NFT projects are really failures sometimes. For example, yesterday we learned about a collection from adult film actress Lana Rhodes called CryptoSis. They didn’t attract enough investors and then collapsed in value altogether. The author of the project did take the money she received, though. Read more about it in a separate article.

Unsuccessful NFT-projects

Pixelmon is an online game in which users catch monsters of the same name and collect them as NFT. The action takes place in an open virtual world in the RPG genre. Prior to this, the first Pixelmon collection was announced, which will not be “available for capture” in the game itself. In addition, owners of the first collection were promised exclusive access to virtual land in the game.

Pixelmon

According to Decrypt’s sources, the release price of the tokens was set at around 3 ETH, then reduced in a Dutch auction format. That is, many tokens were issued at a price point below 3 ETH, which is equivalent to about $8100 at the current cryptocurrency exchange rate.

So what was it that crypto-enthusiasts didn’t like so much about the project? First of all, as members of the blockchain community pointed out, Pixelmon’s character design looks ridiculous and sometimes even silly. Commenters have criticised the startup’s creators that it “doesn’t work right” and “could turn out to be fraudulent”.

Here’s an example of NFT, for which early investors shelled out a lot of money. Apparently, it’s a far cry from the beautiful characters the developers originally promised release.

Pixelmon

A little later, Syber spoke more about what happened and said that the NFTs released did not accurately reflect what the in-game assets would look like. On Discord, he apologised and stated that the disclosure of the NFT collection in the OpenSea trading platform was a “terrible mistake”. Here’s his rejoinder.

The plan was to use the funds raised from the token issue to create proper and better character models. NFTs can be updated, and the way they look now is not the end result. They will be made better. The aim of the whole project was to create the first AAA NFT game.

For clarity, here’s a tweet showing representatives from another project (left) and Pixelmon pets (right).

Twitter users noted that the models for the NFT were designed literally “by hand”. One of them, for example, is an almost exact copy of a stock model in Unity. That is, similar models can be found for free or for a small fee on the official Unity platform, which means that the developers spent almost no effort to design the project. Syber commented on this point as well.

We bought a lot of models for our prototype project on Unity. They were not used in the NFT itself. It was never our intention to use them in the final version of the game. We need time to develop it. We will aim for an alpha release by the end of this year.

That said, back in December, Syber posted the following message on Twitter.

Pixelmon is the next blue chip. It’s a financial tip. Don’t look for a catch.

It doesn’t look good.

Of course, it’s ironic – although some investors may have taken it at face value. However, one fact remains the reality – $70 million was raised to issue tokens, so the disappointment of the game’s participants is understandable.


We believe that this project can indeed be considered a major failure of 2022. Still, such amounts of investment and the end result are completely incomparable, and it can certainly be considered a fraud on investors who were expecting completely different characters. From the looks of it, the NFT will indeed end up being redesigned, but such an approach should clearly be a serious wake-up call for investors. Obviously, they won't get involved with this developer's projects anymore.

What do you think about it? Share your opinion in our Millionaire Crypto Chat. There we will discuss other important developments related to blockchain and decentralization industry.