Peter Molyneux's $50 million NFT game left most players with heavy losses

Winners & losers: Peter Molyneux's play-to-earn blockchain game Legacy launched in 2023 and has long since gone offline. His studio, 22cans, is now focused on Masters of Albion. But while Legacy brought in more than $50 million for the studio two years before it even launched, a new report suggests that virtually no players turned a profit, and many suffered staggering losses.

Players who invested in Legacy recently told Ars Technica that some lost tens of thousands of dollars and recouped less than $100, or nothing at all. Events leading up to the game's 2021 unveiling made it an enticing prospect for the blockchain-faithful, but it ultimately met the same fate as many other projects involving the technology, including its predecessor.

Legacy's publisher, Gala Games, had previously released a crypto and NFT-focused game called Town Stars during the peak of blockchain, or web3, enthusiasm. Early players purchased plots of virtual land tied to NFTs, which could be used to produce in-game resources and earn GALA, a crypto token, or loaned to free users who could share in the earnings.

An initial wave of excitement sent the value of Town Stars' TOWN token soaring, and early players profited handsomely – at least one made over $100,000 by playing less than 10 minutes a day. But interest in the game's simple "proto-idle-tapper" gameplay dried up quickly.

Without a steady influx of new players and investment, the value of both TOWN and GALA plummeted by over 90% by mid-2022.

Despite those losses, enough players had made serious money from Town Stars to keep the concept appealing, if only the right game design could sustain new player interest.

Gala had by then convinced Peter Molyneux (Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, Fable) to convert his next project, Legacy, into a play-to-earn blockchain game.

After 22cans unveiled Legacy in 2021, players drawn in by Town Stars' early success poured over $50 million into NFT-linked land parcels in Gala's next venture. When Legacy finally launched in 2023, however, players found little of the complex systems Molyneux had promised – as has become something of a pattern – and Gala claimed 85% of winnings from the few who earned anything at all. The game was dead within weeks.

One player spent $10,000 on a land plot that ultimately earned back less than $100. Another netted just $9.84. Everyone Ars Technica interviewed said they regretted investing. The only "players" who reportedly came out ahead did so by flipping NFT deeds on secondary markets like OpenSea.

The $50 million-plus that 22cans raised, meanwhile, went on to fund Masters of Albion, which launched on Steam Early Access earlier this month. The new game, said to be the 67-year-old Molyneux's last, drops the blockchain mechanics entirely, aiming instead to blend elements from his earlier classics.

Source: https://www.techspot.com/news/112208-peter-molyneux-50-million-nft-game-left-most.html