In 2021, at the height of the world’s collective blockchain madness, video game called Unspoiled Islands – Pokemon, but with cryptocurrency—It raised over $500,000 on Kickstarter. A year later, the game is practically dead and so broken that it can’t even refund its backers.
In a post on the game’s Steam pagethe developers said “We have to stop development of Untamed Isles and put the project on hold,” which sounds temporary until you read the rest of what they had to say:
There have been countless factors that have led us to this point, but what they all boil down to is that we are not financially able to meet the demands of what we want to do.
Untamed Isles is a very ambitious open world monster hunting MMORPG. We brought over 70 people on board to work on this project and we worked relentlessly for over 2 years to build the game we all dreamed of. The truth is that the cost of development is high and there have been many bumps in the road up to this point. Since we began our journey in 2020, the economic landscape has changed dramatically, both in general and specifically for cryptocurrency, and we are unsure of the current market. We have run out of funding and are unable to continue development at this time.
“The economic landscape has changed dramatically,” he said.the donkey fell from the crypto marketwe gambled away your money”:
We leaned into the cryptocurrency market and expanded rapidly on the back of positive interest. We were just short of the runway when the crash happened. Gaming remains gaming-first, crypto-second by design, but cryptocurrencies have become and remain essential to getting us to launch. Unlike many projects founded in a storm, we have a great game design that can stand on its own two feet. But until the cryptocurrency situation is resolved – and we’re sure it will be at some stage – then we’ll have to hibernate development on this project.
And that donkey fell so far developers say in a separate post “We are unable to repay our original backers as our cash reserves are empty. We regret it and wish that this scenario would be different.”
While this is part of the story where I’m saying that everyone who backs this game is getting exactly what they deserve, the fact is that Unspoiled islands the crypto elements were optional, and it’s clear from the backer feedback below the “pause” announcement on Kickstarter that many people weren’t interested in the speculative elements of the game itself:
Unspoiled islands “pause” is particularly odd it was just two weeks ago that the team has confirmed a date of October 6, 2022, and that one of their key promises during the Kickstarter campaign was “We’re happy to have the funding to safely deliver core functionality and the game.”
