The Viral Crypto Gaming Death List Counts Four Studios. It’s Really Two — And It’s Already Outdated

In Brief:

• A crypto gaming obituary making the rounds lists Nyan Heroes, 9 Lives Interactive, Ember Sword (official site) and Bright Star Studios (official site) as four distinct collapses. In reality there are two: Nyan Heroes was 9 Lives’ game, and Ember Sword was Bright Star’s.
• The two shut their doors four days apart in May 2025, both blaming an inability to raise fresh capital. Each token now trades roughly 99% beneath its peak.
• The count is also behind the times. Proof of Play, Forgotten Runiverse and Wildcard have since wound down as well, and Caladan pegged the sector’s failure rate at 93% back in April.

A roundup of crypto gaming shutdowns doing the rounds on X this week tallies four entries. The real number is two.

Nyan Heroes was built by 9 Lives Interactive. Ember Sword was built by Bright Star Studios. By treating the studios and their games as separate line items, the list — posted by @StarPlatinum — credits each with its own raise, arriving at a headline total of $68 million plus $203 million in land sale pledges from what amounted to two corporate failures announced four days apart in May 2025.

The collapse underneath the list is genuine. The math on top of it isn’t.

What 9 Lives actually raised

Development on Nyan Heroes stopped on May 16, 2025, closed out by 9 Lives Interactive — the Singapore outfit that previously operated as Rude Robot Studios. Its funding history runs to $8 million raised in May 2022 at a reported $100 million valuation, followed by a further $3 million in March 2024 in a Mechanism Capital-led round that also included Sfermion, 3Commas Capital, Momentum 6, Kosmos Ventures, Devmons GG and CSP DAO. CryptoRank’s tally comes to $13.5 million spread over eight rounds, the token launch included.

A lack of interest wasn’t the problem. More than a million people took part across the game’s four play tests, and wishlists on Steam and the Epic Games Store topped 250,000.

“Despite these accomplishments and discussions around publishing, new investments, grants and acquisition—we weren’t able to secure the required capital to see the game to completion,” the studio wrote on X. Its Discord community channels were switched off shortly after, and replies to the post were restricted.

Speaking to Decrypt, co-founder and CEO Max Fu said the studio had put itself on the market. “Currently, we are exploring acquisition of the studio and/or the IP,” Fu said. “Some discussions are underway, but I suspect it may take some time to finalize a decision.” Nothing has been announced since. NYAN — which debuted on Bybit in May 2024 — dropped more than 40% on the announcement and now sits roughly 99% under its all-time high.

Founded in 2021, the studio staffed up with veterans of Electronic Arts, Bungie and Ubisoft. Fu’s own background was in medicine, while co-founder and advisor Wendy “Wengie” Huang arrived from marketing.

The $203 million that never arrived

Ember Sword’s shutdown came from Bright Star Studios on May 20, 2025, delivered first via a Discord post that landed only after the server’s channels and chat history had been erased.

Work on the project began in 2018 at the Aarhus, Denmark studio, then trading as So Couch Studios. Publicly disclosed venture funding came to about $7.8 million from Bitkraft, Delphi, Mechanism, Dialectic and Play Ventures, concentrated in 2021 and 2022, with Dr Disrespect, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and ex-Blizzard WoW lead designer Rob Pardo also holding positions on the cap table. The first land sale added more than $11 million.

That $203 million belongs in an entirely different column. It represents the sum 35,000 applicants pledged in 2021 to a raffle for land allocation. What the sale actually generated was a small share of that, and the money never passed through Bright Star’s hands.

“We explored every possible way forward, but the current web3 and gaming market made it impossible,” the studio said. “Our journey, and servers, go offline today.” A parallel notice on the game’s website described it as “one of the hardest announcements we’ve ever had to make,” adding that the team “were ultimately unable to secure the funding needed to continue.”

The game had gone through a closed beta in mid-2024 before moving into early access that December. EMBER, which launched on Ethereum in July 2024, is down roughly 99% from its first tracked price and carries a circulating market cap of $85,312. Refunds for landholders went unmentioned.

The list is already out of date

Both shutdowns are now over a year in the past, and the bleeding has continued since.

Proof of Play — the a16z crypto-backed studio behind Pirate Nation — is shutting down, having concluded that its wager on fully onchain games never delivered sustainable engagement or token value. Pirate Nation’s code is set to be open-sourced, with stewardship of the PIRATE token passing to an independent foundation. The studio had closed a $33 million seed round in September 2023.

On Jan. 26, Forgotten Runiverse took its Ronin MMORPG offline “until further notice,” pointing to financial infeasibility. Wildcard shuttered all multiplayer operations on April 27 having burned through $55 million — a $46 million Series A in 2022 plus another $9 million in May 2025. Pixel Heroes Adventure, 77-Bit, XOCIETY and Sidus Heroes have each scaled back dramatically or stopped operating altogether.

By BitPinas’ count, at least 22 crypto games in 2025 alone either closed or ripped out their web3 features to go back to conventional publishing. The total since the segment’s high point exceeds 300.

Funding has evaporated alongside them. Per DappRadar, quarterly venture inflows have slid from $1.6 billion at the 2021-2022 peak to $18 million, while yearly funding has fallen from roughly $4 billion in 2022 to around $360 million in 2025. The quarterly breakdown: $91 million in Q1 2025, $73 million in Q2 and $129 million in Q3. Between Q4 2025 and early 2026, somewhere in the $50 million to $90 million range closed across fewer than 15 deals.

Caladan’s report in April estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in total venture money flowed into the segment from 2020 to 2026, judged 93% of GameFi projects effectively dead, and measured token values as roughly 95% below their 2022 highs. Separately, the Blockchain Gaming Alliance found that 32.6% of gaming developers pointed to cash shortages as the single biggest threat to their survival.

Over a year in which token launches climbed 200%, the average project has lasted four months.