Indie Card-Battler Shardbound Revived as Web3 Game on Immutable zkEVM

The crypto world is waiting for high-quality, breakout games to showcase the benefits of blockchain. Could the answer be to take an almost-there Web2 game and give it a Web3 twist?

That’s what Immutable Games is trying. Today, the game publisher and company behind Ethereum scaling network Immutable X announced that it’s working with game studio Bazooka Tango to adapt the 2017 turn-based tactical collectible card game Shardbound into a blockchain game.

Shardbound players must use virtual cards to battle each other in a 3D arena, offering gameplay that’s something like Blizzard’s Hearthstone with elements of Riot Games’ Teamfight Tactics. The game was originally funded via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, but only received an incomplete “Early Access” release.

Bazooka Tango founder and CEO Bo Daly told Decrypt that he had followed Shardbound’s development since its inception, and is thrilled to be developing a revitalized, more complete iteration of the game with new Web3 elements.

“It’s a game that we think is deeply strategic, it's great for competition, and really kind of built with streaming and community in mind,” said Daly, who previously worked on games like Vainglory and Red Dead Redemption. “We think of Shardbound as a world with a thousand stories.” 

Finishing the job

Like many indie games, funding was a challenge for Shardbound’s original development team, Spiritwalk Games, Daly shared (Reddit users also reported that the studio had shut down due to a lack of funds). Some elements of the fantasy game were even released unfinished. 

“There’s missing art all over the place,” Daly said of Shardbound. “Fundamentally, I think there was maybe a little bit of a business problem.”

The original Shardbound game was released on the Steam store, which does not allow NFT games on its platform. The game received plenty of positive reviews and has a 76% positive user rating on Steam. However, it’s now what many gamers would call a “dead game,” meaning it has very few remaining active players.

Analytics from data tracker Steam DB show that the game peaked at 750 concurrent players six years ago. But that initial spurt of interest died down relatively quickly, and Shardbound now barely sees one concurrent player a week.  

When asked about Shardbound’s struggle to retain an audience, Daly said he wasn’t sure of the exact number of total players, but believes that the total number of game accounts created was “in the hundreds of thousands.” 

The new game

Daly shared that the team hasn’t locked down on which platforms the new Web3 iteration of Shardbound will appear, but they hope to leverage the original’s PC gaming audience.

Immutable and Bazooka Tango also aren’t sure where the new game will be downloadable yet, but Immutable VP of Game Partnerships Jennifer Poulson told Decrypt in an interview that both Steam and the NFT-friendly Epic Games Store are being considered.