It hasn’t been a long time since the first introduction of the game Ember Sword. Therefore, It is extremely easy to misjudge this game as another ordinary free to play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game without any special features at first.
But when we actually try the game, it clearly shows that that’s not how the game works. We can hardly find any lootbox or in-game cash shop while playing. But you will, instead, receive those as rewards during gameplay by completing PvP and PvE missions.
After saving up enough of those rewards from the given missions, you can exchange them with the others in order to earn a special in-game currency known as PIXEL Tokens. This is a kind of Bitcoin currency.
When players trade the PIXEL Tokens, the game’s developers will take a small amount of money from that. It is basically similar to an eBay-based-style system that runs the game. However, that feature of the game is optional. You can either choose to collect the cosmetics the usual way, which is not an easy thing to do, or you can buy them from others with your PIXEL Tokens.
Furthermore, you can also become Landowners by investing in LAND and help the world evolve. All players can place resources, monsters and NPCs to earn more profit by creating more services as well as experiences, vendor marketplaces for example, the place in which players can purchase subscriptions of the game, participate in in-game auctions, and so on.
Couch Studios - the developer of the game - claims that they would re-define the negative reputation of pay-to-win. To do that they will remove of a shop in the game which uses real currency.
However, there will still be an optional subscription and marketplace fees every month. According to the following press release:
“Most free-to-play MMORPGs monetize through pay-to-win mechanics and non-transferable cosmetics in an attempt to increase revenue by locking down the cash shop economy. With Ember Sword, we’re putting players in charge of evolving the world and its economy instead, because to us, creating an engaging and fair universe is much more important than heavily monetizing players – opting instead for an optional monthly subscription and marketplace fees.”
This system seems to be a lot fairer than anything we have got the chance to see up to now, doesn’t it?