In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, Editor-in-Chief Jon Jordan speaks with Bo Daly, CEO of Bazooka Tango.
In addition to sharing his excitement to launch open beta around the world, Daly talks about what makes Shardbound so visually and narratively immersive, the uncharted parts of blockchain, and why the game is not for everyone. I also go into detail about why I’m relieved that I might not.
BlockchainGamer: What have you done in your career so far?
Beau Daly: I’ve been in the game for a long time. I started at Rockstar Games during the PS2 era with Red Dead Revolver and Red Dead Redemption for the Xbox 360 and PS3. From there I worked in MMOs for 10 years as the WoW revolution arrived, and then MMOs transitioned to free-to-play. I originally worked with John Romero on his MMO, which was difficult to make. It was a big mission, a big dream, and it’s still very close to my heart.
So I worked on various projects for about 10 years, learned a lot, and put that knowledge into my first startup company, Super Evil Megacorp. The Vainglory we built was aimed at bringing core gamers to mobile. This was 10 years ago, and mobile was not considered a serious gaming platform. The world has obviously changed a lot since then.
I’ve been very fortunate to be able to help drive that change and build a great audience and a great game with a great community. Esports tournaments were held all over the world. We held the number one mobile game on Twitch for a long time, and I think we even overtook Overwatch at one point.
I left that company five years ago to build Bazooka Tango with co-founder Stephan ‘Captain Neato’ Sherman. We hope that Shardbound will be our next big feather in the cap.
Back in the Kickstarter days, Shardbound was developed by another studio. How did you all know about it?
Everything we’re doing with Shardbound right now is a testament to the great work the Spirit Walk Games team has put into it. It was a studio that was founded around the same time as Super Evil, and its members had worked at the MMO studio Gazillion, so I knew them well. We were like startup brothers.
Making games is hard. Marketing games is difficult. We continued to track the game closely because it is very difficult to raise funds for the game.
They weren’t able to fully realize it at the time, but we continued to stand by the team. It was with the advent of digital collectibles that we saw an opportunity in terms of completing games and bringing them to life. This fits very seamlessly and cleanly into a world where you want to build decks and build a community, but you don’t want to get stuck with cards pulled from gachas or useless cards. The ability to try things out and build your deck the way you want it is important.
And it’s just a beautiful world. We see this as more than just a collectible card tactics game. We hope it’s one that can be brought to life for decades to come, setting different types of gameplay in a world that feels lush, vibrant, and alive. .
You mentioned digital collectibles. When did blockchain appear?
We believe blockchain is a great way to support and grow our community and give players the opportunity to customize their gaming experience.
When it comes to Shardbound, the promise of blockchain for us is interoperability. My goals here are more ambitious than simply starting and running a great CCG. I want to create a series of games in the Shardbound universe that are greater than the sum of their parts.
Back to the startup story. I’ve worked with some of the greatest people in gaming throughout the WoW era, and I think this is some sort of proto-metaverse. It was a game where people met and got married. If you can bring different types of gamers together and make them not only socially interconnected but also economically interdependent, you create a very rich social tapestry. So they have a reason to meet in what is today a Discord server, but was once a tavern in WoW.
It was really hard to build all this infrastructure 20 years ago. It took hundreds of teams and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to get a game that probably no one would ever play across the finish line. So this is not a great value proposition for founders. For me, building a great game involves testing maybe 10 different ideas, and if three of them are hits, you’ve got the foundation for something great. I think blockchain will eliminate the need to build an auction house. it already exists.
How would you describe Shardbound and why do you find it such a fascinating world?
Think Hearthstone meets Final Fantasy Tactics, or XCOM. Shardbound is definitely inspired by the games Blizzard makes and the games Square makes. Again, this is a bright world, a world with a thousand different stories. All the characters have interesting stories and are part of the culture. You can see that there is art in this world. Yes, this is a post-apocalyptic end-of-the-world landscape, but it’s extremely bright and gorgeously rendered.
Credit to our amazing team, Josh Nadelberg and everyone at Spirit Walk Games, for envisioning this for us and bringing us something that transcends boundaries.
Also, all games are best when they’re social, meaning you can play them with friends. I’m also a big fan of tactical games, so Shardbound has social and tactical elements that are very similar to Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone.
Try to get mana every turn and put big commander cards on the board. However, everything you put on the board is a moveable piece, so it quickly becomes a chess match. You can win by knocking out the other team’s commander, but you can also win by controlling different parts of the board at different moments to earn enough victory points. It’s about thinking through every step and playing your opponent thoroughly.
We would also like to give a big thank you to Immutable Games, who have been a great partner to us over the last year and gave us the foundation we needed to understand how we think about blockchain.
That means it includes elements of trading cards, deck building, and tactics. Would it be considered a niche genre? Can more people participate?
I think so. One of the reasons we’re launching open beta now is that we’ve reached critical mass in pre-registration. We have a pre-registration list of 100,000 entries.
I think it’s always difficult trying to combine two genres from a design perspective. The question is whether it can be the union of these two sets. Can you give CCG players enough depth that the tactics are fun and novel? And can we bring tactical players into the CCG world in a way that appeals to both?
I think it’s possible, but again, I’d love to make some other games in the Shardbound universe. Even if this isn’t the game for you, we want to be able to build an ecosystem of titles that will appeal to you. Maybe it’s the upcoming fifth game that will get everyone really excited.
Some blockchain games are highly cryptographic and rely on things like token rewards. You never do that, but the very beginning is a game. What do you think about the blockchain gaming community?
There are a few bits here. So everyone who registers early will get a unique set of cards. That being said, we have a really exciting partnership between now and the end of November, working with Immutable as part of our Main Quest program. Players can basically play and win 3 matches in Shardbound and earn 100 gems in that program. Of course you can convert it to IMX.
We want to make sure we give those players what they want. This game has been in development for a long time. I think it’s important for business to know what’s actually going on in the game, so we need to put that first. That has to be the reason everything else becomes interesting and exciting.
I also think our audience should be 100 million gamers. That’s my dream for what Shardbound will look like in a few years. But ultimately, if players come into the beta with incentives other than to play the game, they won’t know if the game is working or not. With so many players here, we may have a false sense of confidence. I don’t want to say that to prospective investors.
We’re confident that our audience, who’s been with us on this journey for the better part of a year, are the ones who come and play for hundreds of hours. In fact, a significant portion of them already play six to seven days a week.
It launches through the Epic Games Store, which is usually fine for blockchain. It will also go through Steam, which has stricter blockchain rules. There are still people on Steam who like to browse and review bomb blockchain games. What do you think about the possibility of these two things colliding?
Every game has aspects that people like and dislike. I don’t think what we’re doing here will be considered a disqualification by any player.
People’s first reactions are up to them, but I’m happy with that.
Again, my last company released a mobile MOBA in 2011, but it wasn’t what players wanted. We’re confident we can find the talent and grow and scale this game for years to come.
Currently in open beta, what kind of progress do you see coming? What is the roadmap?
We hope to move forward with a global launch. Obviously, the holiday season is approaching and it’s a very expensive time for marketing efforts. You need to think carefully about timing. But I can say that this game is more ready for worldwide release than any other game I’ve seen so far. Over the past two months, we’ve spent a lot of time in closed beta building the tools we need to get the game into production going forward.
We just want to make sure that the team is set up and the resources are in place so that we can start to grow our audience and internally that our players can support this game in a way that it deserves over the long term.
Once we receive those signals, we’ll be moving pretty aggressively towards a global launch.
We expect the game to still change significantly. Since this is a beta version, we reserve the right to rebalance cards and take various measures to ensure a good player experience.
How much of the game is designed for NFT trading?
Ultimately, it takes some time to educate players on why web3 is cool and how it interconnects with different games in the ecosystem. It’s important not to scare everyone from day one, especially if you’re coming into this game without touching anything on blockchain. Therefore, the game needs to survive as a Web2 experience long enough to take players across the chasm.
We are thinking very carefully about why web3 should be interesting to players. There’s nothing worse than wanting a specific card for an upgrade, only to find it buried deep in your loot box, never being able to pull it out. Web3 actually solves a lot of problems with this kind of genre.
We want to make sure we’re starting to paint a picture for the hundreds of millions, even billions, of gamers who probably don’t trust web3. We want to show them the point.
Check out the Shardbound open beta on Steam and Epic Games Store.
