FTX collapse has done lethal damage to an up-and-coming card game
Storybook Brawl(opens in new tab) is a free-to-play fairytale card game designed by former Magic: The Gathering pros that showed real promise when it debuted in 2021. It still needed work—we said in a preview(opens in new tab) later that year that it felt «unfocused,» and was «struggling for a unique identity among the varied mechanics of what is still an unexplored game genre»—but it was in early access, which is exactly when those sorts of issues are supposed to be worked out.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. Developer Good Luck Games announced on Twitter today that the servers will be taken offline for good on May 1.
«On behalf of everyone on the SBB team, we'd like to thank you for your support,» the studio tweeted earlier today. «We’ve explored different options, and unfortunately there is no path forward. We’ll be shutting down the servers on May 1st — please enjoy SBB until then, and thanks for all the memories.»
A specific reason for the closure hasn't been given, but the widely held assumption is that Storybook Brawl was caught in the swirl of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that went from a $32 billion valuation at the beginning of 2022 to multiple criminal charges(opens in new tab) at the end of it.
FTX acquired Good Luck Games in March 2022, saying it was an «opportunity to be the vanguard for the ethical integration of gaming and crypto transactions.» Fans didn't see it that way, however: The review bombs(opens in new tab) began dropping almost immediately, dragging the user rating on Steam down to «mixed», based on 3,506 reviews at current count.
The bigger issue, of course, was that FTX was itself a house of cards. Founder Sam Bankman-Fried denied criminal intent but acknowledged on Twitter
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