In Brief:
- Pixelmon (official site) has stopped all work on its game and let go of its game team after playtesting failed to produce a long-term deal.
- What remains of the core team is moving toward unnamed “other verticals,” and a community town hall on September 18 will address where the IP goes next.
- The project once commanded attention with a $70 million Genesis sale in February 2022, though its art reveal drew heavy criticism.
Pixelmon ends game development
Development at Pixelmon is over. The studio has disbanded its game team, closing out a four-year effort to build a gaming business on top of its NFT collection. Word came through Discord, following three weeks of playtesting alongside an outside publisher that never converted into a long-term commercial agreement.
Retention during that trial period simply wasn’t strong enough to warrant further spending. The remaining core team intends to pivot into “other verticals,” though it has not said which. Holders will get their chance to weigh in at a community town hall on September 18, where the IP’s future is on the agenda.
Background on the project
Pixelmon started in 2021 with ambitions of an open-world RPG built around NFTs, virtual land and play-to-earn mechanics. The February 2022 Genesis sale ran as a Dutch auction opening at 3 ETH (roughly $8,100) per NFT and brought in $70 million. Then came the art reveal, which drew a wave of ridicule — and out of that mess emerged a green creature named Kevin, who went on to become one of crypto’s enduring memes.
LiquidX stepped in that September, taking a 60% stake in Pixelmon and installing Giulio Xiloyannis as CEO. The incoming management took over the brand with rebuilding as the priority. That reboot delivered Kevin the Adventurer on Base in 2023, which pulled in 36,000 players at launch, and was followed by PixelPals and a planned Wardens Ascent.
February 2024 brought another $8 million raise, paired with a roadmap to move to Avalanche by 2025. The team also launched MON Protocol (official site), pitched as a token-driven publishing network for its titles. Its community presale reportedly pulled in $7 million inside eight minutes, moving 62 million tokens priced near $0.11 apiece — those buyers now sit down close to 99%.
Counting the 2024 raise and the presale, the team that has now wound down burned through roughly $15 million, a far cry from the $70 million the project collected at the outset. Pixelmon’s exit marks another meaningful casualty in a web3 gaming sector that keeps shedding projects.
With Thursday’s town hall approaching, attention is expected to turn to who steers the Pixelmon IP from here — a community takeover among the options on the table.