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

After millions in NFT sales, the hyped “play to earn” game was effectively dead in weeks.

Molyneux made a lot of his now-famous grandiose promises about the design of Legacy, of course, calling it “a vast and epic game” where you could design “any conceivable product… anything you can think of” to build your business around. In a contemporary interview with The Verge, he promised “the most advanced simulation that I have ever been involved with,” complete with “moral choices and [a] narrative storyline [that] really picks at those moral choices.” At Galaverse, he added, “I’ve been involved in simulations for decades now, and this is everything we know about those simulations.”

In addition to Molyneux’s usual game design bluster, though, was a newfound enthusiasm for the idea of making money from simply playing a game. “And because it’s a blockchain game, you earn,” Molyneux said at Galaverse, leaning on the last word for emphasis. “For a game designer, imagine how exciting it is to know that a game design that you’ve been working on, people will be earning money with it!”

“I want to focus and make Legacy the defining game of blockchain gaming—because that’s the sort of ridiculously optimistic person that I am—and a defining game of any of the games that I’ve created before,” he said in a separate livestreamed Galaverse interview. “It feels like the start of something interesting… I just get super excited in places like this, and I think what Gala is doing is incredible.”