Banijay Entertainment and the up-and-coming studio Anonymous Labs have announced plans to move Tommy Shelby’s kingdom from the soot-glossed canals of post-war Birmingham to the quicksilver world of Web3. The Peaky Blinders game, still untitled, is pitched as a full-fledged “AAA” release. It arrives in 2026, neatly after Netflix’s planned Peaky Blinders feature film. If all goes to plan, a series that bowed out in 2022 will find a second life, this time powered not by razors but by tokenised flat caps.
For Banijay the attraction is obvious: Peaky Blinders retains a global audience of about 80 million, and screen rights alone can no longer wring value from a fan base that wants to do more than watch. Interactive spin-offs have tried before, Mastermind (2020) and The King’s Ransom VR (2023) both flickered and faded, but the new venture signals fresh ambition. Anonymous Labs promises branching narratives, a player-governed “Shelby Council” DAO and an in-game currency earned through missions rather than purchased in a store. Think Red Dead Redemption with balance sheets: buy barrels, run bookmaking rings, expand districts, then vote on the next illicit enterprise.
Utility first, speculation second
Sceptics will point to the studio’s brief résumé, its sole outing so far is Simon’s Cat, a memecoin that rose and fell with the lunar volatility of the market. Yet that experience has at least acquainted the team with the perils of unsustainable tokenomics; insiders say that lesson is shaping a more conservative economic design. “Utility first, speculation second,” is the mantra repeated in investor decks, a welcome inversion of earlier blockchain experiments that mistook collectibles for content.
Crucially, the game will not hide its cryptographic plumbing behind jargon. Cosmetic NFTs, we are told, will function like digital heirlooms, skins and weapons that unlock flashback missions and evolve as the story advances. Episodic airdrops, meanwhile, will track the seasonal cadence of the television show, offering players a sense of unfolding history rather than a cattle auction of scarcity. The aim is immersion, not arbitrage.
Open Peaky Blinders game world
Technology alone, of course, never guarantees magic. Building a sprawling open world and knitting it to safe, low-friction wallet flows is a formidable double brief. Even established houses such as Ubisoft and Sega have only dipped older franchises into blockchain waters. Yet the timing favours boldness: regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are creeping towards clearer rules, and the public’s shoulder-shrug to crypto winter has thawed into cautious curiosity. A well-made Peaky Blinders experience could meet that curiosity halfway.
There is also something fitting about Tommy Shelby becoming a protagonist in the age of distributed ledgers. The original series was a hymn to modernity: cars; telephones; global trade, arriving to unsettle the old ways. The blockchain, for all its excesses, is the latest instrument of upheaval. To cast players as industrial-era bootleggers learning the etiquette of DeFi is, in narrative terms, almost obvious.
Banijay’s licensing chief David Christopher argues that Web3 gives fans “genuine stakes” in the story’s direction. That could read as marketing patter, yet early focus-group feedback is encouraging. Non-crypto viewers report interest in voting on rival gang arcs and owning artifacts that cannot be deleted when a publisher loses enthusiasm. If Peaky can convert passive spectators into co-authors, both studio and audience stand to benefit.
The house wins, but so do the punters
None of this guarantees triumph; every ambitious game remains one missed milestone away from ignominy. Yet the proposal deserves more than a reflexive eye-roll. The brand has reach, the design brief shows signs of restraint as well as flair, and the cultural moment is ripe for a mainstream experiment that treats blockchain as scaffolding for better fiction.
Should Anonymous Labs ship what it promises—credible gameplay, transparent economics, and a community that feels heard, then the Peaky Blinders Game could mark the point where crypto entertainment stops speaking only to the converted. It would be a twist Tommy Shelby himself might appreciate: the house wins, but so do the punters, and everyone leaves the Garrison with just a little more in their pockets than when they walked in.