Featuring 250 cards and over 40 different gameplay mechanics, Cometh recently launched its space-themed PC TCG Cosmik Battle into early access via distribution apps such as Epic Games Store, Ultra and Hyperplay.
Deployed on Cometh’s own Arbitrum-based L3 blockchain Muster and supported by its own infrastructure, we checked in with studio CEO Jerome de Tychey to dive further into the game, its future mobile adoption, and more.
BlockchainGamer.biz: Can you give us some background to Cometh?
Jerome de Tychey: Cometh was founded in 2020 to develop blockchain applications accessible to the general public. We developed a set of middlewares to manage the onboarding and ongoing blockchain interactions of users. We tested those tools in several games with a first fully-onchain game published in February 2021.
Our gaming division, Cometh Studio, spun out of Cometh in 2023 and is now publishing Cosmik Battle.
What excites you about Cosmik Battle and how does it stand out from all the other blockchain TCGs?
Cosmik Battle runs on a permissionless blockchain with all the EVM features available and more. This is a major breakthrough. No other TCG went this far in leveraging the blockchain. The game is available to all gamers, both web2 and web3, with the smoothest onboarding of the industry yet fully aligned with the blockchain ethos. The game relies on our latest account abstraction service (Cometh Connect) to offer a seamless blockchain experience while letting advanced users remove the training wheels.
I am very proud of all the engineering achievements we brought to make the game as enjoyable as a traditional game. The average gamer won’t accept any compromise on usability for the sake of game asset tokenization.
What I am the most excited about is the quality of the gameplay and of the balance of the game. The alpha phase of the game gathered about 100,000 unique players that played 1 million sessions over 12 months. Thanks to their contributions and feedback, Cosmik Battle has proven to be both competitive and fun. Shaking the whole TCG genre is our next move.
What’s your target audience?
We are simply aiming at every video game player. We do of course have a bias towards TCG gamers that will find common mechanics and good use for their deck building skills. Yet, we firmly believe that Cosmik Battle can be the right entry point to TCG for a newcomer as well as an excellent playground for esport professionals.
Our onboarding is account abstraction first. It’s basically a mullet: web2 in the front, web3 in the back. A new user won’t see the blockchain at all, yet everything is working behind the scenes to ensure full self custody, recovery options and transaction sponsoring. In Cosmik Battle, a user profile is a smart account based on the most secure and flexible standard: (Gnosis) SAFE. Upon logging in, a dedicated session key is created to sign on request from the player thus avoiding annoying wallet popups. No need to get ETH to pay for transactions either, account abstraction allows us to sponsor efficiently all the transactions.
A web3 veteran can add every wallet address he or she wants as owner of the SAFE and starts customizing their experience with the NFT owned on those wallets or freely transfers assets stored on the SAFE elsewhere. Everything runs on Muster which is a layer 3 based on Arbitrum One, it has ETH for native currency and benefits from the latest innovations in the field. This may seem like too good to be true but honestly it’s a marvel to see unfold.
We’ve seen many web3 games move towards mobile distribution recently, can you tell us more about your plans in this regard?
We are going on mobile ASAP. Over the next quarters we are going to finalize the early access and get busy with the mobile version of the game.
What should we expect from Early Access and what are the main developments you need to complete until the game is formally launched?
The early access period has two objectives.
- First we rely on our player base to test and help us find the few remaining gameplay bugs, remember that we have 250 cards and 40+ different mechanics.
- Second, we are load testing our infrastructure to make sure we can handle 100,000+ users even better than we had previously during our alpha on Polygon. We are also taking this occasion to bring important new features to the experience, such as Premium Card upgrade (NFTs), Cosmik Marketplace Alpha, Bounties and much more.
The Early Access will last until April and will be immediately followed by version 1.0, the official release if you will. The first inaugural season Genesis, launched on February 26. It will last until the end of the Early Access and come with great events and surprises for players, notably a huge celebration tournament.
You’ve announced the game will deploy on Arbitrum. Are there any plans to expand to more blockchains in the future?
The game is deployed on Muster which sequences its transactions into Arbitrum One. We have plans to support most blockchains when it comes to reading what NFT the player has on their wallet so as to personalize their gaming experience.
That being said, we have no plan at the moment to deploy the game elsewhere.
Stay up-to-date on Cosmik Battle via its website – and play the game on Epic Games here.