Meet the players who lost big money on Peter Molyneux’s failed Legacy

You don’t get what you pay for Meet the players who lost big money on Peter Molyneux’s failed Legacy After millions in NFT sales, the hyped “play to earn” game was effectively dead in weeks. Kyle Orland – Apr 27, 2026 6:45 am | 70 Remember NFTs? Peter Molyneux's 22cans tried to bring them back... in gaming form! Credit: Aurich Lawson Remember NFTs? Peter Molyneux's 22cans tried to bring them back... in gaming form! Credit: Aurich Lawson Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav 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…” “Legacy was paid for upfront, man,” former Gala Games Chief Marketing Officer and President of Blockchain Jason “Bitbender” Brink told Ars. “Gala paid a minimum guarantee to… [Molyneux] and his team. The NFT sales for Legacy go toward that minimum guarantee.” Legacy, like other Gala Games products, ended up being “a lot of hype, promises, and implied functionality that never occurs,” said Old Man Smithers, a Gala Games researcher who has documented the company’s early history for their YouTube channel. “Instead, you get a minimum viable product, and then it’s forgotten about while the next project is hyped.” In exchange for their crypto millions, players who bought into Legacy got “a proto-idle-tapper… with a bigger screen,” Brink added. “People are angry, pissed, and disillusioned, and I don’t blame them.” Town Stars in their eyes To understand why players put millions of crypto dollars into Legacy long before it was released, you need to understand a bit about Gala Games, the crypto-focused gaming company and Legacy publisher that was founded in 2019. From the start, the new outfit attracted some strong initial interest in the then-trendy blockchain gaming space (aka “web3 gaming”) thanks to the involvement of Zynga veteran Eric Schiermeyer and crypto evangelist Wright Thurston. Town Star? More like Farm Star, am I right? Credit: Gala Games Town Star? More like Farm Star, am I right? Credit: Gala Games In September 2020, Gala Games debuted its own crypto token, GALA. Instead of selling GALA directly through a relatively standard Initial Coin Offering, Gala Games sold 50,000 “founder nodes” to early adopters who would share in a collective daily…

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