Opening Day is Almost Here

Blaseball Fans, Opening Day is almost here! We spent the better part of a year building a new foundation for your favorite Cultural Event, and can’t wait for you to jump back in.

There’s so much to talk about (in-game social features! mobile app! redesigned sim!), but before we dive too deep, I want to tell you a bit about the leadup to this release. The Verge called our first version of Blaseball a “mass hallucination” and I really can’t imagine a more apt description. Everything happened so FAST. We were tremendously grateful for your outpouring of love, creativity…and patience.

Blaseball, as you know, was a glorious mess.

Our “beta” was a prototype that we developed in three months, and the technical issues were immediately obvious. There were so many unexpected outages, on top of the breaks we had to take to develop more content. We reached the edges of Blaseball’s simple simulation pretty quickly, which meant we couldn’t add content without adding complexity.

In the meantime, we scrambled to figure out how to make this brand new type of live, performative game development sustainable. We still have a lot to learn, but we’re starting from a much better place.

Here’s our goals for the next version of Blaseball:

1. New stories, all year long. We want to run Blaseball all year. There will be short gaps between Eras, but we’re aiming for them to last a few weeks rather than several months.
2. An approachable, communal experience for all players. Have you tried getting your friends into Blaseball? It’s not easy! Blaseball can be intimidating and confusing, and so much of the experience previously took place on Discord and Twitter. We rethought the fundamentals to make the game easier to get into and are building integrated social features, so everyone can participate in the community.
3. Create a foundation for what comes next. This release isn’t just about the upcoming Era, it’s about creating the building blocks we’ll use for future releases. Before we get there, we need to refine our processes and try out some new ideas with you. Blaseball is our first attempt at a wildly different style of emergent game design for mass communities, and we’ll get better at making it the more we playtest live. We don’t expect all of our ideas to work, but we do promise that Blaseball will keep evolving. Tell us what you like and what you don’t. We’ll do our best to be transparent about our thinking too.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll pull back the curtain on some of the biggest changes coming to Blaseball. Thanks again for making it through Siesta with us. Opening Day is January 9th — get ready to Play Ball.

Sam