In Brief:
- Pixelmon (official site) informed its Discord community on Sept. 14 that game development has halted entirely, that its gaming staff have been given notice, and that the titles already released will be taken offline.
- Behind the call was a three-week trial in which third-party publishers put their own marketing money into acquiring and retaining players for Pixelmon's games, and then walked away from a longer agreement.
- The project brought in roughly $70 million through its February 2022 mint and another $8 million in a 2024 seed round. It says refunds are off the table and that whatever capital is left will fund a business model outside gaming.
Pixelmon is out of the games business. In an announcement posted to its official Discord on Sept. 14, the project said it has stopped all game development, laid off its gaming team, and will take its live titles down as the infrastructure supporting them is torn apart.
An audit is what finished it. For three weeks, outside publishers put their own marketing budgets behind Pixelmon’s games and applied their own measurement tools to see how paid campaigns pulled players in and how many of them stuck around. None of the publishers dismissed the games outright. They simply didn’t find enough there to put a longer-term offer on the table, suggesting instead that Pixelmon sharpen the product and come back for another round of testing in a few weeks.
Pixelmon raised $100M chasing the dream of becoming Crypto Pokemon
Four years later, they are abandoning video games
2021
– Pixelmon appears during peak NFT season
– promises an open-world RPG
– NFTs as playable characters
– virtual land
– play to earn
February 2022
–@StarPlatinumView on X ↗
Management turned that down. Internally, the team had already settled on treating the publisher exercise — described as an “audit of sorts” — as the last test the games would get.
The project named none of the publishers involved and released no numbers on marketing spend, player acquisition or retention.
Notice went out Friday
Notice reached every person on the gaming team last Friday, with severance and other entitlements determined by the legal requirements of each jurisdiction. Those staff go on garden leave while the games are pulled down.
A reduced group of senior and multidisciplinary employees remains in place to hunt for a business model outside of games. According to Pixelmon, a town hall on Thursday will address the pivots under consideration, the company’s AI tooling work, and how the team and the community will operate together going forward.
No refunds
Holders of the token and the NFTs won’t be getting money back. Pixelmon said a community refund is structurally impossible because the company answers to equity shareholders, among them funds and financial investors whose capital was tied to acquiring the intellectual property and shifting funds out of the project’s original New Zealand entity.
Whatever capital sits outside tax escrow will bankroll one more run at product-market fit. Should that fail, the company said the remaining option is to shut down.
The Discord announcement, as reported, was silent on what technical or commercial backing — if any — the MON token or the NFT collections can expect. MON is still described on Pixelmon’s own site as the token powering the Pixelmon universe.
Previous hunts for a business model yielded Launchpool, CollectShiny and Lexium. This one proceeds without a gaming operation, and without a Launchpool alongside it.
Four games, none of them stuck
Pixelmon’s $8 million seed round, closed in February 2024 with backing from Animoca Brands, Delphi Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Amber Group, Bing Ventures, Bitscale Capital and Cypher Capital, was earmarked for a slate of four titles: PixelPals, Hunting Grounds, Arena and Kevin the Adventurer. By August 2024, the project said it was getting ready to show off Warriors of Nova Thera and Hunting Grounds following tests with Discord members.
Kevin the Adventurer — built on Base and centred on the ogre-like creature that became the project’s signature asset — attracted around 36,000 active players. Those players qualified for the original MON airdrop, as did holders of selected Pixelmon game NFTs, PixelPals “Farm2Farm” competitors and presale buyers.
The mint that started it
The Dutch auction Pixelmon ran in February 2022 took in close to $70 million on the pitch of an open-world RPG featuring NFTs as playable characters, virtual land and play-to-earn rewards. Certain buyers handed over 3 ETH, worth roughly $8,100 back then.
Then the reveal arrived, and the art bore no resemblance to the promotional renders. Founder Syber described it as a “horrible mistake.”
Kevin — the crudest of the bunch — became the running joke that outlasted the project itself. As the Pixelmon floor slid to roughly 0.44 ETH, Kevins changed hands above 8 ETH, about $24,000, and a few were listed at 100 ETH. Coinbase eventually revived Kevin as a $2 collectible on Base during its Onchain Summer campaign.
Web3 studio LiquidX picked up a 60% stake in late 2022 and put Giulio Xiloyannis in as CEO to rebuild the project on upgraded 3D art. Four years, a change of leadership and an art overhaul later, the games are being switched off.
“We think we have been in this ‘not too bad but not good enough’ territory now for over 2 years,” the team said.