In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Bo Daly, the CEO of Bazooka Tango.
As well as sharing his excitement over launching open beta globally, Daly dives into what makes Shardbound visually and narratively immersive, the unknowns of blockchain, and why he’s at ease with the game maybe not being everyone’s cup of tea.
BlockchainGamer: What have you been up to in your career?
Bo Daly: I’ve been in games for a long time. I started in the PS2 era at Rockstar Games with Red Dead Revolver, Red Dead Redemption on Xbox 360 and PS3. From there, I spent a decade in MMOs, at the advent of the WoW revolution, and then they moved to free to play. I was originally working with John Romero on his MMO, which are hard to make. It’s a big mission, a big dream, and it’s something that’s still very dear to my heart.
So I spent about a decade working across different projects, learning a ton, and took that knowledge and plowed it into my first startup, which was Super Evil Megacorp. We built Vainglory, which was all about bringing core gamers to mobile. This is 10 years ago where mobile was not viewed as a serious gaming platform. Obviously the world’s changed a lot since.
I felt very lucky to be able to help catalyze that shift and to build a great audience, and great game, with a great community. We had esports tournaments all over the world. I think we had the number one mobile game on Twitch for a long time and even popped up past Overwatch at some point.
I left that five years ago with my co-founder, Stephan ‘Captain Neato’ Sherman, to build Bazooka Tango, and Shardbound is hopefully our next great feather in our cap.
Back in the Kickstarter era, Shardbound was developed by another studio. How did you guys come across it?
Everything we do right now with Shardbound is a testament to the incredible work that the Spirit Walk Games team put into it. It was a studio founded around the same time we founded Super Evil, whose people had also worked at MMO studio Gazillion, so we knew them really well. We were kind of startup brothers.
Making games is hard. Marketing games is hard. Raising money for games is extremely hard, so we kept a close track of that game.
They couldn’t quite make it happen then, but we stayed close to the team. When we saw an opportunity in terms of finishing the game, breathing life into it, it was at the advent of digital collectibles. It fits so seamlessly and neatly into a world where you want to be able to build decks, build a community, but you also don’t want to get stuck with cards that you’ve pulled from a gotcha or something that are useless. It’s about having the ability to try something out and really craft your deck in the way you want it.
And it’s just a beautiful world. We view this as much more than just a collectible card tactics game. It’s hopefully something we can breathe life into for decades, with lots of different types of gameplay set in a world that is lush and vibrant and feels alive.
You mentioned digital collectibles. At what point did blockchain come into the mix?
We see blockchain as a great way to support and grow a community, and give players the opportunity to customize their game experience.
In terms of Shardbound, the promise of the blockchain for us is interoperability. My goal here is more ambitious than just launching and operating a great CCG. I want to make a string of games in the Shardbound universe that knit together into something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.
Coming back to startups. I’ve been working with great people in games through the advent of the WoW era, I see it as sort of a proto-metaverse. It was a game where people met and married. It creates a really rich social tapestry when you can bring together different types of gamers, make them socially interconnected, but also economically interdependent. So they have a reason to go meet each other in what today would be the Discord server, but what used to be the Tavern in WoW.
Building all of that infrastructure 20 years ago was really hard. It took hundreds of teams and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to get a game across the finish line that maybe no one plays anyway. So that’s not a great value proposition as a founder. To me, to be able to build a great game, test out maybe 10 different ideas, and if three of them hit, you’ve got the foundation for something wonderful. I think that the blockchain will allow us to not have to build the auction house. It already exists.
How would you describe Shardbound and why do you find it such a compelling universe?
Think Hearthstone meets Final Fantasy Tactics or XCOM. Shardbound is definitely inspired by games Blizzard would make, what Square would make. Again, it’s a bright world, a world with a thousand different stories. Every character that comes out has an interesting story and is part of a culture. You can see there’s art in this world. Yes, it’s a post-apocalyptic doomscape, but it’s very bright and gorgeously rendered.
All credit to the incredible team, Josh Nadelberg and folks at Spirit Walk Games for being able to envision this for us and give us something to take across the line.
Also, all gaming is best when it’s social, when you can play with your friends. I’m also a huge fan of tactics games, so the social and tactical elements to Shardbound makes it play a lot like Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone.
You’re getting mana each turn and try to get your big playmaker cards out onto the board. But everything that you put out on the board is a movable piece, so it very quickly becomes a chess match. You can win by knocking out the other team’s commander, but you can also win by capturing enough victory points by controlling different parts of the board at different moments. It’s about out thinking and out playing your opponent every step of the way.
Also a big shout out to Immutable Games, who’s been a wonderful partner for us for the last year and given us the foundation we need to be able to understand how to think about blockchain.
So it has trading cards, deck-building and tactics elements. Could that be seen as a niche genre? Can you bring more people into it?
I think so. Part of the reason we’re launching open beta now is that we’ve hit a critical mass of pre-registration. We’ve got a 100,000 pre-reg list.
I think it’s always tricky when you’re trying to combine two genres from a design perspective. The question is, can you make it the union of those two sets? Can you give enough depth to the CCG player that the tactics are fun and novel? And can you bring the tactics player into the CCG world in a way that appeals to both?
I think it’s possible, but again, I hope to make some other games in the Shardbound universe. If this isn’t the game for you, we still want to be able to build an ecosystem of titles that are going to capture you. Maybe it’s our fifth game down the line that is the one that gets everyone super excited.
Some blockchain games are very crypto and lean into token rewards and that stuff. You’re definitely not doing that, but very much am a game first. How do you feel about the blockchain gaming community?
There are a couple of bits here. So everyone who registered early is going to get a unique set of cards. That said, there’s a really exciting partnership between now and the end of November, where we’re working with Immutable as part of their Main Quest program. Players can basically play and win three matches in Shardbound, and they can earn 100 gems in that program. Obviously, you can convert that to IMX.
We want to make sure that we are giving those players what they want. This game has been in development for a long time. I think it’s important as a business to know what’s really happening in your game, so that has to come first. It has to be the thing that is the reason that all that other stuff is going to be interesting and exciting.
I also think our audience should be 100 million gamers, period. That’s my dream for where Shardbound is a few years from now. But ultimately, if you have players coming into your beta that have incentives other than playing the game, you’re just not going to understand if your game is working or not. You might get false confidence because all these players showed up. I wouldn’t want to be representing that to future investors.
We feel pretty confident that the audience that has been with us on this journey for the better part of a year are folks that will come in and play hundreds of hours. Actually, a good chunk of them are playing six or seven days a week already.
You’re launching through Epic Games Store, which is generally fine for blockchain. You’re also going through Steam, which has tighter rules around blockchain. On Steam there’s also still people who like to go around and review bomb blockchain games. How do you feel about the potential collision between those two things?
Every game has aspects of it that people like and aspects they don’t like. I don’t think anything we’re doing here would be seen as disqualifying by any player.
People’s initial reactions are going to be what they’re going to be, but I’m comfortable with that.
Again, my last company put a MOBA on mobile in 2011, which is not something players thought they wanted. I’m confident that we’ll find our people and that we’ll be able to grow and scale this game for years and years to come.
In terms of this now being an open beta, what’s the progression you look to see? What does your roadmap look like?
We’re eager to move towards a global launch. Obviously, we’re approaching the holidays, which is a very expensive time to do marketing. We need to be thoughtful about timing. But I will say that this game is more worldwide launch ready than any game I’ve seen. We’ve taken a lot of time over the last couple of months in closed beta to just build out the tools that we need to be able to live operate the game going forward.
We just want some validation that we can begin to grow an audience and that internally our team is set up and resourced to be able to support this game in the way that players deserve for the long term.
Once we get those signals, we’re pretty eager to push towards the global launch.
I do expect the game to shift a lot still. It is beta, so we are reserving the right to rebalance cards and do different things to make sure that the player experience is good.
How much of the game is designed for NFT trading?
Ultimately, we have a little bit ahead of us to educate players about why web3 is cool and how this is going to interconnect with different games in our ecosystem. It’s important to not scare everyone away on day one, particularly if coming into this game having never touched anything on the blockchain. So the game has to hang together as a web2 experience for long enough to bring players across the chasm.
We think very carefully about why web3 should be interesting to players. There’s nothing worse than getting stuck wanting one particular card for an upgrade and having it be buried deep in a loot box that you’re never gonna pull. Web3 really solves a lot of problems for this kind of genre.
We want to make sure that we are starting to paint the picture for the hundreds of millions, billions of gamers out there that maybe don’t trust web3. We want to show them the point of it.
Check out Shardbound open beta via Steam and Epic Games Store.
