A year and a half ago, I set out to
play and review every single crypto game. But after playing
so many I've lost count, we've learned that
pretty much all of them are irredeemable garbage. Shovelware, asset
flips, and outright scams. It's been quite the journey. Time and time again I was told that
I need to come back later, it's too early. Crypto games are a new concept, and new technology takes a
while to catch on, ya know? ...that's why they're so bad.... Or at least that's what the few
supporters of these games tried to tell me. Well plenty of time has passed, and with how many millions
of dollars these games have raised I think it's fair to
expect some significant improvement. I guess that means it's about time for me to revisit some of
my favorite crypto games. Of course, these aren't my
favorites because they're good. Quite the opposite. These for example stuck
with me due to just how bad they are. Decentraland, a realm of promise
where creativity and capitalism collide. Splinterlands, a mesmerizing
tale of mismanagement and malaise. Kryxivia, a fantasy
world of squandered potential. And last but certainly
least, Undead Blocks, GameStop's finest. I'm sure you've just been itching to
know what happened to each one of these games. Did the investors make a profit? Can you even play them still? These questions and more will be
answered in today's episode of Performance Report. Decentraland was
born at the cusp of Web3, raising over $20
million in startup funding in 2017. This blind optimism would be carried through to the
product's initial public launch in 2020, with Decentraland making headlines thanks to the
hilariously high prices of its virtual land. But by 2022, the
bubble had long since burst, and it was revealed
that despite the platform's valuation of $1.2 billion, they
only had less than a thousand active users. This rise and fall of Decentraland has already been
thoroughly documented and discussed by both myself and others. Its piss-poor
optimization and baffling the high cost leaves it
feeling more like a mid-2000s tech demo never meant for public eyes. But Decentraland is more than a game. It's a creator-focused metaverse. A platform owned by
the people, for the people. And by people, I mean those with a
disposable income and an interest in crypto. Not exactly the
biggest pool of potential clients. This led to the platform almost
immediately trending towards two distinct subsets. Advertisers and staunch libertarians. The latter of these comes as no surprise. This anti-government and self-custodial mindset is a
core tenet of cryptocurrency. And it always has been. This is also not a problem in isolation. If this is what they want to turn the platform into, and if
this is what the users want, then go ahead, do whatever. But this is a creator-led platform. And if these are the only people who are bothering to build,
the appeal only narrows. Decentraland itself
is an amalgam of components and subcomponents,
designed to be as decentralized as possible. While the game
client itself was created in the Unity game
engine, content for Decentraland must be built
using their proprietary SDK. This means that all in-game experiences must adhere to
the limitations of the SDK. And there's nothing a
developer can do to get around them. According to the official Decentraland documentation, here
are a few of the limitations. Control must always be maintained by the player, and they
cannot be moved by the game. Real-time gameplay is not
recommended, due to immense lag. All games should be
turn-based whenever possible. There is no physics engine. If you want to have physics,
you'll need to find a way to code it yourself. Your game cannot
be larger than the plot of land you purchased,
and if you want to build something bigger,
you'll need to buy more land. Your game controls
must be limited to basic movements, jumping,
point and click, or primary and secondary mouse buttons. These engine
constraints alone are more than enough to make a
majority of game ideas fundamentally impossible. Don't forget, you have to own
land to build anything in the first place. That could easily cost you
hundreds to thousands of dollars. The barrier to
entry here is astronomical, and in a world where a platform as simple and popular as
Roblox exists, anyone seriously looking to make and
publish games would never choose Decentraland. Therefore, the only people who actually built things in
Decentraland were people who were invested in the project. This includes many of
the project's corporate sponsors. "Wow, I can't wait
to jack into the metaverse and explore the
official Deutsche Bank virtual experience," says a man held at gunpoint. So here's the 10,000 foot view. Decentraland is a
community-owned platform that serves to foster
true ownership and freedom from censorship. If you want to build something, you gotta buy land, which
even at today's rock bottom prices still costs over $300. And even then, you're
extremely limited in what you can build. So can you guess why Decentraland failed? Proponents argue
that it's the media's fault. Poorly researched
hit pieces frame the game as a disaster
without even giving it a fair chance. The game is buggy and laggy
because it's so futuristic and decentralized. Anyone criticizing
Decentraland just doesn't understand. Stop making fun of us because we
allow players to name themselves with slurs. Censorship is evil. Decentraland is the
first truly decentralized video game, and
that's what makes it special. Of course, none of these features
are remotely intriguing to the average gamer. Most people just want
to play games and have fun. And unfortunately,
Decentraland simply would not be considered
fun when compared to nearly any other product on the market. Regardless, it sure is entertaining to point and laugh, so
let's redownload the game and see how little it's
changed in the past two years. Apparently,
they're working on creating an updated version of
this client, with plans to release it later this year. Looking at the teaser
footage, it's certainly an improvement, although
it might be a misallocation of efforts. It's still the same turd, just
with a fresh coating of rainbow sprinkles. Mmm, yummy, AI-generated slop. Glad to see my
custom character's still here. Genesis Plaza, the
initial spawn point for all players, has
undergone a bit of a renovation. Diving into the wormhole in the center takes us to some
sort of a bar scene, populated with strange NPCs. "Clearly you just put on whatever
rags you slept in and think that's an outfit. Let me tell you something, you don't
cause a good impression on me like that." There we have it. Within the first
90 seconds of playing the game, someone is already making fun of me for being poor. How fitting. The walls of the
bar are adorned with crypto cringe, with the
seemingly mandatory references to Pepe the Frog and Elon Musk. There's also an NPC with a
text-to-speech voice, and you can chat with them. This is a
necessity, as due to the low player count, you'll
likely never encounter another real human to interact with. "Hey there, Jauwn. What adventures have you embarked on
in the vast expanse of Decentralyn today? Maybe we can go on a quest together." "Alright, let's go." "Alright, hold onto your pixels, Jauwn." "Okay, where… what just happened?" "Welcome back, fellow traveler." And this is why chatgpt is
not a substitute for proper writers. This NPC is telling me to
go on a quest that does not exist. Well, it looks
like there's nothing else to see here, so I
open the world map in search of anything interesting. Just looking at the
player count to the most popular
experiences should tell you how far Decentralyn has fallen. The top 10 most visited plots have a cumulative player count
of 214, with that accounting for 99.9% of currently online players. However, I'm not
sure most of these players are humans, and
you'll see why in a second. MetaGamiMall is a metaverse gamify mall that is operated by
Metalive Studio and Metadoge. We hold a huge event called
MetaMine, where players meet brands. I'm not sure what any of that means,
but this is the most popular experience in all of Decentraland,
with a player count of 65. I don't know why I set my expectations anywhere above the
floor, but I thought this was going to be a game. Instead, it's one of the most
dystopian creations you could imagine. Pressing collect coins takes you to the main gameplay loop,
and you're teleported to a moving platform. This platform
carries you on a fixed path, while assaulting
your ears with an ice pick. [39khz ding sound] You don't have to do anything at all, the platform moves on
its own, carrying you through coins that release a shrill
note each time they're collected. *earth-shattering DING* As you travel along the
path, take in the beautiful scenery. *DING* Billboards. Paid for
by the mall's many sponsors. This is the metaverse, being force fed advertisements on an endless
loop while receiving compensation in the form of funny
money to be spent on branded merch. *dinging sounds continue* I can't handle this any longer, I gotta get out of here. A quick jog around
the corner reveals a poorly modeled "muscle
doge", who presides over what appears to be some
sort of board game, without any hesitation I click the pop up, informing me of a
challenge in the Catgirl Arena. Welcome to Catgirl Arena! Here you will need at
least one water card in your deck. Are you ready to play? Consumes 20k soul. Unable to hear her properly due to my
lingering tinnitus, I accept her challenge. Only to learn that,
apparently I don't have enough souls. I need to meditate to recover. Not sure how to do that, do
they mean in game or in real life? But what's this? It seems that the
owner of the neighboring plot has
constructed some sort of anti-Joe Biden mausoleum, complete with NFTs commemorating the Norfolk
Southern chemical train derailment. Funnily enough, these
NFTs aren't even for sale. The owner paid to purchase this plot of land and to mint
each one of these pictures as an NFT, just to create whatever this is. I wonder what compels someone
to think that this is a good idea. Exiting the church through a wall with no collision, I
continue to explore the other plots in the Joe Biden-Catgirl district,
224 only to find nothing more than abandoned plots featuring white
squares where NFTs used to be. Due to the
platform's devastating failure, many of the once
well-kept plots showcasing JPEG collections
have fallen into disrepair. These white squares dot the landscape of Decentraland, indicating a
broken link in place of what used to display an NFT. Or in some cases
you'll find protest pieces, criticizing
Decentraland for their poor leadership and declining revenue. One person complains in the official Decentraland discord
regarding their neighbor's behavior. Their plot, which
once hosted a thriving game, has been
transformed into an incessant pop-up ad, displaying to
anyone within render distance. "Once the number one parcel in terms of 3D gameplay, OG's farm
has been defunded by corrupt Decentraland legislators who see software developers as
hobbyists who deserve $0 per hour. This game is being ported to Roblox. Subscribe to our YouTube to learn the dangers of
Decentraland and why it should probably be banned in the USA." Sorry buddy, that's his land. He can do whatever he wants. Returning to the disappointingly empty world map, I can't
help but notice how sad this looks. While Decentraland was never exactly a bustling world,
speculators sure did make it seem like the future. But it seems like
most of the people who bought land in the metaverse
failed to develop anything at all, leaving the map looking sparser than your average
Minecraft server. The Metazoo International Temple of Beats. This eternal nightclub remains active, lights ablaze, yet
I'm likely the first visitor in months. Feeling more like Fazbear's Pizza than a music festival, the
abandoned husk is eerily silent as the music
appears to no longer be functioning. Polkadot Party. Interacting with a large red button
causes a video to attach itself to my groin. Of course, it's a video about
the blockchain, who would've thought? Unable to remove this crypto chlamydia, I teleported away as
quickly as possible, arriving at the Habitats Tower. This is a museum of sorts designed
to showcase a variety of NFT art pieces. Except there is no
art on display, instead it's nothing but
under construction signs. In a last ditch effort to search for fun before leaving
Decentraland for good, I teleport to the second most
popular game, Soul Magic. Is the engine so
bad that it's impossible to get text to stay
within a box, or is everyone making these games just incompetent? And who can forget
the classic proximity based music, because
remember, this is Decentraland, and all audio must
exist within a 3D environment. Due to the complete lack of instructions, I began clicking
every button in sight, to no avail. My attention was turned to the only
place on this block that has any other players, some sort of well. Clicking on this
well allows me to meditate, and as long as I
hold the left mouse button, the number on the top left increases. How many points did I
need to fight the cat girl? 20,000? Standing here only awards
less than 10 points per second. I'd have to sit here all day
before I can even attempt that battle. No wonder why everyone here is AFK. Oh boy, this is enough
Decentraland to last a lifetime. I think I'm starting to feel ill. I travel to a few more plots, but
none of them seem to be working properly. With how
objectively terrible my experience has been, it's a
mystery as to how this game has any fans at all. But apparently it does, and Decentraland continues to be
maintained by the few remaining community members. These folks spend
countless hours of their free time developing new wearable NFTs or playable experiences, all in
hopes of an eventual influx of players. But it makes me wonder. Is it the sunk cost
fallacy that keeps them involved? Do they really love the
game, or are they just delusional? Perhaps it's a mix
of all three, but there's really no way to
know the true sentiment behind Decentraland. With their official discord having strict moderation that
removes any negative comments, or FUD, a squeaky
clean facade is maintained. Turning to the
Decentraland DAO website, we can take a look at
the decentralized leadership behind the project. A DAO, or a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, is a group
of terminally online crypto bros that roleplay as
leaders of a make believe company. Also since there's
no sole leader of a DAO, it makes it much
more difficult for the SEC to charge them with the
sale of unregistered securities. With Decentraland,
all decisions are put to a vote, including
moderation, project direction, and the spending of treasury funds. Votes on these
proposals are granted based on how many Decentraland assets you hold, such as NFTs or land plots. Essentially, the largest
whales hold the majority vote. Scrolling through the active proposals reveals the rather
bleak state of Decentraland, with many failing to even
reach the minimum number of votes. Concerns are raised regarding the DAO's ability to operate at
all, as due to a decline in participation, core roles remain vacant. In the last 30
days, expenses have totaled $350,000, while
income was less than $10,000. Luckily for them,
they still have millions of dollars worth
of their own tokens in the bank. But how poorly the
metaverse is doing, I'm not sure those
will be worth much for a lot longer. Needless to say,
Decentraland was a failure. So much so, that even their
co-founder left for greener pastures. And by greener pastures, I
mean to go start another NFT scheme. I've actually covered
his new game in a previous video. You might be familiar with it. Big Time. While I may be declaring Decentraland dead, it might take
some time for the community to catch on. Just a few weeks ago, they held the official Decentraland
Expo in Argentina, and while it doesn't look like an event I'd
ever attend, the attendees in the pictures look pretty happy. Interaction in the
Decentraland Discord seems to have declined
significantly, to the point where announcements
hardly receive 80 reactions. When I checked the
general chat channel, the only discussion in
sight was an argument spanning multiple days regarding the moderators deleting messages and
banning people they don't like. In general, seems like
nothing but a whole lot of complaining. So why are these
people still engaging with the community, even
though they clearly don't like it? I'm no psychologist, but I'd reckon it's because most of
them have spent hundreds of dollars on the game
and they know it's a failure. But instead of just
cutting their losses and walking away, they
continue to further invest time and money in hope
of any shred of improvement. I've said this before, but it's
okay to admit your idea didn't work out. We've all wasted money on
something regretful at some point. It's just a part of life. But who knows how
long it might take for that message to reach the
few remaining Decentralanders. It might never,
and the game could continue with a skeleton crew
for many more years until the money runs out. To conclude this section, my
final comment on Decentraland is as follows. It's still horrible, and it really
never should have been any sort of successful. Luckily for the founders, they launched into one of the
biggest economic bubbles of our lifetime and made off fantastically. However, returns
for the players and other investors have been
nothing short of disappointing, and it would be a miracle if
this platform still operated in 5 years. So with that, we
say goodbye to Decentraland. Splinterlands.
This was an interesting one for sure. For this to be considered a video
game, a bit of mental gymnastics are required. It's an extraordinarily simple web-based trading card game,
where the only input you have is selecting which
cards you bring into battle. Then you sit and watch while the game compares the strength
of your cards with the enemies and declares a winner. But due to the pay
to win nature of trading card games, it
really just boils down to a money fight since
the player with the most expensive cards
will win a majority of the time. I still do, but it
was even worse back then. The player base,
while small, is artificially inflated thanks to
their open policy towards bots. It's such a simple game, and due to it being completely
automated, it's really only a matter of purchasing the most overpowered cards, giving them
to your bot, and letting the game play itself. What made it even
worse, though, was the community. When I uploaded this
video, I only had 176 subscribers. Someone in the
Splinterlands community saw my video, shared it
on their official discord, and asked for
everyone to go leave negative comments and report
my video for misinformation. Hilariously, this
had the opposite effect, and thanks to their
hate comments and views, it actually sent my
video into the algorithm. So thanks, I guess? But today, if you scroll through the comments of that
video, you'll find that many of the game's defenders have since deleted their comments, or
in some cases, their entire YouTube accounts. Now, I've come to expect it by now. There's always going to be some ravenous defender for every
crypto game, but it was really eye-opening
to receive such vehement hate for a video I
spent dozens of hours working on. Needless to say, JauwnCoin is at an all-time high, while
SplinterShards have plummeted from 87 cents to .006
cents, a cool 99% decline. This decline in price has led to an ever-present flood of
issues for Splinterlands, including company-wide
layoffs, cancelled or delayed features, and most importantly, a loss of players. Splinterlands was
never a game that was played for fun, as evident by
the community's long-standing permitance of botting or
otherwise automated gameplay. Everyone here just wanted money, and I explained this quite
thoroughly in my original video. But to summarize, Splinterlands is one of the pioneers of an
old trend, something they once called a "play-to-earn" game. These were all the
rage back in the earliest days of crypto
gaming, despite barely passing as a form of entertainment. Unsurprisingly,
they became quite popular, because everyone
loves the concept of "free money," despite
there being no such thing. This fad has died
down tremendously since then, since it became
quite obvious that play-to-earn games were little more
than thinly veiled Ponzi schemes. In order to really play Splinterlands,
you need to buy what's called a "Summoner's Spellbook." Otherwise, you are
locked into a perpetual demo mode without
any ability to earn currency at all, essentially barring progression. However, as they proudly display on
their homepage, they've given out millions of dollars to people just for playing. So think of the Spellbook
purchase as your ticket to financial freedom. This is as much of a
video game as filing taxes is. Actually, taxes might be more
fun, since they can be pretty complicated. Splinterlands
matches are tremendously simple. Pick your cards, pray to
your deity of choice, and click play. The game will roll a few dice in the background, compare
card stats, and return a winner. The animation you
watch is nothing but a replay. Your influence as a
player has already ended. But if you're like me and prefer to
use the Firefox browser, you'd be lucky to ever see one of these battles play out. Seems like for me, it just
freezes up and only lets me skip to the end. Cool, I won. Too bad I didn't get anything,
since I didn't purchase the $10 Spellbook. This spellbook allows entry into the
investment scheme central to Splinterlands. And I'm not just
saying it's an investment to be critical, that's
how the players themselves view it. The numbers don't lie. The word "invest" has been used
22,000 times in the Splinterlands Discord server, about 1,000 more than the word "fun". If you're curious
enough to actually purchase one of these
spellbooks, you'll find yourself being rewarded with a variety
of Splinterlands, tokens, and cards. You can use the tokens to buy more cards, and I guess you
could try to trade them for cash but with how little everything's worth, you'd
basically never be able to make your $10 back without
spending even more money. This is because of how
Splinterlands rewards are structured. In order to be
eligible for a reward, you'll need to stake a
certain amount of the game's tokens, called Splinter Shards. Staking is the act of locking up your tokens and making
them untradeable, and it takes 4 weeks to fully unlock
and regain ownership of your coins. If you don't have any tokens
locked up, you can't earn anything at all. The minimum investment required is
also correlated with your in-game rank. As you climb the
ladder, you'll be required to stake additional
tokens, otherwise you'll be ineligible for rewards. Oh, and of course, you'll need to buy better cards in order
to win in the first place, so that's just another expense. At what point do I become a millionaire? Never. Regardless, this is a video game, and traditionally, you
wouldn't ever expect to earn back the purchase price. That wouldn't make sense. Think about it this way. If you were playing Genshin Impact and spent $16,000 on
whatever people spend money on in that game, you'd
lose 100% of your spendings. This is what we call purchasing
something, and in this case, there's no expectation of a return on investment. Well, you'd probably have a lot more
fun playing Genshin Impact than this game, so at least you get some sort of return. Alright everyone, hold on. I've just been informed by Splinterlands legal team that they
are in fact not an investment company. See, it says right
here in their terms of service. But I'm not exactly
sure how well that would hold up in court,
especially when their former CEO describes
Splinterlands as "minting millionaires". Investment or not,
Splinterlands is a crypto game, so you can
always sell all of your assets to cash out whenever. Even if it's just 10 cents, it's
still more than the zero you'd get with other games. Sounds like a net positive if you ask me. I don't see why everyone's
complaining about being down 99%. Anyway, there's really no point in me continuing to belittle
this game, because it's clear I'm biased. I don't like the game,
and I don't think it's fun. As a company, Splinterlands
faces a similar trajectory to their coin. In a recent Town Hall session, their CEO shared that they have
enough cash on hand to cover only 6 months of
expenses before bankruptcy. Unfortunately, Splinterlands' future has been bleak for years
now, despite their constant attempts to reignite the economy. Selling more card packs, selling land, multiple Kickstarter
campaigns, if it makes the money, best believe they've tried it. Clearly, their
attempts have failed, and the company continues
to crumble from the inside. In 2023, their original CEO and founder would leave his role
to focus on other ventures within the Splinterlands company. There really isn't
that much info about these other games, but it
appears that Splinterlands opened a new subsidiary, called Invennium. Under this subsidiary, they've announced multiple games
and tokens, including some sort of soccer
trading card game and Moonkart. The presence of
the Bandicam watermark just goes to show the
level of competence behind these projects. These two titles are in addition to the recently released
companion game for Splinterlands, something called Soul Keep. Announced two years ago and released into open beta last
month, this title has suffered perhaps the most tumultuous
development period of any tower defense web game. Somehow they
managed to sell 2 million card packs for this
game two years ago in their pre-sale. I have no idea how
much money they actually made from this,
but it's gotta be at least a few million dollars. Whoever they paid to make
this game definitely ripped them off. I could've found 5 college students who could've done this in
a weekend with a case of Red Bull and some Zyns. But I mean really,
if you thought this had any chance of
success and invested in it based on their initial
announcement, then I can't help you. I played Soul Keep for about 30
minutes, and yeah, it's as bad as it looks. It's a pay-to-win tower defense game with an intense
difficulty curve, and just like Splinterlands it plays itself. You see, unlike
Bloons Tower Defense, the de facto king of the
genre, there's no interaction to be had after you click start. There's no possibility for skill expression by reacting
quickly and placing spikes on choke points or
dropping a well timed bomb. You can't even set
targeting preferences for towers, they just
attack enemies at random. And worst of all, you can only place
towers on specific designated anchor points. So much for strategy. Now imagine you're a delusional Splinterlands bag holder,
and you finally play Soul Keep. Your exposure to
mainstream gaming ended at Pac-Man 40 years
ago, so a tower defense game blows your mind. You expect that new players are going
to be clamoring at the gates to get a taste. Finally, a new wave
of fools to buy my bags. We're all gonna be rich. Just one small problem. It turns out that
Splinterlands doesn't even own Soul Keep anymore. It would appear
that Splinterlands sold the rights for Soul Keep
to the development studio they outsourced to build it. Why they did this I have no idea, as they never really gave
an explanation, but I can only assume it was because
they were running out of money. So what's next for Splinterlands? Probably bankruptcy,
but in reality, who knows how much longer they
can keep this grift going. Remember, Splinterlands started as a Kickstarter game, if
that helps give you some history. These bag holders and their
Discord server need to be studied. The levels of cope
exhibited here are actually inhuman. The sentiment is
almost entirely negative. Everyone complains
about how much the game sucks and how much
money they've lost, yet they're still here every single day. On the outside,
they pretend that they love the game and sing
its praises on any social media post. But in reality,
everyone's just waiting for the next big pump so
they can finally get out. Splinterlands is hardly a game, and based on how their
players talk about it, it seems like they agree. In fact, they all but admit
it's nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. Everyone wants to
earn, but the only way to do that is to find
a new mark to pass your bags onto. And unfortunately, finding
new blood is more difficult than ever. Looking at Splinterlands as public
stats, it appears that only 727 new players have purchased a spellbook in 2024. Since you can't really do anything in the game without the
spellbook, this can pretty much be treated as the
number of new players who signed up. Of course, since we have no real idea how many of these are
just second, third, or 50th accounts for a bot farm, the real
number of new players could be as low as zero. So will 2024 be the final year of Splinterlands, or will
they somehow make a turnaround? I mean, it's pretty obvious. Just look at this
amazing gameplay and the fantastic card
artwork that you truly own. Who wouldn't want to play Splinterlands? Kryxivia was one of the longest
episodes of my NFT game review series. This video is a favorite of mine and it's where I really
started to get my footing and found my voice as a content creator. However, it's also a video
with which I have many regrets. I missed a lot of important points and
I didn't even realize it until months later. I fell for it. Well, not really. I didn't give them any money and I
still scored them a 28 out of 100 so even though I fell for the veneer of legitimacy, I still thought
it was a terrible game. But how did they fool me? What did they do that so
many other crypto games couldn't? First off, let's look at the game itself. I thought it was a pretty impressive
feat for a small, inexperienced indie dev team to have put together a
somewhat competent attempt at an MMO. It was tremendously buggy, boring and horrifically balanced
but it worked and that was a lot better than many of the
other crypto games I played before. I would soon
realize a few months later that this was nothing
more than an asset flip and a poorly disguised one at that. This is the Blink RPG builder, a Unity Asset Store package
that served as the base for the game of Kryxivia. Now, using this
isn't inherently a problem but it does
discount much of my praise for the game, considering how little
their product deviates from the template. Knowing how much of the legwork they were able to skip, the
terrible enemy balancing and level design is even more baffling. How much effort did
they really put into this? Aside from this, a number of security vulnerabilities were found
in the game shortly after my video. Most importantly, the game has no anti-cheat at all and
it was laughably easy to speed hack or become invulnerable. I also found a way to grant myself admin access and while
unfortunately I lost all footage of this, I do have a
single screenshot remaining as proof. At the time of my
video, Kryxivia had a player base fluctuating
between 5 and 0 and I shared my doubts regarding the project's future. The CEO of
Kryxivia even took some time out of his busy day to
leave a comment on my video, although when I returned to get a
screenshot of it, I found that he had deleted it. If I remember
correctly, it said something like "We are an
indie team, don't criticize us, remember how bad
World of Warcraft was in alpha? Look at them now." Well, that's a very
good point Mr. Kryxivia. So let's see just how your
game is doing, a year and a half later. Heading to Kryxivia's website, I try
to launch the game in my browser, only to find it loading forever. Strange, but maybe it's
just an issue with the web version. So I try to download the desktop
client, but the page to do so seems to be a 404. Uh oh. Good thing I just so happened to
actually have the installer somewhere in my backup storage, so let's give that a try. It would seem that Kryxivia has shut down their servers
entirely, leaving the game completely inaccessible. Uh, what happened? As usual, we turn to
their official Discord server. While the invite
link on their website appears to be dead, I just
so happen to have my secret undercover account
parked in their server. This looks like a ghost town. What's going on? The few messages that have been sent in the past few months
seem to indicate that the project is dead and completely abandoned. In the time since
uploading my original review in February 2023,
the game would only receive two updates, one in
July and another in September. Then the
development team would go silent. According to their community manager,
this was just because they're hard at work. Big things are coming soon. Be patient. This false hope
would continue to be spread for months, but
the four remaining players would get bored and silently quit. Some vigilant users would notice that
the development team had all left the Discord server and updated
their LinkedIn profiles to show that they were
working on new projects. This extended to the CEO himself, and while he's still in
the Discord server to this day, his LinkedIn states
that he started a new crypto project. In April 2024, the
silence would eventually be broken, and
Frederick, the CEO, would share a message on the game's Telegram channel. "We may find some energy to pivot all our game to a new cycle,
through mobile, but would require market help,
but need to face reality. Kryxivia is over at current stage,"
he says, attaching a screenshot of Kryxivia's dismal token chart. At this point, token values had plummeted over 99% to become
functionally worthless. Worthless to you guys, but not to him. Since Kryxivia raised over a million dollars in initial
token sales, they still made a killing on this scheme. Would this mean that
Kryxivia is technically a rug pool? I would say yes, since they never updated their website or even
made an official announcement acknowledging the game's closure. Their tokens and
NFTs are still available for purchase, and their
website seems to indicate that the game works just fine,
except for the fact that, you know, it doesn't. But it's not
unheard of for a game to shut down when faced
with financial uncertainty. It happens all the time. However, most of
these games don't solicit their players for
money through the sale of unregistered securities. Nonetheless, with Kryxivia
officially dead, there's nothing for me to add. It's no surprise
that this happened, of course. My initial video suspected that their business model was
unsustainable, since their only source of income was
through transaction fees. Without any
players, they would never make any money, and
because the game sucked, they would never get any players. It doesn't take a
genius to figure that out. Kryxivia, you served us well. You were a
sketchy, lazily constructed cash grab that failed to
deliver anything of substance, and I had a lot of fun deconstructing
and picking apart every aspect of your game. You will be lost
forever among a sea of your peers. Failed crypto
games that made a select few insiders very
wealthy, but left hundreds of investors holding dust. Where do I even begin with this one? Undead Blocks is a
blockchain-enabled first-person shooter. Finally, you can truly own your weapon skins, thanks to the
integration with the GameStop NFT Marketplace. Unless you forgot to migrate
your assets when they shut that down. That's right,
Undead Blocks was one of the front-page champions
of this now-defunct venture from everyone's favorite
dying brick-and-mortar pawn shop. Thanks to this partnership, Undead Blocks was able to tap
into the pure idiocracy found within the cult of GameStop shareholders. My review of Undead Blocks was
perhaps one of the most negative I've ever shared. The product was devoid of any creativity, and instead it was
designed from the ground up to extract money
from the wallets of morons. The game that was delivered was a bare-bones,
horrible-performing piece of garbage that served as little more than the minimum required product to
start selling microtransactions. These
microtransactions existed in the form of exclusive weapon
skins, which ranged from a pink recolor to a green recolor. Wow. But why would anyone ever purchase one of these skins when
the game doesn't even have functional multiplayer? How am I supposed to flex on the poors? Owners of the NFTs are instead
granted access to the game's exclusive VIP mode. In this mode, playing the game will earn rewards in the form of
Z-Bucks, which can be exchanged for real money. Since the game only has one map, I envy the willpower of
anyone who actually sat here and played this for long
enough to accumulate Z-Bucks. I guess it's good that it's practically impossible to lose
as long as you keep moving in a circle. For example, like many other crypto
games, there wasn't a shred of anti-cheat. This led to a litany of issues, and the developers found
themselves in a sticky situation. Players were making too much money. Soon enough, the developers would disable the ability to
automatically claim rewards. Instead, they would manually review
every single player's gameplay footage to make sure they didn't cheat, and only
then would they give people their money. Expectedly, this worked horribly. Players would
complain of endless waits to receive their
payouts, some expecting to receive thousands of
dollars in tournament winnings. Update times would continue, updates
would cease, and the team would grow silent. Six months after
withdrawals became subject to manual review,
the team would return to share some unfortunate news. Withdrawals would be
halted for the foreseeable future, and their
founder Grant would be stepping away from the
project for personal reasons. Has the project run out of money? Many would suspect as much, and
silence would resume until December 2023. The team would then come crawling
back to announce that withdrawals would resume. The cult of loyal
bagholders would awake from their slumber to
celebrate, although festivities were cut short after discovery was made. The Undead Blocks white paper had been modified to remove the
team page, which had links to the founder's personal LinkedIn pages. Navigating to these profiles would reveal that many of the
founding members of Undead Blocks have left for a new
company, something called Dopple.ai. This website
appears to be some sort of AI chatbot, which
allows you to interact with copyright-infringing models
of your favorite pop culture icons. Naturally, the player base was an uproar. Undead Blocks was
supposed to be the future, and players were
promised a great game that would pay them for playing. The founders, seemingly abandoning
the project, definitely isn't a good sign. Coincidentally,
Grant would return from his hiatus around this
time, proudly sharing the news that
withdrawals would return in a few days, but only 30%
of your accumulated Z bucks. And the minimum
withdrawal amount is $100. This withdrawal pool would be open
for about a month before becoming depleted. The team would then share that they will refill the pool as
soon as they gain full control of the project. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that point. Are you still following this? To make a long
story short, the withdrawal pool still hasn't
been filled, 7 months later. They keep saying
that they're trying super hard to get it
working, but it gets delayed every time. Grant has returned from his personal
leave to take control of the project again. According to him, the long hiatus was due to their previous
Outsource development team holding the source code "hostage". Now this is the funniest part. This game hasn't received a meaningful update since it
entered beta 2 years ago. The undead token is down
95% with hardly any liquidity left. Nobody has withdrawn money in months, and basically
everything that was promised has turned out to be a lie. The community
turned on Grant, calling him a scammer, reporting
him to the FBI, the SEC, and even their moms. But as soon as Grant came back and said withdrawals will be
turned on, the mood switched. It's hilarious to
go back and see the exact same people who
were calling this game a scam a year ago now hyping it up today. It's fascinating
that anyone still has trust in this project's
leadership at this point, considering the fact that
they seem to lie and delay constantly. Alas, the mind of a bag holder
is never one we can fully understand. Anyway, that's the story, or at
least to the best of my understanding. It's really not even worth re-downloading this game to see if
it still works, especially since they're asking me
to run it as an administrator. I think I'll pass. Obviously, I have no faith
in the success of this project. Grant has removed
all references to Undead Blocks or Wagyu
games from his LinkedIn profile – clearly, he doesn't want to be
associated with this piece of shit either. If they ever manage
to release those two maps that they promised two
years ago, I will personally invest $13 into Undead Blocks.
