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

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. 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.”

Town Stars in their eyes

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 “web3 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 $2 at the beginning of December. The GALA token price also shot up from about 2 cents in September to around 9 or 10 cents in October, then to a brief record of 65 cents on December 1. The price of Gala Games’ founder’s nodes saw similar price increases from a few thousand dollars to nearly $100,000, both on secondary markets and for the dwindling supply sold directly by Gala Games itself.