Origins TCG opens free Steam demo, routes card trading through Valve’s marketplace

In Brief:

• Koin Games launched a free Steam demo for Origins TCG, the studio’s first public build after five years of development.
• Players defeat bosses to unlock every deck and claim demo-exclusive collectibles they can trade immediately on the Steam Marketplace, not an independent on-chain system.
• The Steam routing marks a shift from Koin’s original plan for a standalone on-chain trading model on the Immutable-powered game.

Koin Games put a free demo of Origins TCG live on Steam, the first time the public can play a build the studio says took five years to make.

The demo hands players a single task with a payoff. Defeat the bosses to unlock all decks and claim exclusive collectibles, the studio said. There is no pay-to-win, a line Koin has held to since it started pitching the game.

Trading moves onto Steam

For a crypto audience, the news isn’t the demo so much as where the trades settle. Origins TCG runs its collectible economy through the Steam Marketplace rather than the independent on-chain model Koin first described. The demo ships with demo-exclusive collectibles that players can start trading on Steam right away.

Koin has said the choice comes down to reach. Steam’s trading system already clears millions of transactions and puts the game in front of an audience used to buying and selling digital items. Routing through Valve lets Origins address the ownership question without leaning on an NFT marketplace.

The game is powered by Immutable and was known during development as Project O. Koin Games is based in Altamonte Springs, Florida, and led by founder and CEO Timothy Jooste.

Fast matches, thin decks

Origins runs on simultaneous turns, so both players act at once. Matches use 13-card decks across a three-lane board and finish in roughly seven to nine minutes. Every game pulls from a pool of more than 100 rotating locations that change the board and force different lines of play.

Koin has set its target opponents high, aiming the game at Marvel Snap, Hearthstone and Pokemon TCG Live rather than other web3 titles.

“We’ve set out to make the most competitive digital card game of all time,” Jooste said. “We are the Counter Strike of TCGs – the first ever digital card game to build for a collectible ecosystem.”

Public-domain myths

The setting is built entirely from public-domain source material. Koin calls its world the World of Origins, a monk-punk, high-tech realm where figures like Robin Hood, Mulan and Winnie-the-Pooh live. It blends Western and global mythology, drawing on legends from China, Japan, the Middle East and elsewhere.

The team’s resume is a large part of the pitch. Koin credits its developers with work on Candy Crush, Apex Legends, Deer Hunter, EverQuest and Microsoft Solitaire, titles that it says reached more than 1 billion players and generated over $5 billion in revenue. Members of the team also worked on Gods Unchained, one of Immutable’s early trading card games.

Full release and Early Access are planned for later this year. Koin is targeting a global mobile rollout in mid-2026 and has been testing on PC and Mac ahead of that.

Jooste has also floated a move in the other direction, teasing physical collectible cards, including metal variants, that would bring the digital game into the real world.

Asked what the studio wants to be known for in a decade, Jooste said it will have “proved web3 could enhance games web2 players actually love. We’ll be known for reintroducing true collectibility to digital TCGs. Or as someone once said: we put the ‘T’ back in TCG.”