Interview: Pixelborn Creator Pavel Kolev Talks Success, Influence, And The Fear Of Getting Shut Down

If you’re a fan of Disney Lorcana, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Pixelborn. The unofficial, unsanctioned digital client for the TCG that offers a fully automated way to build decks, learn to play, and practice against real players all over the world, entirely for free. More than 50,000 players were using the app to play Lorcana in September, while the Pixelborn Discord server has grown to over 44,000 members, making it the largest Lorcana community anywhere online – in the physical card shortage, a digital boom has occurred.

Those are impressive figures for any new game, but what makes Pixelborn even more remarkable is that it’s been developed entirely by one person in their free time on nights and weekends. I spoke with Pavel Kolev, the Bulgarian software engineer and solo developer behind Pixelborn, about its incredible success, the legal hurdles it faces, and the impact he hopes it will have on Lorcana itself.

It’s hard to believe Pixelborn was created by just one person. It’s a fully-featured digital version of Lorcana, complete with matchmaking, a ranked ladder, and fully scripted gameplay with all the sound effects and animations you’d expect from a digital card game. If not for the legally-distinct-from-Disney assets and the fact that you have to import all of the card art into the game manually – a simple but strange process – you would be forgiven for mistaking Pixelborn for an actual Lorcana game. How did one person create all of this, and do it so quickly?

Kolev is asked this often, and until now, has been reluctant to talk about his background. He initially asked me not to share the details about his history in game development, for fear that he might be accused of using Pixelborn to bring attention to his other work. “I am doing Pixelborn out of pure passion without seeking any external benefits,” he tells me. Throughout our interview Kolev reiterates often that Pixelborn is a labor of love and not a springboard for his career as a developer. He isn’t interested in the spotlight, he says, but recognizes that Pixelborn has become so much bigger than he ever imagined it would be, which, like it or not, makes him an important person within the Lorcana community.

It turns out most of the work for Pixelborn had been done long before Lorcana even existed, and that made Kolev perfectly placed to supply the finishing touches. Kolev has a long history in software and game development. In 2013 and 2014, Kolev and a small team of developers competed in NASA’s Space Apps Challenge, the world’s largest hackathon competition with over 20,000 participants annually. His team took home the top prize two years in a row.

Those accomplishments led to the founding of a game studio where Kolev worked with 15 people for seven years to develop digital card games. Those projects are no longer in development, and Kolev isn’t currently working in the game industry, but he was able to convince his investors to let him use the engine his studio developed to create Pixelborn. From there, things moved remarkably fast. “I reused what had already been done there and relatively quickly created Pixelborn,“ he says. “When they announced the rules it took me literally one day to build the client.”

Kolev says he was mesmerized by Lorcana from the moment it was announced. “At that moment I was like, ‘This is my next big thing.’” Kolev says. “I’m a complete card game freak, and because of my job and my passion I had to play almost any available card game, both physical and digital.” He says it’s unlikely there’s a card game out there he hasn’t tried, and he thinks Lorcana is special. “I can see all the little decisions that were influenced by the market, target groups, all those things that are there for the design, for the art, I think it’s brilliant.” He says he planned to travel to Indianapolis for Gen Con before we even learned how the game was played. He shares a sentiment a lot of early Lorcana players feel, “For me this is a once in a lifetime experience, to be part of the beginning of something like that.”

Kolev wasn’t raised on Disney movies. Bulgaria was slow to import Disney when he was growing up in the ‘90s, and he was a teenager by the time classics like The Lion King made their way there. Now, Kolev sees Lorcana and Pixelborn as a way to finally become a Disney fan, reconnect with his childhood, and bond with his kids over their shared love of the game. He loves playing Pixelborn with his five year old, and he says Moana is a favorite in their house. “We watched Moana a month ago and ever since the OST is on loop in my car, at home, even when I am alone,” he says.

That could help explain why Pixelborn is such an important project for Kolev. Just as Disney movies were out of his reach as a child (“something we could only dream for,” he says) Lorcana is similarly unobtainable for him now. Bulgaria falls outside of the ten countries where Lorcana is currently distributed, so if he (and the thousands of fans around the world who also live outside of those ten countries) want to play Lorcana, Pixelborn is the only way to do it. Kolev is proud to be able to create the opportunities for more people to discover and enjoy Lorcana, especially those who otherwise would never have access to the game because of where they live. Kolev says this isn’t specifically why he created Pixelborn, but it’s certainly a big factor in its success.

Kolev gets a lot of feedback from Pixelborn players. People that otherwise wouldn’t have access to the game, be it for financial reasons, geographical restrictions, or any other barrier that prevents them from going out to a store to play, are constantly sharing their gratitude with him. “It’s one of the things that has given me strength to continue working on Pixelborn,” he says. “Every day I receive so many messages. Every morning I wake up with hundreds of new messages from people,” he says. “Some are asking for support, but there are those people who DM me to say ‘Man, thank you so much, you’re doing amazing work. I can’t get product, this is the only way I can play at the moment.’” Kolev says people often tell him they’re buying physical cards and getting into Lorcana because of their positive experience with Pixelborn.

Kolev’s original goal was to acquire 1,000 users in the first year, and he planned to shut the game down if he didn’t get there. When we spoke in mid-September, Pixeborn had just passed 53,000 unique users, and around 7,000 daily active players. The next day, the game hit half a million games played in September, and it only took two weeks.

The explosion of new players forced Kolev to shift his priorities. Instead of updating the game, he had to spend his free time solving account issues and providing player support. He remains the sole developer on the game, though he now gets support from the community in a variety of ways, including several individual contributors who volunteer their time to keep Pixelborn going.

One player built a website for the game completely on their own. There’s half a dozen players who have taken on the role of QA testers and are assigning priority to bugs they find so Kolev can tackle them in an efficient way. There’s a group of players that have been working on translating the game into multiple languages. Currently you can play Pixelborn in English, French, Spanish, and German, and they’re working on adding Russian. Kolev isn’t involved in any of these efforts, the Pixelborn community has just taken it upon themselves to support the game in any way they can.

He also runs a Patreon account for Pixelborn, which allows players to provide donations to the project in exchange for certain rewards in the game, like more detailed stats. “Everything that we’re getting from Patreon is going to server costs and charity,” Kolev says. With the amount of players on Pixelborn every day, paying out of his own pocket to maintain the servers became unsustainable for Kolev. Now he uses Patreon funds to cover the overhead, and donates whatever is left over at the end of the month.

“Our first donation was $1,000 for Doctors Without Borders, our second was $4,000 for the Maui [wildfire] disaster.” Earlier this week, another $5,000 donation was made to Doctors Without Borders. The causes he donates to are voted on by Patreon members, and Kolev is adamant that he doesn’t take any of the revenue that the Patreon generates for himself.

Obviously, adding money to this equation puts Pixelborn at significantly higher risk of getting shut down. Disney is a notoriously litigious company that’s fiercely protective of its IP, and while Ravensburger doesn’t have that same reputation, the company behind Lorcana has every legal right to come after Kolev and Pixelborn. So far, Ravensburger has not reached out to Kolev, and he doesn’t know what the company thinks about his app. “I’m giving away my free time, most people enjoy what I’m doing, we’re providing resources to charities, it’s a win-win situation. I’m not sure if Ravensburger is seeing it this way,” he says.

While he goes to great lengths to protect Pixelborn by donating all of the money that isn’t used for upkeep and making players add the Disney art to the game themselves, he’s willing to pull the plug on Pixelborn if Ravensburger asks him to. “If Ravensburger has a problem with Pixelborn, they don’t need to send lawyers or anything, they just need to ask me and I’ll shut it down immediately,” he says. “If they think Pixelborn is harming the game, I’m not trying to harm their revenue or player base or LGS anything. I just want to try to help the game grow.”

Kolev says that while he wants to do everything he can to keep Pixelborn online, he won’t hesitate to shut it down if he’s told to. “I won’t enjoy it, but I’ll do it because I respect all the work that they’ve done. It’s an amazing game. I want it to succeed and I want Ravensbuger to be happy.”

And while Ravensburger isn’t saying one way or another what it thinks about Pixelborn, Kolev believes that even if it were to go away, some version of digital Lorcana is inevitable. “People will find ways to play online,” he says. “They’ll fall back to Tabletop Simulator or something else will show up. With COVID cases on the rise in some countries, we never know what will happen tomorrow, whether there will be another lockdown and online play will be the only way to play. From my point of view, at the moment, Pixelborn is helping. I hope it helps people enjoy the game.”

Perhaps Ravensburger sees it as inevitable too, which is why, for now, Pixelborn is being left alone. Kolev knows that could change at any point, and he believes that Ravensburger will eventually want to create its own, official Lorcana client to compete with Magic: The Gathering Arena or Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel. He says he’d be the first person to apply for a job on the team, and it’s hard for me to imagine a more qualified candidate. “It’s not what I’m doing all this for, I’m not trying to find a job or anything, but I would definitely consider it.”

Beyond the Patreon revenue and the desire to protect its intellectual property, Another thing that might concern Ravensburger is the impact that Pixelborn has on Lorcana and the community surrounding it. Lorcana co-designer and brand manager Ryan Miller is a big believer in in-person play and supporting local game stores. He’s passionate about seeing people come together to enjoy Lorcana in person, to build communities locally, and to form new relationships in real life. If digital becomes a more popular way to play – and it already might be, considering a million Pixelborn games were played last month – then that could impede Ravensburger’s vision for the game.

It’s also interesting to consider what kind of impact Pixelborn is having on Lorcana’s meta. With unlimited access to every card and the ability to play and test deck archetypes non-stop, Pixelborn is shaping the collective knowledgebase of Lorcana players, and influencing, at least to some degree, how the game is played. This is a similar problem to what Magic faced during the pandemic, where more people playing online on Arena than in-store led to new sets’ metas being ‘solved’ too quickly, thanks to the sheer volume of games being played.

Kolev knows this, and he’s spent a lot of time thinking about how to limit the influence he and Pixelborn have on the game. The player data he collects from Pixelborn is immense – it’s so much data, in fact, that he had to start limiting the data he keeps to just the last 24 hours, because he couldn’t afford the server space to maintain 15 GBs of data every day. Everything from deck win rates to individual card popularity, and all the way down to the frequency that any particular card is played, on what turn, and how that correlates to win percentage, is data that Kolev has access to and, if he so chose, could share with the community.

“I wasn’t sure that I wanted to share [the data] because I didn’t want to be an influencer of the life of the game in any way,” he explains. “There are people that care about that data and will use it to make decisions on their next deck or their next tournament. I wasn’t sure if this is something Ravensburger would want. They’d probably prefer that the meta would be resolved slower than that.” Kolev says that he was eventually convinced that, even if he shares the data, most will still build decks they want and not care about adhering so strictly to the meta. The constraints on product availability means that not everyone can build the best decks anyway, so he decided to share a limited amount of data for one week and see how it influenced the game.

“If I see that everyone jumps on the top ranked deck, I would have cut off sharing that data,” Kolev says. The only info he releases is the color combinations that are being played, as well as their win rates, for the top 100 players on Pixelborn. That hasn’t seemed to have a detrimental impact on the game – the Pixelborn meta is still shifting from week to week and new decks rise and fall in popularity – but still, Kolev is putting his thumb on the scale every time he shares data, and he’s very cognizant of the influence he could have if he isn’t careful.

“I ran a poll on Twitter asking people their thoughts and I spent two weeks thinking hard about if I should do it or not, I’m still not sure I’m making the right decisions,” he says. “I really don’t want to be that person who is influencing the game that way.” Kolev sees the data issue as another factor that puts Pixelborn at risk. “I’m not sure how Ravensburger will react. Where is the line where they will come and tell me ‘please shut it down, enough is enough’? Sharing those statistics might have been one of those lines.”

As much as he can, Kolev allows the community to drive the decisions he makes about the game. He uses polls on Patreon to determine where the extra money gets donated every month, what features to prioritize in development, and to make important decisions about the future of the game. When the Discord server was getting bogged down by people asking the same basic questions all the time, he let his community vote on whether or not they should pay for a subscription to a Discord bot that can answer those questions for them in order to alleviate the burden placed on the community to answer those questions. Even the smallest costs are put to a vote, like the $10/month it costs to add Mac support (Pixelborn can be played on PC, Mac, and Android). “Any cost we have goes through Patreon,” Kolev says.

Pixelborn is still growing. The most requested feature currently is spectator mode, which Kolev says he can do once he finds the time. He also wants to add limited modes like Draft, which he says will take some time, but he hopes he can add next year. With Rise of the Floodborn coming next month, the community voted to add a new game mode that includes all of the new cards ahead of the official release on November 17. Players can start experimenting with the expansion early, without affecting the actual ladder. All of the currently revealed cards from Rise of the Floodborn are already available to play with in Pixelborn right now.

It’s impossible to predict what will happen to Pixelborn in the future, but Kolev is proud of the work he’s done, and happy to play a role in supporting a game he loves. He believes Pixelborn is helping Lorcana grow and thrive, and helping players develop a deeper connection with the game. “Lorcana is fulfilling the original Walt Disney vision and mission – make people happy,” he says. “I hope Pixelborn somehow contributes to that.”