Forgotten Runiverse's relationship with Bisonioc raises questions...
SIDELINED NEWS 151
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TLDR :
Forgotten Runiverse is going offline
RCADE Network ditches L3
Pixels founder shares his learnings
🗞️ NEWS
FORGOTTEN RUNIVERSE IS GOING OFFLINE
Another week in crypto gaming, another game going offline. This time, it’s The Forgotten Runiverse (TFR) who shared the following: “…we’ve reached a point where it no longer makes sense financially to maintain the game in a live environment in its current state”
The game was taken offline as of the 28th. However, the team also emphasizes that this isn’t the end: “We are not abandoning the Runiverse”. The game was in its early access stage
Based on how viral the discussion became, it’s apparent that a great number of people knew or were/are invested in the project. Telling of how big crypto gaming used to be as a category back in 2021-2022, compared to now
TFR is part of the multimedia IP, Forgotten Runes, including various NFT collections, a comic book, 3D avatars, extensive lore, and a TV show
They put a lot of energy and resources into building this IP, even though their TV show is going through “turbulence”, their comic books stopped releasing in December 2024, and the game is now going offline as well
To fund all these endeavors, Forgotten Runes raised funds over the years by launching multiple NFT collections. Here are its largest ones:
Forgotten Wizards: 10,000-piece collection, sold at 0.07 ETH each (700 ETH)
Warriors Mint: 16,000-piece collection, sold via Dutch Action (1800 ETH est.)
Beasts Action: 294-piece collection, sold via an auction model (500 ETH est.)
Shadows Mint: 666-piece collection, sold at 0.2 BTC each (120 BTC/ $5.5M)
Land Sale: 17,255-piece collection: essentially a funding round through a private land sale, as many of the NFTs were sold to investors and partners
Numbers of the sale were never reported, but a conservative estimate would be ~$5M, when comparing it to the size of other land sales near the tail end of the NFT/GameFi boom
Furthermore, TFR generated $700K through monetization in its alpha and beta tests. They also claim to have sold over 200,000 copies of their comic on Amazon, although much of that was driven by a free promotion. In total, the studio must have raised $15M or more, since its start in 2021
Assuming an annual burn rate of $2M, and 6 years of operations (rough est.), that still leaves them with ~$3M in the bank. Of course, this is based on a lot of assumptions and my napkin math
ElfJTrul (one of the co-founders) on Discord said: “It’s less about runway and more about not seeing a viable business path forward”
Elf also mentioned how they’re not ready to transfer the IP to the community, as they see a potential future in an acquisition. But even if the DAO gained ownership, what would they do with it?
On the topic of MM x BS, there seems to be more at play here. As part of their deal, BS has kept the rights of TFR. A figure named “Jitcy” in the Discord, who seems to be an employee of MM, says: “We had no control on how the game turned out (you wouldn’t believe how many docs I have made trying to tell Bisonic what to fix)”
“I can only hope we one day can gut the game and make it function.”
It’s rather confusing, since Bearsnake (should) have control over both? So, why did this relationship seem so antagonistic?
Forgotten Runes released multiple NFT collections, but never released its (expected) XP token. In August 2024, the team launched a points system with Donuts (SocialFi-like campaign), and players were able to collect Mana and Quanta during the following playtests
Both were expected to result to an allocation at the XP TGE
While CT rushed to call this project a “rug”, some digging led to unearth there’s more nuance to the issue. But will Forgotten Runes see the light of day, and ever see a full launch? History shows that we should be doubtful…
RCADE DITCHES L3 AND PIVOTS W/ WAR OF NOVA
After months of minimal communication, the RCADE Network released an update this week: 1) they’re sunsetting their L3, and 2) War of Nova (WoN) is pivoting to a Web2 publishing model to “support long term sustainability and user growth”
The RCADE Chain is built on top of Arbitrum, as an Arbitrum Orbit Chain. Originally, it was running on a Node Network, powered by Nexus Nodes. Now, that model is changing to an ecosystem token to “reduce complexity and ongoing costs for node holders and the broader ecosystem”
Node holders/NFT stakers will continue to receive RCADE token emissions, but simply as airdrops moving forward
Over the past months, WoN, their flagship title, has continued to receive updates and is generating some revenue as a mobile F2P game
According to Sensor Tower, the game generated $80K in revenue across the App Store and Play Store last month. Notably, the game had fewer than 10K downloads across the app stores in that period, plus only a total of 10K+ downloads on Android
So, the game’s operating with quite a significant ARPPU and ARPU. However, these numbers may be heavily skewed by a couple of whales, and the real question is whether it can scale downloads and revenue profitably at the same time
Other than fiat, players can directly spend $RCADE in WoN
WoN is not the only game in development under the Revolving Games umbrella. There’s also Skyborne Legacy (social RPG), Hatchlings (pet-care), and Hatchkings (social casino). Since the communication on the social pages of these games has slowed down, it’s hard to gauge when/whether these other titles will see progress
On the other hand, the update from the RCADE Network did mention: “RCADE team shipped five meaningful feature updates to our live game, continued development on titles in the pipeline”. Likely, referencing these titles
Last year, in July, the team launched its RCADE token, now down almost 99% from its launch price, trading at a ~$630K market cap
The token launch was a total disaster, as described by Grail (the largest holder of their NFTs at the time): “Well the token was dumped from .007c to .0018c by the time the community (NFT holders, play-2-airdrop, and private sale investors) could claim three hours post TGE which was a 86% drop in value.”
Funnily enough, back then, he also predicted this recent outcome: “Strong chance they probably just slow rug on the web3 side, build their games for web2 and just keep the profits in the company.”
Other than the delayed airdrop claims as described above, Grail pointed out disappointing exchange listings, a lack of staking functionality on TGE, most of the value going to exchanges, a lack of utility, and no clear (“an opaque”) Web3 strategy with too many pivots
Not to mention the “I spoke to my lawyer. I will not refund. Go **** yourself” fiasco (also discussed in GC Alpha 57), just 2 days before TGE
Post-TGE, the team slowed down communications (always a bad sign), and even the “unhinged loud mouth”, Ammar (one of the founders), went rather silent since October 2025
In October, Ammar shared how the team was being restructured and reset
In total, Revolving Games raised over $25M from VCs through 2 rounds. $12M in its first round and $13.2M in the second round. Both were announced in 2022, with no follow-up VC rounds in the following years
Furthermore, it held a node sale in 2024, in which it raised over $7.5M. Making their total funding over $32.7M
A healthy amount of funding that would assume a good amount of runway is left. However, it should be noted that Revolving Games was a 150-employee company at 1 point, and is projected to burn $3.2M this year according to Aberdeen
Yet, even with this burn rate, I would be surprised if the company did have less than $5M left in its treasury
With the current price of RCADE, the team won’t be able to OTC out some of its tokens to fund expenses. Plus, WoN would need to scale significantly for the company to become profitable,
January isn’t over yet, and we’re already getting hit left and right with weekly shutdown or pivot announcements, but “crypto gaming is inevitable, right?” While a handful of teams are surviving, we’re praying for another crypto gaming cycle
PIXELS FOUNDER SHARES HIS LEARNINGS
Luke Barwikowski (founder of Pixels) shared an article last week titled "Web3 Gaming Didn't Meet Expectations. Rewarded Play Will.” The piece goes into his many valuable lessons gained from operating a live game economy (in crypto) over the past few years, and how he sees rewarded play being the next opportunity
Here are some of my favorite highlights from the article, with some additional thoughts sprinkled in here and there of my own
“A lot of people concluded: “play-to-earn is dead.” My takeaway was different: the first version of play-to-earn failed, but it still proved something fundamental: tokens can buy attention at scale.”
Essentially, what Luke says here is that “tokens can be a potent tool for UA”. The majority of teams that executed on this idea simply failed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. ZBD for example has shown it is
“We hit the wall because the incentive channel attracts adversaries, and adversaries scale faster than your content roadmap.”
On botting:
”Any incentive system that assumes “we’ll just detect bots” is already dead.”
“Where we started making progress was shifting from a bottoms-up fraud model (“what device is this?”) to a top-down intent model:- What is this user doing?”
Bot detection is a cat-and-mouse game. Instead of playing that game (and losing), Pixels choose to study malicious users’ behavior and design their systems to “start identifying intent” (i.e., how can this user become a value add instead of a value extractor)
“We hit the wall because the incentive channel attracts adversaries, and adversaries scale faster than your content roadmap.”
When incentives are at play you’re running the “liveops threadmill” on steroids. You’re playing this game of keep up, to make sure players aren’t finishing your content too fast and get bored (often leading to churn)
“Most “quest” platforms were too simple. They were essentially rule engines with payouts. Bots adapted instantly, and advertisers were left with inflated vanity metrics and no durable lift.”
Then, he added that if rewarded play is ever going to work if needs to function like modern advertising
On monetization and how it affects player behavior:
“When you add a real-money layer to the core loop, the game becomes a different product psychologically.”
“Because the moment the player feels like they “lost” money, even if they received entertainment, they don’t interpret it as entertainment. They interpret it as being extracted from.”
“The closest durable model is some version of a rake, a smaller, more transparent take rate where: the system accepts winners and losers, but doesn’t make players feel like the house is predatory.”
Cambria (esp. the Duel Arena) would be one of the best and most successful examples of a game that monetizes based on volume. It’s “player vs. player instead of player vs. ecosystem,” as Fabledmelon puts it
On reputation systems:
“We also experimented with reputation systems to fight fraud and gate certain functionality. Reputation can be useful internally, but public-facing “scores” come with major downsides: it feels like a social credit system, it creates perverse incentives,and it pushes you toward heavy paywalls and gating that can hurt growth”
“Long-term, I believe targeted rewards and intent modeling beat blunt reputation gating. Give fewer rewards to abusers; don’t necessarily block them from using the product.”
On the perception of crypto:
“Even if your product is legitimate, the word itself (crypto) introduces friction”
We saw the same thing when we spoke with Ben. Here’s a segment taken from GC Alpha 74:
“Crypto is almost like a bad word…to a lot of people, it means Ponzi scheme”. Adding that at this point, Cambria isn’t a “crypto game” anymore, and now has to use terminology closer in line with real-money trading (more familiar to the OSRS audience)
“We tested this directly with paid ads for our new app: ads that mentioned crypto rewards performed 5–10x worse than equivalent ads framed as normal real-money rewards.”
Overall, good takeaways in terms of P2E, botting, rewarded play, reputation systems, perception, and much more. I encourage every game maker in crypto to take some time and read the whole thing, lots of nuggets in there
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