Crypto game Ember Sword shuts down after 7 years of development
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Ember Sword, a crypto MMORPG in growth, has been cancelled. They are saying it’s as a result of the group couldn’t get extra funding for the sport.
Ember Sword as soon as used Polygon, then the Immutable X chain, then Mantle, asking early NFT consumers emigrate their property from chain to chain through the years.
“In as we speak’s market,” the group wrote in a message, all that’s left of its now-wiped web site, “we couldn’t discover a path to maintain constructing. Our journey, and the servers, will go offline.”
So how a lot funding did Ember Sword have? It’s unclear. Vibrant Star Studios, the group behind the sport, raised $700,000 in 2020 and one other $2 million in 2021 in publicly disclosed rounds, in response to information from BlockchainGamer.biz and a press launch. Earlier than 2020, Vibrant Star was referred to as So Sofa Studios.
In 2021 — a peak time for NFTs extra broadly — potential Ember Sword gamers collectively pledged a complete of $203 million in NFT land gross sales for the unreleased sport.
VentureBeat reported in 2023 that the sport had over $18 million in funding from traders ($7.1 million) and land gross sales, not together with the sport’s 2023 “Alpha land sale.”
As we’ve heard from some VCs just lately, it’s not all the time a good suggestion to monetize your crypto sport too early.
It’s additionally troublesome to know for sure how a lot cash a studio has raised in complete, as some blockchain partnerships and grant offers aren’t publicly disclosed.
Ember Sword had apparently been in growth for over seven years, since 2018. The sport solely supplied full early entry in December 2024, although there have been some group alternatives to playtest earlier variations of the sport since not less than 2023.
The sport’s token, EMBER, deployed in mid-2024 and is now down over 99% from its all-time excessive that it noticed at its launch.
Picture: EMBER value over time.
The studio beforehand ditched Unity in favor of creating its personal sport engine, after which cycled by means of 5 completely different proprietary engines earlier than making a last determination (Vibrant Star’s web site, now purged, has deleted its previous webpages with these particulars).
“As a group we’ve got developed and labored on 5 engines in complete,” an archived copy of a webpage printed in January 2023 from the studio’s web site reads.
