Immutable Games, a global pioneer in web3 game creation and publishing, has announced that its flagship product, Gods Unchained - Ethereum's highest-grossing trading card game - has become the next crypto game to premiere on major digital distribution platform Epic Games Store (EGS). According to a June 21 release, the game is now available to 230 million players worldwide.
Gods Unchained is a collectible card trading game comparable to Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering Arena, but with cards that players can own and trade. Each card in Immutable X is represented by a nonfungible token (NFT) on the Ethereum layer-2 network. The game was released in June 2019, and over the next two years, its player base increased to 80,000 weekly active players by January 2022.
The release of Gods Unchained on the Epic Games Store is a significant milestone for the game, which hopes to put it on par with other digital Trading Card Games (TCGs) such as Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering, Yu Gi Oh, and Legends Of Runeterra.
Similar to Steam or GOG.com, Epic Games Store is a digital game distribution platform. According to the developer's "2022 Year in Review" post from March, over 230 million PC gamers use Epic Games to discover new games to play.
According to Gods Unchained executive producer Daniel Paez, the Epic Games listing represents a watershed point in the game's history. He stated that:
It is hard to overestimate the significance of Gods Unchained's launch on Epic Games Store, one of the largest PC gaming platforms in the world [.] We are extremely excited to present our game to a completely new and truly massive audience of traditional PC gamers and TCG enthusiasts.
The listing comes at a time when Web3 publishers are still fighting back against Steam, the world's largest PC game distributor. In October 2021, Steam declared that Web3 games were no longer accepted on their marketplace while also delisting Age of Rust due to the benefits the game provided to NFT holders.
The Gods Unchained team has unveiled its updated roadmap for 2023, which includes an array of additional features. Gods Unchained is planned to undergo a soft launch on both Android and iOS mobile devices later this year after hosting over 60,000 sessions in one month to work on gameplay and design during pre-alpha for Android mobile users.
Along with general user experience upgrades and various quality-of-life enhancements, the team plans to experiment with new game concepts, including the long-awaited "Sealed" game mode. Gods Unchained will be the first web3 TCG to incorporate this game format, which is often seen solely in conventional TCGs and will be centered on a buy-in queue with decks constructed from a pool of 60 randomly picked cards and three Gods.
In Sealed Mode, players will go through a gauntlet run until they win seven times or lose three times, whichever comes first, and will be rewarded based on their performance. To spice things up, typical deckbuilding restrictions will not apply in this mode, allowing players to have multiple copies of legendaries as well as cross-domain cards from the given card pool.
More fresh and fascinating game modes will be added in the future. For example, Chaos Constructed, which is already in development, will remove restrictions on using cards from the same domain as the chosen God.
Furthermore, the technical architecture behind the pack opening mechanic has been upgraded from a video hosting pack opening experience to a WebGL one, allowing for a more fluid experience on all devices, including mobile.
Gods Unchained's developers aspire to become even more aggressive in their communications with the community as the game grows rapidly, including regular dev diaries for game updates and an updated roadmap every quarter. Hence, players know exactly what to anticipate in the future. Meanwhile, Executive Producer Daniel Paez and other team members will talk with players on Discord on a weekly basis to reveal what's going on in the game's environment.