In 2021, at the height of the world’s collective blockchain frenzy, a video game called Untamed Isles — Pokemon, but with crypto things–earned over $500,000 on Kickstarter. A year later, the game is practically dead, and has been so broken that it can’t even offer refunds to its backers.
In a post on the game’s Steam pagethe developers said “we have to pause development on Untamed Isles and pause the project”, which sounds just temporary until you read the rest of what they have to say:
There have been countless factors that have caused the lead up to this point but all this has happened is that we have not been able to meet the financial requirements of what we set out to do.
Untamed Isles is a very ambitious game when it comes to being an open-world monster-catching MMORPG. To make this project, we involved more than 70 employees and we worked non-stop for over 2 years to build the game we all dreamed of. The truth is that development costs are very high and there have been many difficulties on our way up to this point. Since we started our journey in 2020, the economic landscape has changed dramatically both in general and specifically for cryptocurrencies, and we are not confident in the current market. We have exhausted our financial resources and we cannot continue to grow at this time.
When they say “the economic landscape has changed dramatically”, they mean “the ass fell out of the crypto marketthat we bet your money”:
We focus on the crypto market and expand rapidly thanks to active interest. When the collision happened, we were heavily exposed with the runway being too short. The game is still game first, crypto second in design, but crypto funds became and still are essentials in getting us to the release. Unlike many projects that have been successful in the storm, we actually have a great game design that can stand on its own two feet. But until the crypto situation is resolved – and we believe it will at some point – then we must hibernate development for this project.
And that ass has gone downhill so far the developers said in a separate post “Due to our cash reserves being empty, we are unable to refund the original backers. We are really sorry about this and wish that this scenario would have been different”.
While this may be part of the story where I say that everyone who supports this game gets what they deserve, the reality is Untamed Isle’s The crypto elements are optional, and it’s clear from the backer feedback below the “disruption” announcement on Kickstarter that a lot of people are only interested in the game itself, not the speculative elements. its:
Untamed Isle’s “Interruption” is particularly odd it was only two weeks ago that the team confirmed a launch date of October 6, 2022, and that one of their key promises at the time of the Kickstarter campaign was “We are fortunate to have funding that allows us to deliver a core functionality and gameplay safety”.
