It was announced yesterday that Storybook Brawl will be shutting down at the end of the month. It’s interesting. Storybook Brawl wasn’t the game I thought I’d be writing a retrospective of today. I thought that would be Crimesight, which will shortly share a death day with Storybook Brawl.
This won’t be a writeup about the gameplay of Storybook Brawl. If you want that sort of information, perhaps because you’re engaged in some technical equivalent of an archaeological dig, I did a writeup on that here.
Instead, I think it’s worth looking at how we got here, and why. After all, it’s not like Storybook Brawl is an inherent failure. Steam charts show it as having a high of about 500 players a day. And I played the game! Storybook Brawl was fun. I’m going to ripping into another game later today that had less than 60 people play it yesterday. And it’s not going down in under a week.
Storybook Brawl is, like many other games, not going to go down because it was bad game. It was fun. It was fair. It wasn’t gacha oriented garbage. It didn’t sell skimpy bathing outfits for its characters. It likely died because it did one thing, and that one thing probably wasn’t even a bad choice at the time.
See, a while back, Storybook Brawl was sold to a small scrappy financial investments company run by an effective altruist you might have heard of. His name was Sam Bankman-Fried. And his company was called FTX. Well, at least FTX was one of the 50 or so he had set up. I don’t know which one actually bought or managed Storybook Brawl.
Then, as you might or might not know, the whole FTX thing lost 8 billion dollars (give or a take a bit), and stole its users’ money. And the aforementioned Sam might have committed a lot of financial crimes. Oh, and they were a cryptocurrency exchange. I don’t think I mentioned that bit.
When Storybook Brawl sold to FTX, with the implication that NFTs would somehow be added at some point, I was pretty unhappy. These days though, I have a more realistic view of indie game development. Frankly, I can’t blame them for taking the money, even if it might have been tainted. Or stolen. Probably stolen.
For all I know, the FTX deal is what kept Storybook Brawl alive for these last few years, up until this month. Maybe 500 daily active users, and 93% positive reviews isn’t good enough. Maybe making an interesting, novel, and fun game isn’t what you need to do to succeed.
Maybe you need anime girls in skimpy swimsuits distributed from slot machines and marketed to children. Maybe you need to take money from elaborate ponzi schemes, funded by stolen money and the inherent stupidity of crypto.
There was a woman demoing a physical version of a Storybook Brawl card game at PAX Unplugged last year. I have no idea what will happen to it. Maybe it will get a theme change, and shopped around. Maybe it’s as dead as the servers.
It’s hard to tell if Storybook Brawl was another casualty of FTX, or something else. Maybe it was less a victim than a slavering thrall, remaining animate by the money FTX pumped through its veins, and eventually killed by the death of its host.
But it was a good game.