Northern Guilds was initially introduced in September 2021, at the height of the global NFT craze: “a fun-first, device-agnostic dungeon crawler blockchain MMORPG inspired by your favorite childhood games”. You might be surprised to know that Northern Guilds has turned out to be none of those things.
According to Martijn van Wezel, a member of the Northern Guilds development team has posted a lengthy update on the project’s Discord informing anyone looking forward to the game that it is dead, that Pixie Interactive, the company behind it, is dead, and that everything has gone to shit because the leadership team has spent all of their money on things like cryptocurrency investments and “excessive business travel.”
The former employee describes the past few months as “a nightmare, a tragedy, a dumpster fire,” and claims that despite initial claims that the game “had just secured enough funding a few months prior to get us through 1.5–2 years of development,” Pixie’s management team, which included CEO Thomas Konig and CTO Wesley Peeters, had been constantly busy trying to secure more money, including meeting with “Russian nationals,” had actually been meeting with “Russian nationals” instead.
The two are also said to have “launched another project,” called “NFTVault,” which “soon failed” but also “took their attention away from Pixie for a while,” resulting in a time “when our upper management and leadership climate started to change and we all felt it.”
Additionally, the employee claims Konig and Peeters invested business funds in a cryptocurrency as part of a $800,000 tax obligation that they were unable to pay, which ultimately led to the bankruptcy of the studio. In a statement issued to Kotaku, Konig denies this, saying “Tax money was not used to invest in crypto, to my knowledge. I never had access to the company financials”.
Latest NFT News, Trendings and Tutorials, right at your inbox, every Monday Leave this field empty if you're human: