“Crypto Pokemon” game on Kickstarter no longer has funds to continue development after crypto crash

Untamed Isles, a video game described as “Pokemon but with crypto stuff“, no longer has funds to continue its game development and has been put temporarily on hold. According to its developers, it is due to their cash reserves being empty. This also means that—even after more than RM2.3 million had been invested on Kickstarter—initial backers won’t be able to get their money back.

“We have to pause the development of Untamed Isles and put the project on hold. With a heavy heart, we made this decision and we understand our amazing community will be shocked reading this,” wrote the game team on their Steam page.

What’s Untamed Isles?

Untamed Isles’ Kickstarter project launched on 27 August 2021 before it went on hiatus on 12 August of this year. It’s described as “a monster-taming turn-based MMORPG” but with “cryptocurrency integration”—although they say that the game “does not require blockchain integration to be played by a user”.

The game’s description explains that “most of the items and all of the monsters within the Untamed Isles can be tokenised and can be sold, bought, and traded on the website marketplace”. The platform also has an “in-game auction house”, allowing players to “earn while they play”.

On “hiatus”?

“To work on this project we brought more than 70 staff members on board and we were working relentlessly for more than 2 years to build the game we all were dreaming about. The truth is that the cost of development is high and there were lots of bumps on our way to this moment. Since we started the journey in 2020, the economic landscape has changed dramatically both generally and specifically for cryptocurrency, and we are not confident in the current market. We ran out of financial resources and we can’t carry on the development at this moment,” continued the developers regarding its hiatus.

In the announcement, they admitted that even though crypto integration isn’t nessecary, crypto’s “economic landscape” is the reason why they couldn’t continue game development. However, on 17 August, the developers added an additional statement after “misunderstandings” from “some recent media attention”.

“Phat Loot Studios and Untamed Isles did not invest any funds into crypto, all funds raised through crowdfunding and through traditional investment were spent by the studio developing the game… We had several investors pull out recently due to concerns about both the economic market along with the crypto market at the moment which made it very clear we could not reach early access. If they had not pulled out, we were pushing to make the early access date we announced,” clarified the developers.

In their FAQs, they stated that they are “not in a position to refund” thier initial backers due to empty cash reserves. However, pre-orders will be refunded.

Untamed Isles will not be able to hit the target release in October 2022. But the studio founders are “looking at ways to salvage both the core studio and the game” so that it can be completed and released—along with other possible titles.

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