Things aren’t quite right in Silicon Valley with the NFT cockfighting game

For the past year, a company called Irreverent Labs has been working on a game called Mecha Fight Clubto be driven by NFT sales and based on the proud and ancient sport of cockfighting.

Is not used actually Chickens, mind you, they were mech chickens, but still.

Here’s the game in action, which it was hoped would stimulate sales of a lot of Mechabots, the NFTs that players were supposed to buy and then use to battle each other:

Maybe you are shocked I want to hear this after seeing such a successful demonstration, but it’s now May 2023 and the game – or the collection of concept videos centered around NFTs, however you want to describe it – has essentially been cancelled, with the developers taking a have announced “indefinite hibernation”:

While the cancellation could easily be attributed to it looking crappy and being built in a dead market, Developers have instead decided to blame the recent SEC crackdown on cryptocurrencies, saying “We are an American company and a lack of clarity makes it difficult for blockchain companies to operate here. Given the current regulatory confusion, we simply couldn’t create an in-game economy without worrying about the regulatory implications.”

You might be just as shocked to hear that a lot of people who have been very interested in all the NFT and crypto hype are now heading towards “AI” like the rest of Silicon Valley instead of this.

The game’s official YouTube account, which has long since stopped posting gameplay videos (although it… Twitter account had continued to hype the game up until earlier this week, using mostly AI-generated imagery), has recently started posting AI interviews instead, and decrypt reports (above Web3IsGoingGreat), the company has now turned its back on game development entirely, instead using machine learning to create “short videos from images”.

I’m not posting this to point out and laugh at a bad game that probably never would become a game and you probably never heard of. I’m posting this because This company received $40 million in funding to make MechaFightCluband just a year later they can just call it quits, shift their entire focus to a premise as weak and ethereal as crypto, and just carry on like nothing happened.

Linette Lopez’s excellent article last week argued this “Silicon Valley has entered that phase of its business cycle – a forlorn part of a tech downturn where desperation can turn to ruthlessness.” within a year is the perfect example of that desperation, a case study of how everything is wrong with so many companies involved in these areas of technology, and even worse, the idiots who keep giving them all this money.