Draft:The Bazaar

• Comment: A near-exact duplicate of Draft:The Bazaar (video game). [​[User:CanonNi]​] (💬 • ✍️) 14:34, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

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The Bazaar
File:The-bazaar.png
Developer(s)	Tempo Games
Publisher(s)	Tempo Games
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows macOS
Release	October 30th, 2024
Genre(s)	Auto battler, Strategy, Hero-builder
Mode(s)	Multiplayer

The Bazaar is a free-to-play, live-service strategy video game, developed and published by game developer Tempo... The Bazaar was first announced on April 6th, 2018, by twitch streamer turned Tempo founder and CEO Reynad. The game monetizes itself with cosmetics such as animated cards, hero and board skins, and more, with a planned in-game marketplace where players can buy, sell and trade their cosmetics with other players. The game released as a paid Closed Beta on October 30th, 2024; Open Beta started Wednesday March 5th, 2025, followed by the full Launch just a month later on Wednesday April 2nd, 2025.The Bazaar is available for Microsoft Windows and macOS, with Android and iOS releases planned for 2025.

The Bazaar features several Heroes with unique items and playstyles. Players face a series of deck-building decisions and PvE threats followed by PvP face-offs with asynchronous matchmaking. The game draws inspiration from the auto-battler, deck builder, and digital card game genres

Gameplay

Before each run of The Bazaar, players must first choose a hero to play. Each hero has their own set of around 100 items, and when players unlock that hero, they unlock every base item in their pool. The Bazaar has many playable heroes planned, each with distinct playstyles. The Closed Beta features three heroes: Pygmalien, Vanessa, and Dooley, for the launch a fourth Hero was added; Mak Each hero features different mechanics and offers different win conditions; players have Vanessa unlocked by default. Other heroes can be unlocked through the in-game currency, gems, or purchased via microtransactions.

A Bazaar run is structured through "Days" and "Hours". At the start of each day, you gain gold equal to your income. The default income is 5, and players can increase this amount through various methods, such as by using items and taking part in special events. Players must reach 10 PvP wins before losing all their "Prestige"; a run starts with 20 Prestige, and players lose some equal to the "Day" count when defeated in a PvP battle.

Each Day features 6 hours. The 3rd hour is guaranteed to give you an option between 3 PvE fights with various difficulty levels and rewards, and the 6th hour features a PvP battle against the board state of another player that is at the same point throughout their run. The other hours can feature a variety of different encounters, such as Merchants who sell you items, Skill Trainers who sell Hero Skills, free items, or special events.

Throughout a game, players can buy items and Hero Skills for their board, and players can move items around their board freely while out of combat, as they often have positional effects. Items have rarity tiers—Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond—that affect how powerful they are as well as when they show up in a run. When you find the same tier of an item, you can fuse it to upgrade the item.

In The Bazaar, a player's board has a total of 10 slots; each item takes up 1, 2, or 3 slots, depending on their power level. Players start a run with 4 slots unlocked, with the rest progressively unlocked via the "Level" system: players unlock 2 slots at Levels 2, 3 and 4. Every level-up provides you with extra maximum health and an added benefit, such as free items/skills, item upgrades, or item buffs. To level up, you must gain 8 XP; you get 1 XP at the end of each hour, and can earn additional XP from PvE battles, random events, and level-up rewards.

Players also have access to a "Stash" with 10 slots for stored items. Items do not activate inside the stash during battles; however, non-combat passive effects work even while in the Stash.

Battles in The Bazaar do not require player input; instead, items on both boards trigger automatically after an item-specific cooldown timer. Players each have a health pool, and the PvP battle ends when the opposing player's health is reduced to or below 0. If the battle continues long enough without a winner, a sandstorm appears that damages both players; this sandstorm deals increasing amounts of damage until one of the players loses.

Monetization

The game features two forms of in-game currency: Gems and Ranked Tickets. Gems can be used to purchase Heroes or an entry into the Ranked mode. The Ranked mode requires one Ranked Ticket or 100 gems. Every 24-hour day, players receive one free Ranked Ticket. To earn more tickets one has to finish missions in order to gain experience points to advance in the so called Prize-pass a version of a Battlepass

Besides fulfilling missions, both daily and weekly, to advance in the pass, one can also pay to skip tiers and advance quicker if desired.

In the pass one can earn extra chests, ranked tickets, pass exclusive cosmetics as well as expansions to the hero card pools of 10 each. There is two card packs, 10 items strong each season (month). Once the season ends these packs will be automatically added to the pool of the corresponding hero, so new players wont have to unlock them slowly but rather start on the same playing field.

The Bazaar Closed Beta required paid access in the form of limited-time Founders Packs, which granted Closed Beta access, exclusive collectables, in-game Gems, and physical goods, depending on the tier purchased. Once The Bazaar entered Open Beta the game entered free-to-play permanently. The game monetizes mainly by selling cosmetics in the form of Boards that change up the environment, Hero skins that alter what your chosen hero looks like, Stash skins which change up what the chest looks like, Bank skins that change the gold pile, Rugs that your items lay on top of, Playlists that change the music you hear in-game, and card backs. In addition, there are also titles that appear under your username.

Another form of monetization is via Subscription where the generated reward chests get doubled, effectively doubling the earned cosmetics as well as the earned in-game currency that can be used to unlock the other heroes or even limited time skins.

Development and release

Development of The Bazaar was first made public through an Indiegogo campaign, from which the game raised $115,000 toward production. Soon after, developer Tempo Storm—a former competitive esports organization—formally announced a company division dedicated towards the production of The Bazaar: Tempo Games. In 2019, the game was made publicly available for pre-order which granted the user early access and the amount they paid as in-game currency, doubled. Pre-orders were closed September 16th, 2021.

On February 20th, 2020, Tempo Storm announced they received a $3.3 million investment led by technology investor Galaxy Interactive. On March 5th, 2021, Tempo launched their open investment campaign on Republic and successfully funded and closed on August 10th, 2021, with $700,734.

Throughout the development of The Bazaar, the team uploaded update videos showcasing the progress of the game in all areas of the game development such as art, music, design and gameplay. Video updates stopped after February 7th, 2022 so the team could focus on finishing the game.

The Bazaar was officially announced at the OTK Games Expo on June 4th, 2024. Alongside this announcement, the Closed Beta date was revealed to take place in October. This date also commenced the return of weekly videos, this time focusing on finalized topics (instead of the previous in-development videos) such as gameplay reveals, art spotlights and music previews.

The amount of players in the European region being magnitudes higher than anticipated by the developers resulted in severe server issues the first few weeks in the Closed Beta, the amount of users also revealed other critical issues in the infrastructure and code so that the date for the Open Beta got pushed back to ensure stability.

Art

Tempo Games outsources N-iX, a European software development company. They are responsible for many art pieces players see in The Bazaar.

There is more than 600 items with unique in the game, each of them have a 10 possible variants where they are visually altered and 180 of these items have an alternative animated version, 60 items getting an animated version each season.

Added to that there is 150+ different encounters, both PvE as well as Merchants with unique Art as well as voice-lines.