Kickstarter Game Goes Bust Gambling on Crypto, No Refunds

In 2021, at the height of the world’s collective blockchain madness, a video game called Untamed Isles – Pokemon, but with crypto stuff—made over $500,000 on Kickstarter. A year later, the game is practically deadand is so broke that it can’t even refund its backers.

IN a post on the game’s Steam pagehave the developers said “we must stop the development of Untamed Isles and put the project on hold”, which just sounds like it temporarily until you read the rest of what they have to say:

There have been a myriad of factors that have caused the premise to this very moment, but what it all boils down to is our inability to keep up with the demands of what we set out to do.

Untamed Isles is a very ambitious title that is an open world monster capturing MMORPG. To work on this project we brought with us more than 70 employees and we worked relentlessly for more than 2 years to build the game we all dreamed of. The truth is that development costs are high and there were many bumps in the road to this moment. Since we started our journey in 2020, the economic landscape has changed dramatically both in general and specifically for cryptocurrency, and we are not sure about the current market. We ran out of financial resources and we cannot continue development now.

When they say that “the economic landscape has changed dramatically”, they mean “the butt has fallen out of the crypto marketthat we gambled your money on“:

We leaned into the crypto market and expanded quickly on the back of the positive interest. When the crash came, we ended up heavily exposed with too short a runway. The game remains game-first, crypto-second in design, but crypto funds have been, and still are, critical to getting us to release. Unlike many of the projects that have started 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’re sure it will be at some point – then we have to put development on this project on hold.

And that ass has fallen out so far that the developers say in a separate mail “Due to the fact that our cash reserves are empty, we are unable to refund our initial backers. We truly regret this and wish this scenario were different.”

While this could be the part of the story where I say everyone who supports this game got exactly what they deserved, the fact is Untamed Isle’s crypto items were optional, evident from backer feedback during the “hiatus” announcement on Kickstarter that many people were only interested in the game itself, not its speculative elements:

Untamed Isle’s “hiatus” is especially strange given 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 that “We are fortunate to have funding that allows us to safely deliver the core functionality and gameplay.”