Soulbound Ditches Web3, Will Relaunch as paid Steam Game This Summer

In Brief:

• Soulbound, formerly Worldwide Webb, is sunsetting its current web3 MMO and shutting down servers later this summer. Characters and progression will be discontinued.
• The game is being rebuilt as Soulbound: Online for Steam under developer SpiderWare, with paid early access this summer and a demo planned in the coming weeks. No blockchain elements are mentioned in the Steam listing.
• Genesis landholders and Weeb holders receive exclusive Founder Packs based on snapshot tiers. Non-landholders retain premium cosmetics, SoulBits balances and selected achievement rewards.

Soulbound is walking away from web3. The Pantera Capital-backed MMO, formerly known as Worldwide Webb, announced it will sunset its current blockchain-based game and rebuild as Soulbound: Online, a paid Steam title with no apparent crypto integration.

“We have made the decision to sunset our original vision for Worldwide Webb, and thus the current production build of Soulbound later this Summer,” the team wrote. “The servers will go dark and your characters, and progression will unfortunately be discontinued.”

The game shipped over four and a half years of development. The team listed dozens of content updates including a single-player roguelite, 5v5 PvP, a complete engine rebuild, cooperative dungeons, raids, a full skills system, a live marketplace, an auction house, guilds, crafting, chemistry, foraging and over 50 community events. More than 25 named patches shipped in the final year alone, with 631 public Discord announcements documenting the process.

“When we started, we promised playable avatars, apartments you could decorate, a living economy, and a community-built MMO. Every single one of those things shipped. And then we kept going,” the team wrote.

Why the pivot

The team cited two structural constraints. Land-based progression couldn’t scale with new player growth, creating bottlenecks that limited onboarding. Browser-based distribution capped performance, stability and reach.

Moving to Steam removes both. The pivot drops blockchain-based constraints in favor of scalable distribution and wider player access. The Steam listing for Soulbound: Online, published under developer SpiderWare, makes no mention of NFTs, tokens or blockchain. Steam has banned NFT-integrated games since 2021.

What Soulbound: Online looks like

The Steam listing describes a pixel-art MMO with roguelike dungeon runs, three-player co-op, clan raids, crafting, base building and an open world narrative centered on hostile entities called The Anima. Tags include action, MMORPG, sandbox, farming sim, roguelite and bullet hell.

Paid early access launches this summer. A demo is planned in the coming weeks. No release date has been confirmed.

NFT holder transition

Genesis landholders and Weeb holders will receive exclusive Founder Packs tied to snapshot tiers. Founder rewards are described as permanently exclusive to eligible holders.

Non-landholders retain premium cosmetics, SoulBits balances and selected achievement rewards. The team did not detail how or whether any of these carry monetary value in the new Steam-based system.

“This chapter of the studio, and the game, is coming to an end,” the team wrote. “The game you’ve been playing will cease to exist and we are no longer able to support the blockchain version of the game and the player base that turned up for it.”