In Brief:
- Koin Games said the free Steam demo for its card game Origins TCG has been downloaded more than 20,000 times.
- The demo launched July 15 and passed 15,000 downloads in late September.
- Ranked play and the $10,000 Crimson Cup arrive with Steam Next Fest on Oct. 19, an Alpha Edition Kickstarter opens Oct. 27 and the full game is listed for Q4 2026.
The free Steam demo for Origins TCG has been downloaded more than 20,000 times, developer Koin Games said on X.
“The demo for our game Origins was downloaded over 20000 times already,” the studio’s account posted, listing matches that run under seven minutes, real collecting and no pay-to-win as the draw.
20K!!!
Koin Games founder and CEO Timothy Jooste flagged the count on his own account, posting “20K!!!”
The figure has climbed quickly. The studio said in late September that the demo had “just crossed 15000 downloads,” which puts the most recent 5,000 in roughly two weeks.
Koin released the demo on July 15 for PC and Mac, the first public build of a game the studio says took five years to make.
A busy October
The milestone lands two weeks before Steam Next Fest opens. The festival runs Oct. 19 to 26, and ranked mode switches on in the demo when it starts, with exclusive ranked rewards, Koin Games said.
A Demo 2.0 update arrives alongside the festival and adds custom deckbuilding to the demo for the first time.
The studio also runs the Crimson Cup, an online tournament with $10,000 in prizes, from Oct. 19 to 25. Five qualifiers of 512 players each feed a 256-player playoff stage on Oct. 24, with finals on Oct. 25. The winner takes a 1/1 Dracula promo card, two booster box cases and $1,500 in cash.
Sign-ups go through the game’s Discord. The tournament is played on the demo build, not the studio’s separate playtest client.
A Kickstarter, then launch
A Kickstarter for the Origins Myths & Legends Alpha Edition opens Oct. 27, a date Jooste confirmed on X in September. Alpha booster boxes and cases are preorder-only, and the studio has said the print run won’t repeat. Koin said in July that it targets about $4 per collector pack.
The full game is listed for Q4 2026 on Steam. Cards earned in the demo become tradable on the Steam marketplace once it ships.
From Immutable to Steam
The trading layer is the part crypto watchers have followed closest. Koin built Origins on Immutable and announced it in August 2025 as Project O (official site), with on-chain card ownership in the pitch.
The studio abandoned the standalone on-chain marketplace in May and now routes all trading through the Steam Community Market, citing its audience of players who already buy and sell digital items. The game has no native token.
Koin calls Origins the first free-to-compete TCG. “Compete on skill alone (zero pay-to-win) for limited digitally graded cards you can buy, sell, and trade,” its Steam page reads.
How the demo plays
Matches use simultaneous turns across a three-lane board. Decks hold 13 cards, and every game pulls from a pool of more than 100 locations that change the field. The roster leans on public-domain figures, among them Robin Hood, Mulan, Winnie-the-Pooh and Dracula.
The studio has summed up the pitch as a game where players “play like Hearthstone & Snap, rip and collect like Pokemon, and trade like Counter-Strike.”
The demo sits at “Very Positive” on Steam, with 95% of 74 user reviews positive.
