these cards whilst reducing the impact royalty fees would have on prices.

Card QualityFee PercentageApproximate Fee*Meteorite5%<$0.01Shadow4%$0.01Gold3%$0.04Diamond0.5%$0.07*Based on the Median Sale Value of cards at the specified Quality on the Immutable X Marketplace as of 11 May 2022

As a team, we want to show our players how committed we are to supporting the long-term vision for Gods Unchained that we share with our community. I am passionate about the long-term success of this project and I hope you all feel the same way. As the market grows for cards, so too will the rewards available to those who make use of staking in the future. As developers, aligning our incentives with our players is fundamental to what we are building with Gods Unchained. Thank you for your ongoing support of Gods Unchained!

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