GRIT: why this 2021 western is only reaching Steam today, and what it lost on the way

GRIT has existed since 2021. It had a page, screenshots, a community, coverage. And it turns up on Steam today with zero reviews and a page that smells of fresh paint, as though it were born this morning.

It was not born this morning. It has come a long way back, and it has come back missing a limb.

It was not allowed to be there

In June 2022, at the Galaverse convention, Epic Games and Gala Games announced their collaboration on a game: GRIT. It became the first blockchain game on the Epic Games Store, with player-owned assets as NFTs, bought and resold, and a drop of ten thousand avatars to be minted through Gala Games. The game was announced as free to play.

Meanwhile, Steam was closed to it. In October 2021, Valve had settled the matter by outright banning from its store any game built on blockchain, cryptocurrency or NFTs. GRIT ticked every box of that ban.

That is why a 2021 game arrives on Steam in 2026: it could not come earlier.

What it left at the door

Go to GRIT's Steam page and look for the word NFT. You will not find it. No blockchain, no crypto, no Gala Games. The game's past has been wiped from its own shop window.

Valve's rule has not moved since 2021, so GRIT did what it had to do to get in: it abandoned what used to be its selling point.

The business model went with it. The free game funded by resellable assets is now a paid game, monetised through a hundred-level CattlePass of weapon skins, horses, parachutes, outfits and titles, with eight themed Logbooks and a daily mission. The most ordinary pass on the market.

So the promise of digital ownership has been swapped for the same cosmetic subscription as everybody else. It was probably the only viable way out, but a 2022 buyer deserves to know what remains of what he was sold, and the page carefully avoids telling him.

The press was not kind at the time either: Kotaku ran a headline saying the Epic Store's first blockchain game looked dreadful. Four years on, it gets a chance to answer.

The idea that sells the dream

Its central idea deserves better than its past.

Every gun you pick up is also a playing card. You have four slots. Each gun carries a suit. Two of a suit switches a perk on, four makes you something the rest of the lobby has to plan around.

That turns every looted body into a concrete dilemma: take the better gun, or the one that completes the hand? It is simple, immediately legible, and it gives loot a meaning most battle royales have never managed to give it.

The four suits map to four roles:

Diamonds, the Tracker. Nobody gets to hide. Hit someone and he stays lit up for your whole posse. Full hand, and anyone shooting at you gives himself away doing it.

Hearts, the Chaplain. Everything that keeps people alive happens faster around you. Full hand, your remedies carry to whoever is close and the men you revive come back stronger.

Spades, the Merchant. Armour becomes a suggestion, your lead goes through what other men were counting on, and a full hand cuts the whole posse in.

Clubs, the Cavalry. The horse is not how you get to the fight, it is how you win it. Faster, tougher, eventually near unkillable, with the ability to haul teammates up at a gallop.

The detail that makes the system smart: suit perks spill onto teammates. A posse that coordinates its hands beats one that loots at random. Here is a battle royale that rewards talking over twitch.

The rest of the formula

A hundred players a match, around twenty-five minutes a round, solo, duos or posses.

The closing zone is called the Calamity, and the game adds an idea I have not seen elsewhere: a train that keeps rolling straight through it. You can board it for loot, stay aboard to hold position inside the ring, and throw off anyone who had the same thought. While everyone else runs, you ride.

Better still, the variation between matches is structured rather than left to loot luck: three Wildcards are dealt from a deck of twenty before a shot is fired. The Calamity might chase the train instead of closing a circle, Second Chances might be off the table, the Deathcart might be stocked with something it has no business selling. You find out the day's rules as the cards hit the table.

And being gunned down does not end your match: you duel your way back.

What sets the score

It rewards a genuinely good design idea, the inventory as a poker hand, which gives every pickup meaning and pushes teams to coordinate. The Wildcards dealt before the match and the train inside the zone are two more finds, and the western setting remains badly underused in the genre.

It marks down a context that does not inspire confidence. A paid hundred-player battle royale lives or dies on population, and this one arrives with a four-year history, a complete change of business model, and an original audience that came for resellable assets which no longer exist. Empty servers are the first risk of all.

It also accounts for the page's silence about that past. Not mentioning NFTs is entirely legal and probably mandatory to be on Steam, but a 2022 buyer deserves to know what is left of what was promised.

So the advice is cautious: the idea is worth trying, and it is worth checking the concurrent player count before paying.

For those who grew up on westerns: which game has best captured that atmosphere so far?

We argue about it on the InsertCoins Discord, where opinions on the video game Wild West run strong.