In the absence of a real baseball league, it may come as no surprise that a simulated league should become popular in the difficult 2020 year. Still, the absurd horror and minimalist aesthetic of Bubble ball seems an unlikely success. The text-based fantasy-fantasy league has attracted hundreds of thousands of players and has now allocated $ 3.4 million to build the game and mobilize it.
If you are not familiar Bubble ballTry it now and sign up – it’s free. You will likely get a better idea of what the game is after 30 seconds of browsing than the next few paragraphs.
For those of you who prefer to read, however Bubble ball is a web-based fictional baseball league where players can bet on the results in-game. But this is where it gets weird. The teams are not the Mariners or the Mets, but the Moist Talkers and the Worms. Players have names like Chorby Soul and Peanutiel Duffy; Their stats include allergies, pre-game rituals, and an inventory of RPG-like items.
Likewise, games – told through simple text summaries of the action you might see in the corner of a sports website – involve hits, balls, and theft, but also include incineration, shame, and secret bases. “Weather” can include spontaneous blood transfusions between players or birds that disrupt the game.
In short, it’s totally ridiculous, totally unpredictable, and very funny. This completely unique mix of fantasy leagues, baseball satire, and cosmic horror has built a dedicated but routinely confused fan base over the 19 weeks. And like so many hits, this one came as a shock to its creators.
Credit: The play band
“We’re just as surprised as you are,” said Sam Rosenthal, founder and CEO of The Game Band, which developed (and is developing) the game. “Bubble ball was an experimental side project for the studio – we were in the middle of a pandemic, the publishers were on a spending freeze, it was a scary time. We wanted to make a game that would bring people together in this really isolating time. “
The idea for this came from jokes at a real baseball game in which Rosenthal and a friend speculated about a league in which the rules were “different and more chaotic”. Of course, the rules of real baseball are constantly being revised, but so far there has been no resurrection of players burned by rogue umpires, home team freewheels, or shrink rays.
While the resulting game-like product bears similarities to baseball, betting, and fantasy leagues, it is far too strange and random to really be considered the same thing. This creates some friction as players expecting a more traditional experience will lose coins on a game decided by, for example, a bird pecking their team’s star hitter in a giant peanut shell, or a guaranteed home run because of the batter’s magma has eaten.
The Hades Tigers … just so hot. The roster shows a team’s current and permanent attributes while players can work together to bring about change through weekly voting.
“Sometimes we have to remind the fans that this is a horror game,” admitted Rosenthal. The gameplay, as players find out over time, consists more in the collaboration and running of the league itself than in the precision of the odds. “This is not about individual success, but about collective success. The mechanics of the game rewards organization, fans joining forces with other fans on their team. “
Using these coins to purchase votes to determine how the most adored players will be treated at the end of a season, for example, could have a huge impact on the next season. Ultimately, players really get into some sort of long-term alternative reality game rather than some crazy baseball sim as the ominous announcements and events drive home every now and then.
In addition to the outcome of a game and the news that a player has been led to the second base, you can learn that “reality flickered in feedback” or see a disembodied dialogue about the league or the disordered cosmos.
It can be unsettling, and one might justifiably wonder if the creators have a narrative or purpose in mind, or if they are just fueling it and being weird for the sake of madness. I guessed the latter, but Rosenthal just posed me.
Credit: The play band
“It’s going somewhere,” he assured me. “There are many plans, we have written a lot of lore. We have an author’s room literally every day, usually for around 3-4 hours. But we have to be flexible because there are two other creators: the simulation, since we don’t know what will happen in the games themselves, and the fans. There are things we don’t know will stick to, emerging narratives like the reincarnation of Jaylen Hotdogs. We are always learning and giving ourselves plenty of space to quickly retrace or change things if necessary. “
What was never clear even to the developers, however, was whether the game would live long enough to realize these plans. Bubble ballAs a side project built on strange days, it was never meant to be a big money maker. In order for a small game developer to have runaway success but little in a position to monetize that success, the stresses of continued development and support can overtake the benefits of popularity.
“Since we didn’t really set it up to be profitable right from the start, we were slow to lose money,” said Rosenthal. “Fortunately, our community really provided support through patreon and sponsorship. But in the end we wanted to make the game better and more sustainable and we wanted to pay our team what it deserves. “
Credit: The play band
The $ 3M Starting Round initially keeps the lights on, but also lets The Game Band staff stand up so the writers don’t have to prematurely end a meeting because one of them is also acting as product support and the website is no longer working. More importantly, the team plans to build a native mobile app. More than half of Bubble balls Players (ie the real ones, not Baby Triumphant and Wyatt Mason IV) are mobile and Rosenthal admitted the mobile experience is “not great”.
The company has a background in mobile development so they know what they’re doing but have viewed the web as the easiest platform to implement during the pandemic. Now they want to get up and running on mobile as the ever-changing live nature of the game goes well with the updates that sports and fantasy lovers usually sign up for. Who doesn’t want to know right away that their favorite team has entered Party Time, or that their adored player has found new armor, or that a new non-physical law has been ratified?
Rosenthal said they initially refused to seek funding out of a desire for independence, but were delighted with the choice of Investor Makers Fund and said they actually understood Bubble ball and were more partners than parents in moving the operation towards making money.
“We know we can’t just copy and paste monetization from another game Bubble ball, that would ruin the experience in an instant. They have an amazing network of people in the game industry and at the end of the day they are not mandatory, ”he said.
(They also had no objection to a line in the fictional commissioner’s press release claiming that “Blaseball acquired the Makers Fund,” which says a lot.)
“We are very aware that there are ways that free games can make money that are detrimental to the community,” he continued. “So it will always be free to play and it will never be paid to win. The crabs will never run away with it because they are the richest team. When we think about monetization, we think about how it can benefit the entire community, not individuals. “
In the meantime, the league is creeping up and turning into a live dialogue between players and developers from week to week. Don’t expect it to get any less weird as the developers know that constant disorientation is part of the game’s charms.
Amazingly, Rosenthal even managed to point out that this was bubble ball in the parlance of the tropics of game design Dark souls of baseball simulators – “it [Dark Souls] gives you so little that it asks you to interpret and compile a thesis, linger on forums, and talk to others about it. We wanted to create that kind of experience and see how people would interpret this kind of strange, unknowable entity. “
You surely got the weird and unrecognizable part right. Here you can try blowball yourself.