Michael Skinner

Hey Bynx, great to meet you. I'm the founder of Koin Games, the studio building Origins. Like Kevin, I'm a big fan. I've been watching since the early days of Snap, back when you won the Conquerors broadcast. I want to start by saying I appreciate that you take the time to look up a company before deciding on working with them. Hopefully, after I clear a few things up, you might still be open to the idea of working with Origins. Here is a quick history on how Origins TCG started with blockchain and NFTs and ended up like Counter-Strike on the Steam marketplace. From day one we have had one simple dream: to bring the physical collecting experience from Pokémon, One Piece, and Riftbound into digital TCGs. There's something so special about being able to fill out your binder, trade with friends, and collect things that have real value, even if you never intend to sell them. As my wife always reminds me, "Why does it matter if the price goes up if you never sell anything?" 🙂 When we started this journey, it was at the very beginning of using blockchain and NFTs for games. There were a lot of messy things back then, but there was also so much hope that blockchain was the answer to true ownership in digital. So we started to build in that direction. We partnered with Immutable, and we announced (but never launched) Project O as a game that would use blockchain and NFT tech to give players true ownership. But as we kept building, the adoption we all expected never happened, the stigma with gamers kept growing, and ultimately we realized that if we wanted to reach our goal of true ownership in digital, we needed to look outside of blockchain. The obvious answer was to follow in the footsteps of the most successful digital collectible ecosystem of all time, Counter-Strike, and to build on Steam. Just to make it very clear we have zero blockchain in our game, and we never will. Origins is simply a really fun game that gives every player every card for free, and just like Counter-Strike, every item you can buy is limited, rare, and truly yours. We know not everyone cares, but we believe players deserve free and fair competition. We believe players deserve to own the items they choose to spend money on. I'll finish by saying that while it hasn't been the smoothest path from where we started to where we are now, I'm very proud of the journey we've been on. Most of my favorite products and companies, like Apple, Fortnite, and Tesla, made some massive mistakes along the way to finding something great, and I believe that's what's happening with Origins. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and if you're open to it, I would love to jump on a call and chat. My DMs are open.