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🎮What is Influence? I Market Design, Mechanism Design and Token Design Explained🎮

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Economics Design

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Introduction

It is a resource management game that has a very social aspect integrated into its economy. Complete player driven economy where each resource is mined, refined, or constructed by a player. Mints new tokens into the treasury depending on the number of transactions in the game.

High Level Token Summary

$SWAY is its utility token in its ecosystem.

Acquire the token by purchasing through a DEX, gathering resources to sell on in-game marketplaces, leasing land plots to other users, managing a marketplace on your asteroid, finding arbitrage opportunities in the game.

The total amount is undisclosed, but we are speculating that it is uncapped.

Main utility will come from in-game interaction and trade, and recruitment of new crewmates (breeding)

Market Design

There are two NFT collections related to Influence – NFT asteroids and NFT Crewmates. There are a total of 11,100 NFT asteroids owned by 2,300 wallets. Total trade volume is 1,100 ETH with a floor price of .03 ETH . As for the Crewmates, there are a total of 7,800 crewmates owned by 1,200 wallets. The floor price is 0.11 ETH and has a total trade volume of 603 ETH.

Player Archetypes

Killers: PvP is present in a later stage of the game development. This will pose a threat to users looking to transport goods from one asteroid to another.

Socialisers: The game is heavily player driven, therefore socializing with other players is a key part of the economy. This can be in the form of giving discounts to certain people so they will want to trade on your asteroid, or forming of guilds or organizations within the game that require a huge social aspect in order to function.

Miners: Miners are an integral part of the economy. These are the users that gather the raw resources from the asteroids as the first step of the whole supply chain of the economy.

Developers: Developers in the context of this game are users looking to put up buildings and develop their asteroid to be an integral and strategic part of the economy.

Investors: plots on the asteroid can be rented out to other users within the economy. Investors can be asteroid owners not really looking to participate in the game loop but want to make passive income through renting out land.

Mechanism Design

  • Crew

    • Main NFT needed in the game.

    • Crewmates have specializations and skills that make them work more efficiently.

      • Engineer, Merchant, Miner, Pilot, and Scientist

    • Need food in order to function

  • Economy

    • Resource extraction, refinement, and production of final goods.

    • Creates buildings that are part of the production line, spaceports for ships to land, marketplaces for users to trade resources, habitats to store excess crewmates.

    • Maintenance on Buildings and Ships need to be done

  • Travel

    • Travel between asteroid civilizations to trade resources with other users.

    • Requires ships and other resources in order to travel.

    • PvP will be introduced in alter parts of development which can hinder the transport of goods or cause need for ship repairs.

  • Rent

    • Allow users to participate in the game without owning the asteroid.

    • Allows other users to try and extract resources from asteroids owned by other players.

Token Design

Drivers

  • Driven by transactions within the game.

  • Trade of goods, mining of resources, transaction fees.

Allocation Mechanism

  • A – Players will swap or trade resources on marketplace

  • B/C – Part of the transaction fees go to the owner of the market, which they can use to add additional liquidity in their marketplace.

  • D – Part of the fees go to the development fund, which will be used to develop the game or add more liquidity on DEXs

  • E – A proportional percentage of the transaction fee will cause the minting of new $SWAY tokens in the community treasury

  • F – Community treasury gives $SWAY tokens back to players through in-game incentives, contests, or to fund development

  • G – It will also be used to dampen price volatility outside of the game.

Risks

Systematic Risk

There are no private investors for the game, which might cause some serious marketing problems or networking problems in the future. Majority of the initial fundraising will come from the players that buy in to the vision of the team. There are more popular competitors in the market – Star Atlas.

Potential Solution

The team needs to cultivate its community and build a cult following to mitigate the lack of network connections from the lack of venture capitalist investment in the game. It needs to build a solid community that believes in the game as a fun and exciting game rather than an investment opportunity.

Idiosyncratic Risk #1

Economic balance is in the hands of the players. Meaning that they can collude if they wanted to in order for prices of certain resources or outputs to increase, or cause the whole economy to crash with little to no safeguard from the development team.

Potential Solution

Adding a way for the team to mitigate the collapse of the economy, like infusing a particular resource as a marketing event or sale.

Idiosyncratic Risk #2

Resource management at the beginning is a big question for the game. It might take time for players to be able to craft resources that will help in advancing the game economy. It also greatly favors those who are early adopters of the game as these users have already mined enough resources to advance their asteroid, a risk that can impact new user acquisition in the future.

Potential Solution

Can be mitigated by doing a pack sale where users can have access to resources from the get go in order to spur economic activity within the ecosystem.

Idiosyncratic Risk #3

Minting of New $SWAY tokens is limited to a small percentage of total transaction fees. In instances of hyper growth, this might cause $SWAY token price to increase due to the influx of demand. $SWAY minting might not keep up with the demand for $SWAY as new users will have to work themselves up to a point where they add to the transaction of $SWAY in order for new tokens to be minted.

This can be mitigated by adding a clause on the community treasury that the team can mint or burn tokens as needed to keep the economy stable.

Conclusion

Influence is a resource management game that has a very social aspect integrated into its economy. $SWAY is its utility token in its ecosystem. The token can be Acquired by purchasing through a DEX, gathering resources to sell on in-game marketplaces, leasing land plots to other users, managing a marketplace on your asteroid, and finding arbitrage opportunities in the game.