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

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. “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, web3 games are predicated on getting something out.” “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 “LegacyCoin” crypto token by designing and producing the most appealing items from raw in-game resources. 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. “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.” 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 $10,000 on a high-end Legacy Conglomerate plot after playing an early demo of the game at 2023’s Galaverse 2 show in Malta. In the end, Victor said he earned “less than $100” from that plot, mostly by loaning his deed to other players. Including his spending on Gala’s other games, Victor said he is “down seven figures total… Fortunately, I’m not destitute, but it’s absolutely brutal.” After spending “thousands” on Legacy after hearing it hyped at the first Galaverse, Ed777 said his total in-game earnings amounted to $9.84. Another player going by the handle tsappydays said they paid $100 for the cheapest plot of Legacy land only to abandon the game after a few days when “it was clear daily users wasn’t enough” to support any earnings from competitions. 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.” 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 OpenSea 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.” 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.” Looking back at Legacy in that interview, Molyneux seemed at least a little chagrined to have been taken in by the web3 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.