Web3 Gamer – Cointelegraph Magazine

Our biweekly roundup for the Web3 gaming community, featuring news, reviews and the latest on new releases.

Storybook Brawl shuts down servers

Months after the spectacular collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, the casualties keep coming. 

Good Luck Games, the creators of Storybook Brawl – reportedly disgraced FTX CEO Bankman-Fried’s second-favorite game after League of Legends – took down its servers on May 1. The team said it had explored different options to continue, and unfortunately, there was no path forward.

Originally a non-crypto game that launched on Steam in June 2021, Storybook Brawl was an autobattler card game featuring characters from fairytales and legends. It peaked at 2,770 concurrent players in September 2021 and FTX Ventures acquired it in March 2022. 

Following the acquisition, gamers protested by leaving negative reviews for the game on Steam. 

Although it never developed to the point of releasing any of the planned blockchain integrations, Bankman-Fried, who is subject to a 13-count indictment, described the game as an opportunity for FTX to be “the vanguard for the ethical integration of gaming and crypto transactions.” Ironic. 

According to an article on ZDNet – shared by Bankman-Fried on Twitter – he and Good Luck Games CEO Matthew Place were childhood friends.

During Bankman-Fried’s spate of interviews prior to his arrest in the Bahamas late last year, there was some debate as to whether he was playing Storybook Brawl – which he promoted several times without mentioning FTX owned it – or League of Legends during interviews.  

Nevertheless, fans of the game were generally sympathetic to the team, saying the game was “fun while it lasted” and that it was “very upsetting to see the business side [of the game] ruining the gaming side.”

Storybook Brawl was not the only game around which FTX coiled its tentacles. Perhaps the most prominent name in gaming impacted by the FTX fallout was Star Atlas. Half of its treasury was on the exchange at the time of the collapse. It has since been able to retrieve a portion of these funds, Star Atlas said in February.

Immutable solving onboarding issues

Game development platform Immutable debuted a beta version of its gaming passport, a noncustodial wallet and authenticator solution. 

Technobabble aside, it’s basically an attempt to make onboarding to Immutable’s games easier.

This is welcome progress because onboarding to Web3 games is currently a pain in the gulliver and a major issue when it comes to adoption.

While many companies pay lip service to this issue, and there are a few contenders out there who want to be the Steam of Web3, the fact remains onboarding to a new Web3 game is time-consuming, laborious and needlessly complicated. And that’s for experienced players, not just noobs.

For example, playing a game on Klaytn requires reconfiguring MetaMask and signing up for one of the few exchanges that sell Klay. If your luck is like mine, you change your password just before you try to withdraw the Klay, and then you’re prevented from doing so for 24 hours.

For Wax, you have to obtain Waxp from an exchange and pay into an account just to activate the wallet before you even get to a game. Too bad if your chosen exchange doesn’t let you add a reference to a transaction because Wax requires that. 

That’s not to single these two out particularly. It’s all rather awful. Even using a credit card to buy crypto via MoonPay can require anything from your date of birth and home address to full KYC, depending on where you’re based. 

Compare that to just logging in on other gaming platforms and it’s hard to make the case that…