Someone’s claiming they’re going to publish the Nintendo Switch’s first-ever blockchain game this year, though it’s unclear thus far how successful they’re going to be.
The game is called SWRMS, and it’s a “fast-paced, third-person dash-and-slash roguelite game”. In it, players fight and survive waves of enemies, collect loot, craft weapons, and compete on leaderboards. As for where the blockchain stuff comes in, players collect “Andros”, an in-game currency, which can be coverted into “$SHRD” tokens (this apparently stands for “Seek Honor Reach Destiny”, fyi), while crafted items can be converted into NFTs and traded on an in-game marketplace. The same press release also touts “agentic AI companions with memory that integrate directly into gaming experiences” that are apparently only made possible using SKALE’s infrastructure. It’s unclear exactly how these currently are, or will be integrated into SWRMS itself.
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👀 Early Access on iOS, Android, and Switch. pic.twitter.com/koZGTVAV2T
— Andrometa (@TheAndrometa) July 28, 2025
SWRMS is already out on iOS and Android, and publisher Andrometa really wants to bring it to the Nintendo Switch. Today, it published a press release alongside blockchain company SKALE Labs (whose technology SWRMS is using) asserting that it would do so around the holidays this year. Its confidence is currently being projected in press releases where SKALE refers to Andrometa as “the first and only Nintendo-accredited publisher in Web3.” But it’s not exactly clear what this means, precisely. Andrometa has used this line in web copy a number of times, but from what we can tell, it hasn’t actually published anything (blockchain or otherwise) on Nintendo consoles yet.
What’s less clear though is if that’s actually going to be allowed by Nintendo in the first place. Currently, there are no blockchain, NFT, or other web3 games on Nintendo consoles. Most are confined to PC or mobile so far, almost certainly due to console platforms having much stricter rules as to what sort of games are allowed on their storefronts and what sort of technology is allowed to work through them.
Meanwhile, Nintendo is notorious among developers for simultaneously having both strict, esoteric guidelines for its eshop, and also allowing all sorts of low-effort stuff to make it through anyway. One web3 game, Off the Grid, launched in early access on PlayStation 5 and Steam this year as the first blockchain game on either platform, but so far there’s no indication as to what Nintendo’s feelings on this particular topic are (nor Xbox’s, for that matter). We reached out to Nintendo ahead of this piece to see if it had a policy on such games, and it did not return our request for comment.
It’s not exactly news that a blockchain gaming company is making over-ambitious promises about its tech and what it plans to do with it. The space has been full of inflated projections for years now, most of which have been roundly rejected by the wider gaming audience for their scammy nature, lack of gameplay value, and negative environmental impact, to the detriment and furious backpedaling of a number of companies. A few AAA companies have continued trying to push them, but they’re being awfully quiet about their releases, perhaps to avoid backlash. But it will be interesting to see if Nintendo allows this sort of encroachment in the first place, and if it ultimately paves the way for more blockchain games to slip into its storefronts on both the Switch and, potentially, the Switch 2.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
