Building a irst-of-its-kind in-game Player-to-Player marketplace Ember Sword Integration Partnership with Digital Collectibles Marketplace OpenSea

Sune Thorsen
Ember Sword
Published in
4 min readFeb 15, 2019

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Today, we’re excited to announce a new strategic partnership with OpenSea, the largest digital marketplace for trading of cosmetic gaming collectibles.

As part of the new partnership, we will be working closely with OpenSea to develop and utilize a custom version of their infrastructure and SDK as the foundation of the player-to-player marketplace for cosmetic collectible items inside Ember Sword.

We like to think about OpenSea as the Ebay for video game cosmetic collectible items.

It has always been our top priority that the Ember Sword in-game marketplace is both secure and user-friendly, and through our partnership with OpenSea, we can ensure both while saving precious development time, which frees up more time to work on gameplay features and balancing.

“We’re excited to partner with Ember Sword for the development of an in-game peer-to-peer marketplace, as we’ve been very impressed with both the team and early gameplay,” said OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer.

A New Type of Marketplace

This first-of-its-kind Ember Sword marketplace will allow players to freely trade their in-game premium cosmetic items, like skins and emotes, at ease using Ember Sword’s premium currency — the PIXEL Token. A currency that exists in a scarce supply and is powered by the Ethereum blockchain, which means players can optionally sell the PIXEL Token for USD on decentralized exchanges to turn a profit from the cosmetic items they’ve acquired in-game.

Players trade game cosmetics, skins, and accounts for billions of dollars every year on illegal and insecure black markets already, but in Ember Sword, these items can be traded legally within the game’s secure ecosystem.

Unlike traditional video games like Fortnite and Counter-Strike where cosmetic items exist in infinite supply and are all completely identical, cosmetics in Ember Sword all have a unique item history, exist in a finite supply, and are rewarded to players through in-game activities and competitions, turning each item into a true digital collectible.

Why we’re partnering with OpenSea

We chose to work with OpenSea because they’re poised to become the leading marketplace for the user-owned digital collectibles that are at the very backbone of the next revolution in Free-to-Play monetization — and we’re thrilled to partner with their talented team to create the best possible experience for our players.

Additionally, we’re also exploring making it easy for our players to add all their Ember Sword cosmetic items to the OpenSea platform, which already boasts over 1 million digital collectibles for sale.

About OpenSea

OpenSea is the first peer-to-peer marketplace for blockchain-based assets which include collectibles, gaming items, and other assets backed by blockchain. The OpenSea team has backgrounds from Stanford, Palantir, Google, and Pinterest and is funded by YCombinator, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, 1Confirmation, and Blockchain Capital.

OpenSea is currently the largest general marketplace for user-owned digital items with the broadest set of categories (100 and growing), the most items (over 1 million), and the best prices. Since their beta launch back in December 2017, the site has had over 5,000 ETH pass through their market.

Why We’re Building Ember Sword

With Ember Sword, we’re building the next generation Free to Play MMORPG player experience — a re-thinking of what an MMORPG is and can be.

We want to forge an alternative path for games, moving away from predatory monetization and loot box gambling, towards a future where players have a permanent stake in their game world.

We believe that players should be free to trade their in-game cosmetic items, even on secondary marketplaces, and we believe in game design that creates a fair and thriving no-pay-to-win gameplay environment.

We believe in empowering artists to monetize their work, we believe in true ownership over digital items, and we believe in a persistent digital universe built by the players, with ultimate freedom and no borders.

And above all, we know that a great MMORPG starts with an excited community finally in control! We couldn’t be more excited about the future, and we hope you’ll join us on this journey!

Learn More About Ember Sword

Ember Sword is a free-to-play Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) for browsers and PC with a vast, persistent, fantasy universe owned and developed by its players.

Create a character, pick a home region, and venture into the dangerous world with a bow, staff or sword to prove your worth in the action-packed classless combat system by defeating monsters, bosses, and other players, or explore the world as a peaceful forager of goods and rares making a name for yourself as a talented refiner and craftsman of weapons and armor.

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Sune Thorsen
Ember Sword

Founder and CMO at So Couch Studios. Working on Ember Sword, a modern free to play MMORPG.