GoKawiilThis 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. But the players who poured roughly $54 million in cryptocurrency into Molyneux’s previous game, Legacy, say they’re still bitter about getting swept up in Molyneux’s broken promises of a best-in-class economic simulation and the opportunity for “play to earn” riches.
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 YouTube 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.”