Storybook Brawl

» see storybookbrawl.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

This one reached me the way it reached most people outside its own Discord, as a footnote in the FTX wreckage. I did not play it. The reason it is here is that it is the only consumer product I can name that was killed purely by the accounting of a company in another industry, without ever doing anything wrong itself.

Good Luck Games was seven people in Olympia, Washington. Four of them were Magic: The Gathering professionals: Matthew Place, Josh Utter-Leyton, Matt Nass, Brandon Nelson. They were the kind of people who understand card design from the inside because they spent their twenties being beaten by bad card design. They started building in 2020 and put Storybook Brawl into early access on Steam on 18 June 2021.

The game itself was an auto battler in the Hearthstone Battlegrounds shape. You pick a hero for its passive ability, then spend a small budget each round on fairy tale characters and treasures. After that you stop touching the mouse and watch your board fight somebody else's board without you. The one real design difference was two rows instead of one, which sounds trivial and is not, because it doubles the positioning problem that is most of the skill in the genre.

It was well liked by the people who found it and mostly invisible to everyone else. Around 2021 the auto battler shelf was crowded, and a seven person studio has no way to buy attention. Then somebody with a very large amount of somebody else's money noticed.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

On 22 March 2022 FTX bought Good Luck Games outright. The exchange had an FTX Gaming division and a thesis about crypto integrations in games, and Storybook Brawl was to be the test case: NFT-based in-game collectibles, plus ordinary art NFTs on the side. Sam Bankman-Fried, who was at that point one of the most flattered people alive, told anyone who asked that it was his favorite game.

The player reaction was immediate and unambiguous. Storybook Brawl got review bombed on Steam hard enough that a rating of mostly positive went to overwhelmingly negative, which is a rare thing to watch happen to a game that had not changed a single line of code. The players were not confused about what they were objecting to. They had found a small game made by card nerds, and it had just been bought as a demo unit for a token strategy.

~ the funny part ~

The NFTs never shipped. Not one. The entire reason FTX bought the studio, the whole thesis that made the acquisition make sense on a slide, went from announcement to abandonment without ever reaching a build. What the players spent a year furious about turned out to be vapor, and the game they were playing stayed exactly the game it had been.

Then in November 2022 FTX stopped being a company. Ten billion dollars of customer money had gone somewhere it should not have, the exchange filed for bankruptcy on 11 November, and a studio of seven people in Washington state became an asset on a schedule being read by lawyers in Delaware.

~ what got buried with it ~

The servers went dark on 1 May 2023. Bloomberg had the notice a week earlier. A tournament that was supposed to happen in the Bahamas, of course, was cancelled along with everything else that had ever been planned in the Bahamas by that organization.

There is no villain in the game part of this story. The studio built a decent thing and somebody offered them a life-changing amount for it, and they took it, which is what anyone reading this would have done. What died was not a bad product. It was a product that got attached to a balance sheet it had no relationship with, and when that balance sheet turned out to be fiction, the servers it was paying for went off. You cannot fork a live service. When the company that runs it stops existing, so does the game.

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