NFT Cock-fighting Game is all wrong with Silicon Valley

For the past year a company known as Irreverent Labs has been working on a game called MechaFightClubwhich was to be run by NFT sales and be based on the proud and ancient sport of cockfightingfight.

Does not use actual hens, the tanks, they were mechanics, but still.

Here is the game in actionwhich it was hoped would inspire the sale of a ton of mechabots, the NFTs that players would buy and then use to battle each other with:

You can be shocked to hear this after seeing such a complete demonstration, but it’s now May 2023 and the game – or collection of concept videos built around NFTshowever you want to describe it – has essentially been cancelled, with the developers announcing an “indefinite hibernation”:

Although it would be easy to blame its cancellation on the fact that it looked like crap and was built on a dead market, The developers have instead decided to blame the SEC’s recent crypto crackdown, saying “We are an American company and lack of clarity makes it difficult for blockchain companies to operate here. In the current regulatory confusion, we simply couldn’t create an in-game economy without worrying about the regulatory consequences.”

You can be alike shocked to hear that a bunch of people who were very interested in the whole NFT and crypto craze now, like the rest of Silicon Valley, lurched toward “AI” instead.

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The game’s official YouTube account, which had stopped posting gameplay videos a long time ago (although it Twitter account had continued to hype the game until earlier this week, using mostly AI-generated images)has recently started posting AI interviews instead, and Decrypt reports (via Web3IsGoingGreat) the company has now swung completely away from game development and towards using machine learning to create “short-form videos from photos” instead.

I’m not posting this here to point and laugh at a bad game that probably never made it into a game and that you probably never heard of. I am posting this because this company received $40 million in funding to create MechaFightCluband only a year later can only cancel it, change theirs the whole focus on a premise as flimsy and ethereal as crypto was and just carry on like nothing happened.

Linette Lopez’s excellent piece last week argued that “Silicon Valley has entered the Hail Mary phase of its business cycle — a desolate stretch of a tech industry downturn where desperation can turn to recklessness.” Irreverent Labs going from “mech chicken fighting game” to “AI powered video creator” in a year is the perfect example of this desperation, a case study in everything that is wrong with so many companies work in these technological areas and, even more damning, the morons who keep giving them all this money.