Immutable: Guild of Guardians: Eri's Store
Designed: 2024
Product: Guild of Guardians: Eri's Store Customer Audience:
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When a player goes shopping for new game assets, the purchase experience should feel as effortless as possible, whisking them through to the moment they came for— the reward and delight of holding their new toy.
Guild of Guardians is a tactical game in which players strategically assemble a team of Guardians with different skills, to complete various challenges and compete for a high score. The Guardians themselves are web3 assets (NFTs) can be purchased from the studio, earned in gameplay, or traded with other players on secondary markets.
As we led up to launch, the game needed needed a way to sell these web3 assets to players, for web3 currency (ETH), and provide an alternative, higher-yield revenue stream to our in-app purchase shop. At the time, no such tooling existed, and we had a short runway to get the capabilities to market. |
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My role was to handle Product and Design duties, to identify and delivery the most efficient path to launching an end-to-end storefront and payment gateway, which could provide all of the functionality we needed.
We also needed to offer products and bundles and that players wanted to own, at price points they were keen to engage with, available at intervals that would encourage engagement but discourage the kind of hoarding that would upset the balance of the game. |
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Knowing this would be a tool that other games would also need, we collaborated with the Immutable Platform team to craft a solution that could also serve a broader market. To deliver with optimum efficiency, we customized existing tooling to fit our needs— WooCommerce (a Wordpress plugin) to manage the user-facing storefront listings, Immutable Passport (an internally-built account and wallet manager) to authorize payments, and Transak (an external gateway with web3 experience) to validate and process the transaction.
At first we stocked the store with tradeable web3 assets, but this limited us to sporadic revenue according to the monthly sales rotation. To optimise the revenue stream, we built an API that could bridge directly to the game and experimented with other offerings like non-tradeable web2 assets— the same ones we offered in the in-game store, but at a lower price point and purchasable with web3 currencies. |
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Guild of Guardians launched their web store alongside the game in May 2024. As of March 2025, it provides a significant proportion of primary purchase revenue.
The open codebase flexibility we built into the GoG store allowed two other games in our portfolio to use the same foundational technology and launch their own stores. Sales of evergreen web2 asset bundles quickly outpaced the sporadic web3 sales events, so we were able to pivot to focus on designing those offerings. Some bundles were so popular that we have built out further functionality to protect our longterm economy, including periodic timers and purchase quantity limits, to maintain balance while keeping demand high. |
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