How Legacy became a costly crypto bust for players and a business win for Peter Molyneux

This week, players are being asked to pay $25 for early access to Masters of Albion, a god game throwback that legendary designer Peter Molyneux (Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black and White) says will be the last game he ever works on. But the players who poured roughly $54 million in cryptocurrency into Molyneux’s previous game, Legacy, say they're still bitter about getting swept up in Molyneux’s broken promises of a best-in-class economic simulation and the opportunity for “play to earn” riches. Legacy players who spoke to Ars Technica described pre-purchasing thousands of dollars' worth of NFTs, in some cases, to buy into the crypto-fueled vision offered by Molyneux, his development studio 22cans, and publisher Gala Games. Those players said the Legacy they got was a pale shadow of what was promised, with a broken-by-design economic system that caused players to abandon the game en masse within a couple of weeks of its 2023 launch. Despite the game's almost total failure as a going concern, though, Legacy rode the crest of the crypto hype wave to pre-sold economic success that Molyneux said “[gave] us the money to fund Masters of Albion," in a 2024 interview. "That's what we used the majority of the money for…” Read full article Comments

Apr 27, 2026 - 18:52

How Legacy became a costly crypto bust for players and a business win for Peter Molyneux

This week, players are being asked to pay $25 for early access to Masters of Albion, a god game throwback that legendary designer Peter Molyneux (Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black and White) says will be the last game he ever works on. But the players who poured roughly $54 million in cryptocurrency into Molyneux’s previous game, Legacy, say they're still bitter about getting swept up in Molyneux’s broken promises of a best-in-class economic simulation and the opportunity for “play to earn” riches.

Legacy players who spoke to Ars Technica described pre-purchasing thousands of dollars' worth of NFTs, in some cases, to buy into the crypto-fueled vision offered by Molyneux, his development studio 22cans, and publisher Gala Games. Those players said the Legacy they got was a pale shadow of what was promised, with a broken-by-design economic system that caused players to abandon the game en masse within a couple of weeks of its 2023 launch.

Despite the game's almost total failure as a going concern, though, Legacy rode the crest of the crypto hype wave to pre-sold economic success that Molyneux said “[gave] us the money to fund Masters of Albion," in a 2024 interview. "That's what we used the majority of the money for…”

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