Back to collectionYear's End: From Making Games to Building Their Home
On New Year's Eve, the studio counted its losses in a bear market while preparing to carry its game-chain research into the new year. The industry's ledger was bleak. To the narrator, the studio's ambition had quietly shifted from making games to building a home for games.
A creative chronicle combining project history with imagined scenes. Story events are not verification of network activity.
On New Year's Eve, the studio counted its losses in a bear market while preparing to carry its game-chain research into the new year. The narrator set the industry's ledger beside the studio's: survival was a fact, but what they could build next remained an open question.
The industry's ledger was bleak. BTC fell from roughly USD 47,000 at the start of the year to about USD 16,500, a decline of around 64% for the year; ETH fell harder, and NFT trading shrank by 90% from its peak. Luna, Three Arrows, Celsius, Voyager, FTX, and BlockFi fell in succession. Names regarded as too big to fail at the year's start became a roll call of collapses. The studio's accounts were tight too: it released Mike Tyson's Iron Pigeons, its first product to break beyond its usual audience, and sold it out during the bear market. It survived three industry shocks without laying off a single person, yet cash kept burning, the runway had been squeezed repeatedly to just 20 months, and a distribution payment was lost in FTX. On another page sat a research report of more than 40 pages, two calls with Offchain Labs, a technical preference for the Arbitrum stack, and a five-person chain team. In the New Year's voice chat, the Night Watchman said his biggest lesson of the year was learning who had been swimming naked and who had been working hard while holding their breath.
To the narrator, the studio's ambition had quietly shifted from making games to building a home for games. Its shipped product showed that the team could still deliver; the research sketched a larger undertaking. Few were watching in the depths of the downturn, and the chain had no name yet. As 2023 began, the next question was whether the drawings could become something that ran.