We've got an interesting development with Storybook Brawl, an auto-battler card game that takes after the popularity of Hearthstone's Battlegrounds game mode. The game and company behind it, Good Luck Games, has been acquired by FTX.
- FTX acquires Storybook Brawl and its parent company, Good Luck Games.
- There is a big announcement coming soon regarding Organized Play for Storybook Brawl thanks to the resources FTX brings.
- "Fun comes first" for any potential blockchain integrations.
Quote From Storybook Brawl We've got huge news today! We are thrilled to announce that Good Luck Games, the studio that makes Storybook Brawl, has been acquired by @FTX_Official! For more about what this means now and in the future, read on!
Who is FTX? How Will Storybook Brawl Use Cryptocurrency and NFTs?
FTX is a popular digital asset exchange (cryptocurrency) and NFT exchange. With a large amount of negativity towards cryptocurrency and NFTs in gaming, the acquisition is a surprising one to see and shows that the monetization model of the game could change into one that not everyone is happy with. According to the team, this gives the company more funding for the game and they are bringing on some new staff members which will help bring visual updates to the game, among other things.
Storybook Brawl says that they will be exploring blockchain technology to see how they can "create fun for players". No exact commitments have been made yet to how the technology will be explored other than stating that fun needs to come first and integrations must be ethical.
Storybook Brawl's Steam Ratings Change
After the news broke this afternoon, the Storybook Brawl Steam page received some fresh reviews showing that players were no longer interested in the game by giving the game a negative rating.
We're not sure how many negative reviews the game will end up receiving, but as of now, the game is ranked as "Very Positive" overall with 2276 reviews of which 2017 of them are positive.
Let's talk a bit about Cryptocurrency and NFTs, the subject of negativity in Steam reviews, YouTube, and the Twitter announcement.
Cryptocurreny and NFTs in Games
Cryptocurrency in games has been a hot topic in recent times, with a largely negative sentiment overall. One of the big problems people have with blockchain applications is the real-world costs involved in maintaining them. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum require large amounts of electricity to run their blockchains, which isn't very environmentally friendly.
Ethereum, a blockchain that is popular with NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) is working on this actively with a move from the "Proof of Work" model which requires computers to actively mine for coins, and into a "Proof of Stake" one which won't require as much power to maintain as the validator nodes are no longer competing to mine hashes but instead, only need to validate transactions.
The cryptocurrency in gaming topic is a huge one and we can't possibly cover it all in this article. Share your own thoughts on it in the comments below.
HearthSim Announces Storybook Brawl Integration on Untapped.gg
The announcement of the FTX purchase comes just days after Storybook Brawl announced a partnership with HearthSim, the company that made HSReplay.net and Untapped.gg, which saw the debut of a tool for Storybook Brawl much like their popular Hearthstone Deck Tracker.
Storybook Brawl Dev Chat
The founder of Storybook Brawl's parent company, Good Luck Games, Matt Place, sat down with LSV to chat about the acquisition. Out of Cards community members may recognize Matt Place as he previously worked at Blizzard on Hearthstone as a Senior Game Designer, Wizards of the Coast on Magic the Gathering, and Direwolf Digital on Eternal.
Storybook Brawl Announcement
Quote From StorybookBrawl I've got exciting news to share today - FTX US has acquired Good Luck Games (that's us, the creators of Storybook Brawl), and we are thrilled to finally get to announce it. Good Luck Games started as a tiny team in 2019, with just Matt Place, Josh Utter-Leyton, and Matt Nass as founders. Their vision was to make a fun indie game that combined engaging gameplay with deep strategy, and after adding John Conbere (our Lead Engineer) to the team, they were able to make it happen. The goal was to make the best game possible given the resources at hand, and Storybook Brawl was as fun as hoped. I can personally speak to that, as I joined the team last year almost immediately after SBB went into Early Access.
All it took was a couple days of playing the game and I was hooked, and wanted to be a part of it - the combination of the game and the team was irresistible. I mention that because those same qualities are what attracted FTX, and their team (as well as their co-founder, Sam Bankman-Fried) fell in love with the game as well.
Not only did the team at FTX love the game, they saw a ton of potential there as well. Take a look at this quote from Sam, featured in the press release from earlier today:
“We couldn’t stop playing Storybook Brawl when it became available on Early Access in Steam last summer,” commented Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of FTX. “Outside of it being an incredibly fun game our whole office enjoys, with its highly engaging gameplay and free-to-play model, we saw an opportunity to be the vanguard for the ethical integration of gaming and crypto transactions in a way that hasn’t yet been done in this space.”
After talking about the potential FTX saw in Storybook Brawl, and thanks to our familiarity and confidence in FTX and their leadership, we were excited to team up. As you may know, FTX already sponsors both Limited and Constructed Resources, podcasts I host, and they've been fantastic to work with. This acquisition gives us the opportunity to take Storybook Brawl to the next level, and we are already putting those resources into play - we recently launched our partnership with Untapped.gg, we had a ton of popular streamers put Storybook Brawl in front of new audiences, and we've got a big Organized Play announcement coming soon. Thanks to FTX, we've got plans to make Storybook Brawl the best it can be, and these examples are just the beginning.
Blockchain and Storybook Brawl
When it comes to how blockchain technology fits into the picture for Storybook Brawl, I can share our perspective and where we are planning to go, though I don't have specifics yet. The guiding principles we are using when it comes to integrating this technology are these:
- Fun comes first
- Any integration has to be ethical and make the game better for players
- Storybook Brawl will continue to be a game we are proud of and love
We are currently working on and prototyping a variety of approaches, and will let you know when we have a better idea of the direction we are headed. For a more in-depth conversation about this, I sat down with Matt Place to chat.
We here at Good Luck Games are excited for what comes next, and would like to thank all of our players for making Storybook Brawl and its community what it is today. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or by joining our Discord, and we will see you in the queues!
LSV
Do you enjoy playing Storybook Brawl? Are you planning on playing it still after the announcement? Let us know in the comments below.
Comments
could someone a bit more knowledgable on the subject explain to me (like I'm 5, pls) what "maintaining requires computers to mine assets" means in clear speech...? thank you...
It's a complicated subject, but the simplest explanation for the first generation of "proof-of-work" blockchains is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4&ab_channel=3Blue1Brown
It should be noted that although that video describes Bitcoin and the first version of Ethereum very well, more modern blockchains (very likely including whatever SSB ends up using) no longer use this approach, and the environmental impact has been greatly reduced. Most of the people very upset by this announcement likely don't understand that.
I don't think we're anywhere close to being there yet, but once some of the metaverses (Sandbox, Decentraland, Cronos Metaverse, etc.) get further underway, I'd like to see NFT's being able to be used across multiple IP's, a la Ready Player One.
Slightly Off-Topic:
I'd rather see healthy competition between the different metaverses, like Playstation vs. Xbox vs. Nintendo, as opposed to one dominant entity. Competition drives innovation! The next 10 years are exciting though and I hope something fun and unique can be made from this technology.
Even with proof of stake, maintaining a distributed ledger is a lot harder than a centralized storage of who owns what. I haven't seen any proposed use of NFTs in games yet that does something that cannot be done easier with a traditional database.
In theory I like distributed technology: the web should become more decentralized if we want to avoid a handful of megacorps running the world. In practice though, blockchain tech is mostly used for speculation and crime, and has solved very few real-world problems.
You're right, using a centralized store is easier than using a blockchain. There's also huge speed advantages to using a traditional database. Though, once validated, folks should be storing these validations, for at least some period of time, in a database or cache to help with latencies.
I'm very much pro-cryptocurrency and pro-NFT, though I agree, we do not have any real-world problems solved so far with either of the technologies yet and there is a ton of scamming and general shit throughout which has hurt any kind of solid adoption. It'll be another 5-10 years at the very least before you really can do much with it as no one has really hit the nail on the head yet with any of their concepts.
My biggest problem with people who are anti-crypto/anti-nft is for the most part, they just simply are not informed. You see plenty of folks on Twitter (I know, a horrible example of logical individuals) who won't even for a second make an attempt to learn about them. They all scream YoUr KiLlInG tHe EnViRoNmEnT at the top of their lungs, meanwhile, I'm sure they've just Uber Eats'd their third meal for the day.
Proof of Work is horrible, don't get me wrong, and Ethereum's Proof of Stake really needs to hurry up, but the electricity being chugged into it isn't going to be a forever thing. Maybe for Bitcoin that remains true and there's some serious problems with that since the Bitcoin Foundation doesn't seem to have a good idea of where it is headed for proper sustainability of their chain (let's increase the damn block sizes as a minimum thx) and with it always being the most valuable of the bunch, it'll always be mined to death, but for that we actually need people to move onto better technologies and forget about Bitcoin.
I really like that you can own digital items via an NFT. As things get even more digital, having "proper ownership" is a really cool idea. It makes player-run economies super easy and the company that runs the game doesn't need to run a marketplace, but they can still get paid via % cuts of each sale of an NFT, meaning they don't have to worry about the financial risks that come alongside with running something like the Diablo 3 Auction House or the Steam Marketplace - a huge barrier to smaller companies when you need to worry about dealing with tax for every single player. Not to say I'd want to mint every single item I owned since there would be fees with doing so, but if I got a really cool mount drop in WoW that could be minted, you bet I'd mint my Ashes of Alar!
Another cool part that I like about the whole NFT portion with games is having potential for items to be useful across other games. There's a bunch of interesting legal issues that need to be figured out before that actually happens, but if I did get Ashes of Alar in World of Warcraft and another game company who really wanted to pay tribute to WoW made some sort of Phoenix pet, maybe that was given out for free to players who validated that they owned an Ashes of Alar NFT. It's not the greatest example but it's a showcase into how different companies could pay homage to each other.
NFTs need to have value though. The JPEG trash that we see in 99.9% of them right now is hilarious. The NFTs which grant access to a secret club is cool, though when those clubs don't actually do anything, that's basically just a JPEG. There's a couple of neat clubs that do special events together and being a part of something exclusive like that is nice. It's like a digital version of a secret cigar lounge that only the best get access to.
Real world, I'd love to see blockchain voting honestly. There's a lot to figure out to make that really happen, with the big hurdle being most people would never understand it so realistically, why even bother, but it would be one of the things we have right now that would make sense and it would make the stats more open. Big privacy concerns though, harassment potential, and compromised private keys are a negative. I like to think if done right, we'd have a better audit trail than what exists now. Now, a malicious actor could pretty easily get setup at the polling station as a volunteer and shove some extra ballets into the box (I'm sure it has been done somewhere). Though, I also don't think that we desperately need blockchain voting either.
Excited to see where it all goes, less excited about the scams that keep plaguing us, and even less excited about good games being bought out by crypto bros because I don't believe we have perfected the use-case for blockchains in games yet.
Sidenote: Enjin (disclaimer: I was a part of their original drop and continue to hold coins and thus may profit off any potential positive discussion about Enjin) is an exciting project and their product feels like the right beginnings to integrate NFTs and payments into games using this technology. The group has solid leadership and their wallet apps for your phone are great.
You can keep a cache of filtered and indexed history to do quick lookups, but you can't solve the latency between the time a transaction is submitted for inclusion on the blockchain and the time consensus is reached about it through caching. Of course a game company could hide that latency by immediately giving you access to an in-game item you bought or earned and then settle the transaction in the background, but then there is again the question why they're using a distributed ledger at all.
Twitter isn't a suitable medium for discussion, but for some reason people keep trying.
I have spent some time learning about blockchain tech, but the more I understand the tech, the less I understand the market. Which probably means that many of the people heavily invested in the market don't understand the tech.
At their core, NFTs are a mechanism for artificial scarcity. Sometimes you need scarcity to help creators make money, that's why copyright was invented for example. But in other cases the scarcity is just rent-seeking, where companies try to extract as much money as they can with no relation to the cost of creation. Using copyright as an example again, having a 10 to 20 year copyright term gives authors enough time to earn their money, the fact that copyright terms keep getting extended way beyond that is just corporate greed.
I'm a big fan of open source software, which is the opposite of scarcity: people contributing to something that everyone can benefit from for free. That brings its own set of problems, with people taking on big responsibilities in maintaining software while often not getting compensated for that. But overall I think that being able to duplicate digital works is a very unique and useful property; bringing artificial scarcity into such a system is not always a positive.
I also don't think that everything needs to be an economy. Games are supposed to offer a way to leave the real world behind for a while and experience something different. If more and more games not only get in-game economies, but also have those in-game economies tied to real-world economies, every game world becomes some kind of projection or re-skin of the real world, instead of existing outside of it.
You already mentioned legal issues, but that's just one of the obstacles. From a technical perspective, an NFT is only a proof of ownership: it doesn't tell you what an item would look like or how it would function inside a different game. For each additional game it can appear in, the item would have to be manually re-created. That's a lot of effort and I think developers are likely more motivated to spend their time adding items specifically designed for their own game.
There are cases where it would make sense, for example when taking items from a game to its sequel in the same series, in particular for sports games with annual releases that are mostly roster refreshes. However, in those cases publishers would rather sell the same items to players again and again instead of transferring them over. We know that because that's what they're currently doing with their centralized databases as well.
And not even actual JPEGs, but links to JPEGs. Links to locations that might not be all that permanent.
I have some doubts though that money is a good way to measure merit. Sure, some people get rich because they're talented and hard-working, but there are also quite a lot who get there through luck or bad behavior.
Privacy is an issue with blockchain in general. Many people think it's anonymous, but it's very much the opposite of that. You only have privacy for as long as you can keep your wallet disconnected from your identity, but if blockchain is to play a significant role in our future lives, that will be hard to manage.
Another issue is spam: if the transaction costs become low enough, we'll need mechanisms to prevent unwanted items from being sent to our wallets. Otherwise you'd have it fill up with junk or you'll have to pay yourself to transfer the junk out of your wallet again.
Despite all my concerns, I do think the tech is exciting. I wouldn't mind seeing the bubble pop tomorrow though; I think all the get rich quick schemes are getting in the way of potential useful applications.
Oh yeah, there will always be a form of latency, it's tech that unfortunately doesn't scale will without there being a central authority. There are ways around that but of course, that involves some form of centralization which is a bit of a downside, but the upside to that is there's less fees involved then too.
If you take real money, put it into a coin, and use said coin on a side app that lets you transact without major fees and instantly, that's a good way to deal with transactions within a specific game, and then if you want to mint your items, that'll just take a little bit more time as the transaction gets pushed onto the chain. That's sorta the best part we're at with that though right now and the obvious downside is you don't own it until it is minted- though I don't think cheapo stuff would need to ever be minted (a common Hearthstone card vs a Legendary Diamond). The end result of the ledger is a true sense of ownership and if I decided to stop playing a game that made use of minted objects, like a card in a card game, I could either destroy it to reclaim some of the value or sell it to another player.
I agree, there is some artificial scarcity going on right now with NFTs that's a bit on the silly side. I don't believe that to be the end-all-be-all of the tech though. I love being able to relate an NFT to a card game because it makes the most sense in a digital world. I play paper Magic, I own the cards, I can do whatever I want with them. I buy a card on MTG Arena and I can't trade it. If Wizards supported cards as an NFT, my cards would hold value based on the player economy, and Wizards, if implemented correctly, would be able to take a fee on any transaction which gives them access to the secondary card market's large market cap - something they're currently doing a bit of with Secret Lair, which has been printing serious cash for them.
I hate that we don't have any good digital trading card games. Part of it is shitty greed, the other part stems from companies likely not wanting to deal with hacked accounts and players getting their cards all traded away. Trading creates some awesome community and even the Pokemon digital card game is in the process of getting rid of it with their upcoming TCG Online replacement - TCG Live. If I want to sell something for real money, which a lot of games don't support and you can even be banned for it, I can't.
A lot of that comes down to the F2P nature of games these days. They give you a certain amount of free stuff, if that free stuff is tradeable, people start botting hard which even without that in Hearthstone, bots remain a huge problem. My solution is that you can only trade a certain value out of your account, based on how long you've played and how much real money you've spent - if you're giving cards to people for free or if you're trading for a Common with a Legendary (clearly someone is selling something here), that's going to pull value out of that pool you can trade.
Anyway, on scarcity. Card games. Blockchain. We're talking about essentially unlimited numbers of these cards still, with some being minted when players want to keep them in their wallets. The current trend of "there's only 1 of this" or "there's 50 of my item" are kinda shitty and I don't think that'll be a major player long-term. I think, from a card game POV anyway, I could see players getting the option to buy from a limited set of "first edition" packs and those cards would get a special mark on them, with there being like 100 of each Legendary or something like it, but overall, that's just a super exclusive collector piece, which are always fun. Then again, if you stop being interested in the game, you'd have the option to essentially cash out, letting a newer player or more whale-type people get your stuff.
Of course, companies aren't interested in that because now new players can get cards for cheaper to start off their collection. Economies would need to be reconsidered.
That does jump to your point on escapism though and game economies.
Yeah, games can definitely be an escape from the real world and some times people don't want this kind of game. That's fine! I don't think every game is going to become a crypto game and the ones that do will definitely have a more limited base of players. Not every person has to enjoy every game. I'm certainly not very interested in Fortnite despite loving the Battle Royale genre (PUBG 5th Birthday hype).
Though, none of the current games that I've seen that are using crypto look to be worth playing. Either shitty game designs or crazy hoops you have to go through. Also, Gods Unchained was hilarious in that you could pre-order your packs like what, a year in advance before anything was playable? This shits feeling like a Star Citizen (a game which does have some enjoyable content now) Kickstarter.
On proof of ownership and models. Yeah, that's the biggest hurdle I see when it comes to one game integrating another item from another game. I do think cross-game stuff would be very limited in nature and would mostly be a homage thing or one developer bringing forward something or a reference from their older title, perhaps with worse stats.
Game monetization in general is just such a damn drag and that's one thing I think NFTs will do well - giving players some power again. Of course, it means companies properly integrate things and so on.
One thing that I really hate about current monetization is the games that aren't a service. I don't mind buying packs in Hearthstone or a mount in World of Warcraft because I know those games just keep going on. But like, buying a skin in Call of Duty when next year the game is irrelevant? What the actual fuck. Your Battle Pass is absolute pointless garbage, why do I need a 50% XP boost when I just lose the level in a year anyway? I can't even see my skin so who cares what I look like. Granted, NFTs don't even solve that problem, but maybe after I stopped playing after a few months I could sell my skins on the cheap, lol.
Back to your comments though, on JPEGS. Yeah, totally they're just links and it's hilarious. So many people without a doubt have no idea how any of it works and they're going to be in for a rude awakening when these services inevitable shut down or lose content.
And on get rich quick schemes, yeah, there's so much nonsense to wade through. I'm just glad we aren't seeing 200 new coins pop up every day anymore with sites actually listing them. I think at some point NFTs will get to that point too, or at least the crap will be so far at the bottom, no one will ever see it.
I'm really surprised and disappointed to see you shilling for NFT's flux. I respect you as a member of this site, and the admin of it, but hugely disappointed to see this long drawn out post that essentially boils down to "I support NFT's because I have a stake in them, and anyone who disagrees is an idiotic twitter nut".
I don't pretend to understand the entire concept, but I've read a number of articles on the reality of them, as well as podcasts/youtube videos in an attempt to understand them so I can make an informed decision.
https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/amp/
https://tripleampersand.org/deserve-better-nfts/
https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html
https://chhopsky.substack.com/p/nft-fantasy-why-items-as-nfts-does?s=r
Lastly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g&t=2s
Warning TWO HOUR VIDEO. I was only able to watch half it but it's informative as hell.
And to sum it all up... (from we deserve better)
Today’s NFTs cannot maintain their promises. They are not revolutionary solutions for today’s problems, for all they do is replicate already-existent exploitative structures while relying on a different, even more problematic, technological infrastructure. They ultimately amount to a grift, yet another avenue for the environmentally-damaging accumulation of capital in the hands of the few, and should both be condemned and abandoned. We should rather be open to the possibility that tomorrow, there will be a better method of securing ownership of, and agency over, our digital assets — most notably, our personal information, extracted from the capitalist process of financialization of everything — maintaining some of the promises made by NFTs, but free from their toxic baggage.
@flux. Why you would be pro NFT/pro digital currency is beyond me. There's really no reason. Hype/hope for new technology to propel is into the next digital revolution? Sure. But *specifically* NFT/digital currency/web3 (as they currently stand). Hell no.
Like I said, I don't claim to understand the specific tech behind it, but I do attempt to read up and educate myself. New technology, especially in this day and age is guilty until proven innocent (i.e. reliable, safe, secure, user friendly, etc etc)
If the only thing my dissenting post here has earned me is a site ban and you to collect another pair of boots from that ban, so be it.
Just because someone is invested into something doesn't mean I'm shilling for them. I put the disclaimer there because unlike a lot of the "crypto bros", I believe it's good to be transparent about it. It's that exact reason that I don't have any stock investments in Blizzard, which historically speaking is an amazing value, because I'd feel compelled to disclose that somewhere on the site and people would take it out of context. "Oh look you're just saying something positive about Blizzard because you own shares in their company". Meanwhile, I also give them just as much negativity and have no problem calling them out when they're wrong-
And like I said, crypto and NFTs have plenty of their own problems and as of right now I don't think they have found any proper use-case yet. Is it speculative at this point? Sure. But as someone who is a general fan of new technology, it's something I think will eventually have a use-case and I want to support the projects that I think are going to do something innovative. I don't invest in shitcoins and I have zero desire to hold Bitcoin. As far as I'm concerned, the only blockchain that holds any value is Ethereum, partially because of smart contracts and what they enable us to do with the tech. Anything that is purely a store of value, like Bitcoin, is useless overall and eventually, people are going to figure that out. A store of value is stupid if you can't actually do anything with it. Crypto Commerce could have been a thing if these people could make the transactions dirt cheap and quick.
Why you'd jump to thinking I'm going to ban you for disagreeing with me, I can't say I understand. The only people who get banned on here are spammers and bigots.
I made my post knowing 100% it was going to attract some responses that were going to be against my thoughts and that's cool. And no, I don't think everyone who disagrees with crypto anything is a moronic simple-minded Twitter user, that's just from my personal experience one of the more infuriating things about the people who cry about it. I wouldn't even be surprised if some of those artsy folks who shame NFTs all day previously thought it was all cool and then they just couldn't figure out how to make their own art into NFTs to jump on the bandwagon - much anger comes from people not understanding how to accomplish a particular task. In an age where people can't be bothered to do 3 seconds of research, it's quite frustrating.
I fully agree there. I've been saying this for awhile that if the only value in cryptocurrencies is to hold them as an investment opportunity then they have ultimately failed at their primary goal: to be a currency. Now all they are is gimmicks for Matt Damon to push during super bowl ads.
Sorry, I guess I jumped the gun on your reaction due to the vitriolic and uninformed responses I've gotten elsewhere, both on the internet and in real life. Whenever I've countered the NFT/blockchain craze in conversation, I've gotten either hostile responses (online) or investment bro responses (in real life) from people who have no business being anywhere near a computer.
Yea, that is definitely the most frustrating aspect.
I'm a Formula 1 fan and the crypto ads there are hilarious; It's tough to see a camera shot without them! I don't really care much about it, but it does go to show how much money is just being pumped into it when there's no real use cases yet outside of the aforementioned store of value.
And totally, everything is hostile first on the internet and no one actually wants to just talk about stuff anymore. Everyone just blocks blocks and... blocks. Being in a bubble is so awesome!!!!!!! I'm personally looking forward to the studies being done now on how mental illness is on the rise due to social media bubbles because maybe, just maybe, it'll make people rethink their choices. Not saying people have to touch more grass but I do think overall people need to find some new hobbies instead of doom-scrolling.
We might not always see eye-to-eye Sykomyke, but at least we can talk about the way we think.