Summary

  • Fragpunk aims to disrupt the tactical shooter duopoly of Counter-Strike 2 and Valorant with its unique card-based system and fast-paced gameplay.
  • Backed by Netease, Fragpunk offers a potential alternative to the existing live-service systems, focusing on empowering players' decks as a reward for their time.
  • The game's success will depend on its ability to retain players with exciting gameplay, interesting aesthetic, and strategic depth.

The tactical shooter genre isn’t oversaturated, but it’s led by two behemoths of gaming. Counter-Strike 2 is one of the biggest games in the world. Valorant has cornered the market for people who like the strategic elements of CS, but want a little more sci-fi flair. Between Valve and Riot, two of the biggest developers in the world, the vast majority of players have their needs catered for.

That’s why I admire Bad Guitar Studio, the developer behind Fragpunk. This is a difficult market to crack, to the point that most companies don’t even try. How do you claw players away from CS? But it’s possible.

There is seemingly no information about Bad Guitar Studio on the entire internet. It doesn’t have a website or any social media presence. It would be easy to assume that it’s the little guy trying to take on the industry behemoths of Valve and Riot. However, Fragpunk is backed by Netease, so presumably Bad Guitar Studio is a brand new subsidiary or development team within the $60 billion company.

Valorant did it. The game was released four years ago today, and has gone from success to success. Whether it brought new players to the tactical shooter genre with its colourful presentation, interesting characters, and magical abilities, or tore players away from CS:GO, it survived. In fact, it’s done more than survive, it’s thrived.

According to a Bloomberg report from last year (paywalled), Valorant has 28 million active players a month. Compare that to information from SteamDB, which shows Counter-Strike 2 averaged 947,520 players a day in June – a total of approximately 28 million players a month, and you can see that the two coexist in relative harmony.

But can a third game disrupt this duopoly? Is there room for a third in this symbiotic relationship? Neither Valve nor Riot would relish another challenger, especially one with such powerful financial backing behind it, but Netease is forcing its way in. Fragpunk wants to be the game that upsets the status quo.

It’s got a lot going for it. The gameplay is fast and exciting, the characters are interesting and varied. The shooting feels really good, even if I have to relearn my Apex Legends strategies when moving back to a tactical shooter. I also like the fact that, if you die in a round, you can’t pick the same weapon again that match. It forces diversity and tactical flexibility, stops any builds from becoming too oppressive, and means I’ve found a favourite shotgun that I wouldn’t have touched if I could stick to a trusty assault rifle every round.

Any game trying to break into an existing genre with such dominant titles already in play needs to differentiate itself a little. Apex Legends rewrote the battle royale playbook with its Titanfall-esque movement and industry-changing ping system. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild redesigned open worlds from the ground up with more natural storytelling as you explored. Fragpunk adds a little bit of Slay the Spire to the tactical shooter genre.

You collect cards as you play matches, adding them to your deck. You use them in the preparatory stage of each round, voting with points gained by killing opponents to grant your team buffs like +25 percent headshot damage or a brief shift to an opponent’s perspective to gain intel. These cards add a great deal of tactical depth to each round, and clever use of a buff can be enough to turn the tide when you’re at risk of being swept.

These cards also offer something more important, from Bad Guitar’s perspective at least: replayability. You need to collect all the different cards to have as many potential buffs to draw from each round, so you need to keep playing Fragpunk rather than switching back to Valorant. While there’s some cool cosmetics in the game already (a goose hat for Nitro is a personal highlight), these aren’t currently enough to keep me playing. Live-service games rely on cosmetic sales (whether through loot boxes, which weren’t present in the Fragpunk alpha test, or direct sales) to earn money and keep players engaged, but if Fragpunk can engage players with its card collecting mechanic instead, that could be a feather in its cap.

Close

I’m not holding out too much hope – Netease didn’t become a $60 billion company by being pro-consumer, after all – but Fragpunk could offer a more ethical approach to live-service. Like Helldivers 2, which doesn’t deal in FOMO-laden battle passes, Fragpunk could focus on empowering players’ decks as a reward for their time, rather than enticing them back online with paid cosmetics and events.

Fragpunk’s commercial strategy isn’t clear from the alpha, but if players can buy cards with real money, that presents very real pay-to-win problems.

More importantly, Fragpunk is really fun. That’s ultimately what will encourage players to come over from Counter-Strike 2 or Valorant. The live-service trappings, monetisation, and events are what will be crucial to retaining those players, but Fragpunk has the exciting gameplay and interesting aesthetic to make a splash when it releases.

It’s easy to forget that Counter-Strike itself started as a Half-Life mod. Who’d have thought it would go on to be the most popular game on Steam? Fragpunk is starting from far less humble beginnings. But with Counter-Strike 2 and Valorant cornering such a vast market share, is there room in this committed relationship for another? Can Fragpunk persuade the pair into trying out a ménage à trois? And will it have the staying power once it’s broken into the tactical shooter duopoly? These are all questions that can’t be answered during a four-day alpha test, but the initial signs look positive.

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