Meet the players who lost big money on Peter Molyneux’s failed Legacy - Ars Technica

Overview

Meet the players who lost big money on Peter Molyneux’s failed Legacy

After millions in NFT sales, the hyped “play to earn” game was effectively dead in weeks.

Details

This week, players are being asked to pay

Legacy players who spoke to Ars Technica described pre-purchasing thousands of dollars’ worth of NFTs, in some cases, to buy into the crypto-fueled vision offered by Molyneux, his development studio 22cans, and publisher Gala Games. Those players said the Legacy they got was a pale shadow of what was promised, with a broken-by-design economic system that caused players to abandon the game en masse within a couple of weeks of its 2023 launch.

Despite the game’s almost total failure as a going concern, though, Legacy rode the crest of the crypto hype wave to pre-sold economic success that Molyneux said “[gave] us the money to fund Masters of Albion,” in a 2024 interview. “That’s what we used the majority of the money for…”

“Legacy was paid for upfront, man,” former Gala Games Chief Marketing Officer and President of Blockchain Jason “Bitbender” Brink told Ars. “Gala paid a minimum guarantee to… [Molyneux] and his team. The NFT sales for Legacy go toward that minimum guarantee.”

Legacy, like other Gala Games products, ended up being “a lot of hype, promises, and implied functionality that never occurs,” said Old Man Smithers, a Gala Games researcher who has documented the company’s early history for their You Tube channel. “Instead, you get a minimum viable product, and then it’s forgotten about while the next project is hyped.”

In exchange for their crypto millions, players who bought into Legacy got “a proto-idle-tapper… with a bigger screen,” Brink added. “People are angry, pissed, and disillusioned, and I don’t blame them.”

To understand why players put millions of crypto dollars into Legacy long before it was released, you need to understand a bit about Gala Games, the crypto-focused gaming company and Legacy publisher that was founded in 2019. From the start, the new outfit attracted some strong initial interest in the then-trendy blockchain gaming space (aka “web 3 gaming”) thanks to the involvement of Zynga veteran Eric Schiermeyer and crypto evangelist Wright Thurston.

In September 2020, Gala Games debuted its own crypto token, GALA. Instead of selling GALA directly through a relatively standard Initial Coin Offering, Gala Games sold 50,000 “founder nodes” to early adopters who would share in a collective daily distribution of 8.5 million GALA to start. Another 8.5 million in daily GALA went to a “Gala Games Conservatorship,” a relatively opaque group that served as the company treasury to fund future development projects.

Those daily GALA drops were practically worthless until August 2021, when GALA’s listing on the Binance Smart Chain simplified trading and added important liquidity to the market for the cryptocoin. But the real market frenzy around GALA started that October, when Gala Games finally turned on play-to-earn features in its simple farming resource simulation Town Star.

Town Star players could purchase from a limited supply of NFT farming units to help supercharge the lucrative in-game production of the game’s bespoke TOWN crypto token, with rarer, pricier NFT units being more productive. The game also provided players with a “Gala Power” bonus based on how much GALA they had in their wallet, helping drive interest in a token that had been nearly worthless up to that point.

Quickly, crypto “degens” and curious, FOMO-driven, pandemic-trapped lookie-loos started flooding into Town Star on the promise of play-to-earn riches. As they did, the price of the TOWN token shot up from about 21 cents at the end of October to a peak of nearly

The peak of speculative Town Star earnings came just before the announcement and initial NFT land sale for Legacy.

For those who got in early, the brief Town Star frenzy was a massive and somewhat shocking windfall. One early GALA user who asked to remain anonymous (and who we’ll refer to as Phil) said his purchase of six founder’s nodes for an average of $1,400 each was “not that big of a deal” when GALA was at a sub-penny price. But “when the bull run happened, all of a sudden those nodes are printing some serious money.”

Phil said he reinvested some of those sudden GALA earnings back into Town Star NFTs and was able to make $100,000 worth of crypto in December 2021 on about “ten minutes of play a day… I’m not even any good at Town Star, I just had a couple dozen Cranebots and other assorted high-value NFTs.”

“I knew in my heart that it couldn’t logically continue this way,” Phil continued. “I didn’t quit my job—but while it was happening, it was a very powerful drug.”

The reason Town Star’s amazing bull run couldn’t ”logically continue”—and the reason most play-to-earn games quickly fail—is a simple matter of monetary inflows and outflows. In the early days, as new speculative players flood into a hot game, their fresh, incoming initial investments drive up the price of the associated crypto tokens, helping to fuel the profits of the speculative players that came in before them.

When the wave of new speculative players slows or stops, though, keeping those crypto prices high requires a core group of non-speculative players willing to buy the token just to play the game, without any expectations of cashing out. These kinds of “pay to play” players are how a game like EVE Online has maintained a robust, long-lasting in-game economy, even without using cryptocurrency.

Town Star’s extremely basic farming simulation didn’t keep non-speculative players playing or paying for long, though, and the flood of new money coming into the system quickly slowed to a trickle. When that happened, Gala started rebalancing the in-game economy and shrinking TOWN distributions, reducing profits for existing players and hastening an economic death spiral. By May 2022, both TOWN and the GALA token were down 90-plus percent from their late 2021 peaks.

“The reality is… what you really need in order for this really to work is a great game that people want to play and get nothing out,” Brink said. “And that’s the problem… By and large, web 3 games are predicated on getting something out.”

Former Gala Games executive Jason “Bitbender” Brink says the economic systems for games like Legacy were destined to fail.

While Town Star’s pay-to-earn model couldn’t work in the long term, the late 2021 moment when early players were making serious crypto profits helped burnish Gala Games’ image among web 3 gaming advocates. “The way that Gala hooked everyone was that incredible period of time where everyone was earning a ridiculous amount of money for simply playing Town Star,” Phil said. “Seeing what could happen with play-to-earn brought a lot of FOMO and greed into the system.”

One Gala player going by the handle Titan told Ars that the significant earnings players briefly saw in Town Star “baited the hook for all future NFT sales” in other Gala Games, like Legacy. “People had that expectation stuck in their head.”

Molyneux was one of those people who got high play-to-earn expectations embedded in their heads. “I’ve worked on so many designs and I’ve worked on so many games, but to think that someone could be playing my game and earning money, what an incredible honor that would be to have,” Molyneux said in a late-2021 interview with The Verge. “But we’re going to have to be super careful.”

Legacy didn’t start as a blockchain game. Molyneux originally announced the title in 2019 as a “reworking of the very first game I did… a game where you ran a little business.” The concept was sold as a standard single-player narrative simulation, charting the player’s journey from “shed tinkerer to industrial despot” with all the “moral conundrums” that entailed.

Legacy’s shift to Gala Games’ crypto platform came later, after what Molyneux said in a 2021 press release was “an out-of-the-blue call with old friend Mike Mc Carthy, who was working at Gala.” That phone call led to what Molyneux said was “a lightbulb moment.”

“We came to realize I had developed a game perfect for crypto gaming. Every mechanic in Legacy was tailor-made for the blockchain environment,” he said.

Molyneux laid out his grand vision for the new crypto-fueled version of Legacy in an on-stage presentation in front of hundreds at the first Galaverse conference, held in Las Vegas in December 2021 amid the brief peak of the Town Star-driven GALA bubble. The core idea of building a small town into an industrial metropolis was still there in Moylneux’s new vision, but it was now infused with frequent multiplayer contests where players would compete to earn valuable “Legacy Coin” crypto token by designing and producing the most appealing items from raw in-game resources.

Molyneux (left) waxes philosophical about “play to earn” games alongside Gala Games’ Michael Mc Carthy at 2021’s Galaverse expo.

Molyneux made a lot of his now-famous grandiose promises about the design of Legacy, of course, calling it “a vast and epic game” where you could design “any conceivable product… anything you can think of” to build your business around. In a contemporary interview with The Verge, he promised “the most advanced simulation that I have ever been involved with,” complete with “moral choices and [a] narrative storyline [that] really picks at those moral choices.” At Galaverse, he added, “I’ve been involved in simulations for decades now, and this is everything we know about those simulations.”

In addition to Molyneux’s usual game design bluster, though, was a newfound enthusiasm for the idea of making money from simply playing a game. “And because it’s a blockchain game, you earn,” Molyneux said at Galaverse, leaning on the last word for emphasis. “For a game designer, imagine how exciting it is to know that a game design that you’ve been working on, people will be earning money with it!”

“I want to focus and make Legacy the defining game of blockchain gaming—because that’s the sort of ridiculously optimistic person that I am—and a defining game of any of the games that I’ve created before,” he said in a separate livestreamed Galaverse interview. “It feels like the start of something interesting… I just get super excited in places like this, and I think what Gala is doing is incredible.”

Molyneux’s enthusiasm around the Legacy announcement in December 2021 was well-timed with the height of the speculative crypto bubble surrounding Town Star. Amid that frenzy, Gala Games sold the initial allotment of 4,661 NFT plots of Legacy land within days of first putting them up for public sale. Players who bought those NFTs were promised the opportunity to earn crypto in the eventual release, either by using those leases to play directly or by loaning out their land to “free” players in exchange for a share of their in-game earnings.

The list price of the crypto used to purchase those plots was roughly $54 million at the time, but that figure includes some cheaper plots that were given to Galaverse attendees to help prime the market. Not all of the Legacy NFT money was new to the GALA ecosystem, either; many purchasers were just using crypto profits they had already made from founder’s nodes, Town Star play, or the recent sudden appreciation of GALA itself.

The store page for the unique “Heart of London” Legacy NFT, which sold for about $900,000 in cryptocurrency in 2021.

“It was a peak bull market, people were buying all sorts of crazy things,” Brink said. People with Gala founder’s nodes found themselves with “a significant stream of income that you would then turn around, and it’s almost like it’s free money, go buy game stuff with it,” he added.

“What got me interested in Legacy was the fact I made a lot of GALA in the early days and I was simply buying NFTs in anything Gala was going to launch… but not so many as to bankrupt myself,” a player going by the handle Mouldy told Ars.

Regardless of the source, all that crypto spending represented real value flowing back into the coffers of Gala Games, justifying the minimum guarantee that Brink says Gala paid to Legacy developer 22cans. That made Legacy a business success well before its actual launch and ensured that any subsequent long-term player interest would be at least somewhat financially irrelevant to the companies involved. Players sunk significant crypto money into a just-announced title based on their faith in Molyneux’s game design prowess and, crucially, the expectation that they’d eventually be able to earn that money back—and more—when the game launched.

“They are trying to raise money to fund the project and then build it after,” one anonymous Legacy player (we’ll call him Victor), told Ars. “Basically, we are seed investors.”

A map of the more than 4,000 Legacy land plot NFTs sold. Rarer lots closer to the “Heart of London” offered certain gameplay benefits and commanded higher prices.

It’s a system that seems well-designed for Molyneux’s style of enthusiastic early hype. “[Molyneux] is a remarkably charming person,” Brink said. “He’s very easy to talk to, he has interesting ideas, he’s very affable… He didn’t come across as some scheming shyster or anything like that. He just was a guy who was very passionate about his games and was super fun to talk to.”

But pre-selling a game so heavily based on these kinds of promises can also lead to a sense of inflated expectations that are impossible to meet. “The game developers would be like, ‘Oh yeah, this is a great idea, I’d love to do this,’” Brink said of Gala Games marketing in general. “And the problem is that, when you say ‘I’d love to do this,’ the community takes that as ‘I’m 100% going to do this for sure, on my mother’s grave,’ which is not necessarily the case.”

By the time Legacy finally launched in October 2023, it was a far cry from the ambitious game Molyneux had talked up nearly two years before. The core gameplay loop involved a lot of artificial timers and seemingly endless, repetitive clicking to convert crops into ingredients and then move those ingredients into factories. Players could then unlock the opportunity to use those factories to produce and trade bespoke burgers or bicycles, for instance, but the limited design options available left a lot to be desired, especially at the start.

While there was a basic “town satisfaction” rating that affected how efficiently players’ automated workers could operate, there was little to be seen of what Molyneux had once promised would be “the most advanced simulation that I have ever been involved with.”

The play-to-earn economics were even worse. Plans to build that economy around a unique Legacy Coin had been scrapped in favor of a complex system where players used Gems (earned in-game or purchased directly from Gala with crypto or dollars) to purchase entries in design popularity contests that ran almost continuously. Winning those contests would grant players Legacy Tickets that would then be automatically converted to GALA using an arcane formula at the end of every day.

Players quickly found that actually earning money from these competitive events was nearly impossible, though. Those who took the time to read the Legacy litepaper discovered that the total prize pool for daily in-game events was a paltry “15 percent of the GALA spent on in-game Gems.” That means a full 85 percent of the new money players were spending to enter those contests post-launch was simply retained by Gala Games (The millions of dollars in crypto players spent on land plots to access the game in the first place was a separate sunk cost, at this point).

“The problem with that [15 percent payout] is it literally makes it completely impossible, due to very well understood thermodynamic principles, for anyone to get more out than what they’ve put into it,” Brink said bluntly. “Which means that [the game] sucks and is not fun, right?”

“Imagine if a casino would take an 85 percent rake on a poker game,” Victor added. “That’s exactly what they’re doing… Basically if you didn’t win the contests in Legacy, you were losing money. And then it got to [the point that] if you won, you would break even.”

While Legacy added new in-game product categories like Ice Cream well into 2024, the player base had already moved on from the game’s broken economic model.

Once players began to understand those economic realities, the vast majority didn’t see much point in sticking around. A player with the handle Ed 777 told Ars that Legacy’s core gameplay was “fun for the first few days” but turned quickly when “the huge bugs started to crop up and it became apparent that the game economy was a joke. Between these two things, most players simply abandoned the game. Some of the bugs were fixed. But the economy never was.”

Victor told Ars that “there were a few players for a few days” but that “the economy was dead in about two weeks.” That was particularly disappointing, he said, because he had spent

After spending “thousands” on Legacy after hearing it hyped at the first Galaverse, Ed 777 said his total in-game earnings amounted to

While other Legacy players Ars spoke with were hesitant to discuss precisely how much they had spent, everyone said they regretted buying into the game. Many early Gala Games faithful told Ars that they avoided Legacy entirely after getting burned by the collapsing economics of earlier Gala titles.

A player going by Tim T told Ars he got into Legacy “in December 2021, during the heady days of Gala,” when rising crypto values made it seem like a sure thing. By the time the game came out months later, though, “I and all the other OGs knew that neither Gala, nor 22cans, really cared about the game and wouldn’t put much into maintaining or improving it.”

Legacy started selling NFT land plots when GALA was priced on the left side of this graph. The game actually launched when GALA was priced on the right side of this graph.

The only users I found who actually made money from Legacy (outside of Gala Games or 22cans) were the ones who focused on flipping virtual real estate rather than playing the game itself. “When Legacy started out, the degens, IMO, were the ones buying,” said Faz, who runs a longstanding Discord full of disgruntled Gala Games players. “When a sale would start, they would buy a bunch of land then resell at a profit anything that was sold out in the store… People spent thousands, and tens of thousands [of dollars].”

Phil, the early Gala founder’s node purchaser, said he bought one of the game’s high-end Conglomerate deeds for 100,000 GALA (about $60,000 at the time) during the presale. After the purchase, though, he said he “felt a little ill immediately because it was by far the largest purchase outside of a house that I have ever done and I did it so easily with the push of a mouse button.”

Within 36 hours, he had resold that Conglomerate deed to someone else on Open Sea for 27 ETH, worth about $100,000 at the time. “I was over the moon and relieved to have such a great flip, and the panic of having such an expensive purchase in my account was gone,” he said. “I can’t express to you how much I was relieved to not have any NFTs tied to the launch.”

Today, Legacy is functionally unplayable; it doesn’t even appear on the list of games on Gala Games’ website. While the players who spent thousands of dollars on Legacy land plots still technically control the associated NFTs, those crypto tokens are practically worthless without an active game to monetize them.

(Gala Games COO Mark Skaggs said in an email that the company would not be able to offer comment on specific questions sent regarding this story. A 22 Cans representative told Ars that “as we work on the coming updates to our current title… the studio would rather use that time to promote Masters of Albion rather than enter into any postmortem on previous titles.”)

From the start, Gala Games has been careful not to describe purchases of its tokens and NFTs as an investment. “The only reason to get a node is to help support the growth of a decentralized ecosystem based around the ethos of giving gamers freedom and ownership of their own assets,” the company wrote in early 2021. “As node owners support the network, they receive GALA and NFTs as rewards for their support.”

At the same time, the company’s marketing efforts focused heavily on the potential to earn money by buying into its games and the risk of waiting too long to get in. “The people who were first to play it are going to get more than people who are last to play it,” Gala Games CEO Eric Schiermeyer said in a March 2020 interview. “So, I mean, there’s definitely a reason to come in.”

Molyneux said the proceeds from the failed Legacy helped 22cans fund development of the new Masters of Albion.

While some Gala Games players I talked to said they spent money at least in part to support web 3 gaming philosophically, most said they were primarily putting money in to get more money out. A player with the handle Higher Primate told Ars they regret the $86,000 they paid for a founder’s node at the peak of the GALA bull market. “At that time, I also thought their game library was impressive for web 3. [Now] all of those games I was sold have now all been abandoned,” he said. “I purely FOMO’d in, thinking they had the secret sauce for web 3 gaming.”

“Let’s put it this way, If you spent tens of thousands or more on a ‘game piece’ for a game, and you were told that the game piece would allow you to earn in-game… then of course you would expect to earn your initial investment back,” Ed 777 said.

“If you are spending the amount of money some people were spending on some of their NFT’s… it 100 percent is an investment,” Higher Primate added. “Gala isn’t a charity. You aren’t just giving hundreds of thousands of dollars away because you like games.”

The investment those players thought they were making in Legacy ended up serving as a de facto investment in the new Masters of Albion. Molyneux said in a 2024 Eurogamer interview that the pre-sold NFT earnings 22cans made from Legacy weren’t “quite as much as people speculated.” Still, he said the profits from that failed crypto project were enough to “bring back [former colleagues] Russell [Shaw] and Mark [Healey] and Ian [Wright]” to work on Masters of Albion. “It’s not cheap to do that. You’ve got to bring them away from their jobs.”

Looking back at Legacy in that interview, Molyneux seemed at least a little chagrined to have been taken in by the web 3 gaming hype of just a few years ago. “We were sold by a company called Gala Games on this—and I’m very susceptible to these ideas—that play-to-earn gaming could be a big thing,” he said. While Molyneux was able to admit that he’s “not a person that deeply understands” the play-to-earn economic model, he told Eurogamer that, despite the play-to-earn hype he expressed at Galaverse, he now felt that “in my opinion … [it] doesn’t really work financially, or in gameplay terms.”

For the players who lost significant money backing Molyneux’s vision for Legacy, that lesson was an expensive one. For Molyneux’s company, the process of learning that lesson apparently proved quite lucrative.

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Key Takeaways

• Meet the players who lost big money on Peter Molyneux’s failed Legacy

• After millions in NFT sales, the hyped “play to earn” game was effectively dead in weeks

• This week, players are being asked to pay $25 for early access to Masters of Albion, a god game throwback that legendary designer Peter Molyneux (Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black and White) says will be the last game he ever works on

• Legacy players who spoke to Ars Technica described pre-purchasing thousands of dollars’ worth of NFTs, in some cases, to buy into the crypto-fueled vision offered by Molyneux, his development studio 22cans, and publisher Gala Games

• Despite the game’s almost total failure as a going concern, though, Legacy rode the crest of the crypto hype wave to pre-sold economic success that Molyneux said “[gave] us the money to fund Masters of Albion,” in a 2024 interview