In my second follow-up on the question whether Pay to Earn is feasible I'm going to take a closer look at Gods Unchained's economy. Once again we are going to have a short look at what the game is all about. Afterwards we'll try to understand how their economy is built and how they try to implement a pay to earn model. As with Splinterlands, there are some concepts that I think work really well while others might need some fine tuning. So, without further ado, lets get right into it.
Introduction
Gods Unchained is your classical digital trading card game. If you ever played Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra or any other digital card came you'll feel right at home. Both players take turns playing cards, summoning monsters and attacking each other. As with most digital card games, you can't directly interact with the enemy while he is playing and instead have to wait until it's you turn again. While this is somewhat limiting the strategic depth it also helps to make the game more fast paced.
Overall the game is really well built, sporting 6 different factions that each have their unique set of cards and abilities. Anybody liking the games mentioned above should find Gods Unchained to be quite enjoyable. Most cards from both Hearthstone and Gods Unchained could be used in both games without changing anything expect the keywords. Consequently, what sets Gods Unchained apart from its competitors is not its gameplay but its economy and that's what we are going to take a closer look at next. If you want to learn more about the game there are a lot of articles around publish0x and the web to do that.
The basics
Gods Unchained is completely free to pick up. You can create an account for free and start playing right away. The game offers a starter deck for each faction that can be used indefinitely. While you are not allowed to make any changes to those decks and do not own the cards those decks are pretty solid and are more than enough to compete in the early ranks.
Once you want to create your own decks you'll obviously need your own cards. Currently there are three ways to acquire new cards: You earn booster packs just for playing the game, you can buy more packs directly from the game and you can buy (and sell) individual cards from the marketplace. So far Gods Unchained released two different sets with a third one to come soon. Interestingly they chose to differentiate between paid for and free sets. The former can only be bought while the latter can only be earned by playing the game. This creates some very interesting synergy and is what their pay 2 earn concept is built on.
The rewards
Every time you play a game you are awarded with experience. Earn enough experience and you gain a level up. Each level up grants you a booster containing 5 cards from the free core set. Those cards can be used in your decks immediately but cannot be traded with other players. In order to do so you need a second copy of the same card. Those cards are then fused and thus a tradable version of the card is created. In order to fuse cards you need a resource called Flux. Flux is earned by winning games but you are only rewarded for your first 3 daily wins with each champion.
The paid set has 4 different levels of card quality. While the card itself remains untouched it gets a more and more stylish border with every level of quality. So far there's only one level of quality for the core set but they do plan to allow fusing of already fused core cards in order to improve their quality level.
The market
Gods Unchained has a built in marketplace where both forged cards and cards from paid for boosters can be bought and sold. There are also several 3rd party sites where the cards can be traded as well. The game uses ETH exclusively for its transactions so in order to do any trading you need to set up an Ethereum wallet and link it to your account. It's noteworthy that you don't need a wallet in order to play. This helps crypto newbies to first get into the game and only care about blockchain stuff later. Since all transactions are done on chain you have to pay a gas fee every time you buy a card or want to withdraw the ETH you earned from your sales. While the gas fee usually is rather small this still is somewhat problematic for the game since it makes selling common cards much harder. If you spend 0.1 ETH the gas fee is less felt than if you buy a single card for 0.0002 ETH.
So does it work?
Kinda. The basic concept is pretty promising and you can tell that a lot of thought went into crafting their economy. Having both paid 4 and free sets allows them to reward their players with a lot of new cards without taking anything away from the boosters they sell. It's entirely possible to only play the game with cards from either set but all the best decks obviously use cards from both sets. This again helps the whole player base:
Paying players will still need cards from the free core set in order to build their decks. Since you can't control which cards you'll pull from your packs even very active players won't find copies of all the rarer cards in their boosters. So if they want to include a specific card they'll have to buy it from other players. Free 2 Play players on the other hand can improve their deck by buying single copies from the paid for set from others players, thus encouraging to leave their ETH in the system instead of retrieving it. Some of the rarest cards from the core set are worth quite a bit, some weeks ago I managed to sell a copy of a legendary card for 0.25 ETH.
Still the system does have its problems. While the core set offers a lot of cards and the amount of cards and Flux you can earn each day is limited each and every player only needs a maximum of 2 copies of any given card. This is making it increasingly harder to sell cards and obviously is reducing the value of all but the rarest cards more and more. Right now most cards are listed or at least sold below 0.001 ETH. This might temporarily change if the game manages to grow and reach mainstream adaptation since those players would likely buy some cards initially. More people playing would also equal more cards earned though so after a while we'd be back where we are right now. Making the card quality upgradable will help as well although it has to be seen how many players are actually willing to pay for a more shiny card border.
Conclusion
I like Gods Unchained and enjoy playing it. It might be the best title in terms of actual gameplay there currently is in the Blockchain world. Of all games released so it's the one closest to actually finding mainstream adaptation. It's economy is cleverly crafted and the combination of earned and paid for sets is a great idea. They reward playtime without reducing the value of the boosters they sell. I like their pay 2 earn concept although it has its limitations. The combination of gas fees and ever growing supply with fixed demand is making it harder every day to sell earned cards. Allowing cards to be upgraded might help a bit but I don't think it will fix the situation. While I'm really glad that Gods Unchained is mostly Pay 2 Compete instead of Pay 2 Win it makes it harder for them to push demand for their cards. This is something that Splinderlands does really well. In this game your upgraded cards actually become stronger so there's a real need to buy more copies of a single card.
We'll have to wait and see if they can come up with a permanent solution to this problem. Until then it's still possible to make some ETH while playing the game. I earned about 0.6 ETH in the last two months but most of this was due to some very rare cards I was lucky enough to pull. If you are not that lucky you most likely won't earn anything. I'd still advise anybody enjoying trading card games to try the game, just don't expect to get rich doing so any time soon. Ultimately it's really cool to be able to actually trade your cards and that alone is a huge advantage compared to Hearthstone and other competitors. It might not be the perfect play 2 earn game but it definitely is a great game to play anyway.
As always, thank you all for reading and see you next time.
