Perform a primary sale
Primary sales are the first step towards getting in-game items into players' hands. Among other things, a game studio can utilise primary sales to provide an in-game storefront experience.
Immutable offers a specialised widget to help developers integrate primary sales into their game.
Why conduct a primary sale?
There are generally two reasons for conducting a primary sale in a web3 game:
- Sales as a means of customer acqusition: This is a tactic of other types of web3 projects, where on-chain assets are used to incentivise future players to discover and support your new project. You can find some considerations for how to manage demand in these primary sale circumstances later on in this article.
- Sales to provide players with better in-game experience: This comes from the storefront experiences you find in web2 games, where players are able to buy weapons, skins, accessories, powerups and lootboxes though a shopping experience. Typically most of these items would be sold at fixed cost, and considerations for rarity is typically item specific.
Methods to platform for a primary sale
Regardless of the above choice in why you're conducting a primary sale, there are two distinct ways of platforming on-chain.
Method 1: Pre-mint and transfer
This occurs when a game creator initially mints assets into their collection-owned wallet(s) and then transfers those assets to players upon a successful transfer of funds (either fiat or crypto). While this approach allows more flexibility with the sale's design (e.g. does not require a smart contract update upon a change in design), it could come at a potentially greater cost to the game creator if they are required to pay both the minting and transferring gas fees for each asset.
Method 2: Direct mint
This occurs when players directly interact with a smart contract to purchase a game asset. Players send a specified amount of funds to a smart contract during the sale and the contract will then mint an asset directly into their wallet. This approach has advantages such as increasing transparency for players regarding the sale's logic, however the approach needs to be well-thought through and considered as any changes to the primary sale's design could require another smart contract deployment.
Methods to conduct your primary sale
A primary sale can be performed with a fixed price, or a variable price based on auction techniques.
| Mechanisms | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed price | A fixed price sale is the the most common type of primary sale and the simplest to execute. This occurs when game creators price assets at a fixed price throughout the entire sale's duration. | |
| Auction | Auctions are more complicated to execute but lead to better price discovery of the assets. There are two main types of auctions:
|
Additional information and considerations
As you think through your primary sales decision you should consider the following points. For the average game, we believe you'll need a combination of various architecture which is tailored to your specific sale need.
| Consideration | Description |
|---|---|
| Volume cap | A primary sale that sells out all of its assets is a clear signal of a successful sale. Depending on the type of sale, this can provide your game predictable revenues, as well as drive buyers' interest to the sale as the available supply dwindles. |
| Time cap | Game creators can choose to have a clearly defined sale window for players to purchase their assets. In addition to driving excitement towards the sale starting, this can also drive demand as the sale finishes. |
| Phasing | A phased launch (i.e. holding several launches to distribute an asset's total supply) is a particularly useful lever to drive sellouts and excitement where total asset supply outweighs your current community size. The sequence of game asset sales (e.g. PFP followed by land assets) can also be an important decision as it creates a mental model where participants understand what is being dropped and why without needing to be told. For example, PFPs being dropped before land assets allows players to get a sense of the game world they're entering. |
| Player purchase limits | To prevent bots or a small number of players buying many of the available assets, player purchase limits (identified by wallet address) should be set. While this reduces potential sales, the sentiment impact and risk of price dumps by holders of many assets are worth the trade-off. |
| Allowlisting | Depending on your primary sales' launch goals, allowlisting a subset of players for access to your primary sale can be valuable. Cases where this approach is helpful would be to reward early community members or to promote healthy community engagement. |
How do I conduct a primary sale?
There can be lot of work involved in managing this process. To save developers some time, Immutable offers a primary sales widget that handles the entire payment flow. This allows for the easy integration of primary sales into your existing game.