In light of some recent media attention, we would like to address some misinformation and misunderstandings.

Phat Loot Studios and Untamed Isles did not invest any funds into crypto, all funds raised through crowdfunding and through traditional investment were spent by the studio developing the game.

The reason for the pausing of game development is due to the company exhausting its available funds. We have around 70 full-time staff and have had so for over a year and ran a smaller team for over 2 years.

We had several investors pull out recently due to concerns about both the economic market along with the crypto market at the moment which made it very clear we could not reach early access. If they had not pulled out, we were pushing to make the early access date we announced. This all happened after announcing our early access release date.

The game was progressing well and beta testing feedback was very positive. Unfortunately, the crypto market crash meant that investors that were lined up earlier this year pulled out (ie the token raise investors). This investment was necessary to make it through our runway to launch.

In addition, it was proving hard to get pre-order traction given the negative sentiment associated with web3-integrated games, despite Untamed Isles being primarily a full MMORPG game (with web3 marketplace only an ancillary future integration in the background for those players that wanted to trade their in-game items outside of the game). This caused us to take a critical look at launching the game in this current market.

As a consequence, it wasn’t possible to continue funding the development to hit the target release in October 2022.

Studio founders are looking at ways to salvage both the core studio and the game so that it can be completed and released down the track along with other possible titles.