The NFT project, led by Mino Games, faces community backlash after its controversial exit from the blockchain space.
After raising $15 million in 2023 to build a blockchain-based game, the CEO of Mino Games, Sasha MacKinnon, announced that the company’s NFT game, Dimensionals, is transitioning to a purely Web2 title.
The pivot leaves Dimensionals as a traditional title on the Steam gaming platform, abandoning all NFT integration and calling the project a “substantial financial loss for the company.”
The CEO also says they are spending the revenue they made to buy back their ‘Stones’ NFTs and distribute ETH to holder wallets.
MacKinnon cited multiple roadblocks, including DDoS and bot attacks on their giveaway campaigns, Opensea and Blur’s pivot to remove royalties from their platforms, and security issues as their community members fell victim to scams. After the project’s second mint for its Eves collection, “the NFT community as a whole began to sell across all projects,” he claimed.
Controversial Exit
In an interview with GamesBeat, MacKinnon said, “I think what we’re going to see over two to three years is this burgeoning community will start to rapidly grow.”
Despite referring to Web3 gaming as a “once-a-decade” opportunity, the Dimensionals Twitter page has scrubbed all mentions of words such as NFT, web3, blockchain, crypto, and mint just a year and a half after raising money.
A thread from a Dimensionals community member, IcoBeast.eth, also shares a screenshot from an alleged letter to investors by Mino Games that lays out the team’s plan to move away from Web3, citing issues such as lack of scalability, lack of reception from the broader gaming community, NFT market fragility, and the Web3 audience’s financial incentivization.
Throughout the exit process, community members often complained of poor communication from the team. On August 17, one of the Discord mods known as “blackedout” announced that “the distribution of funds has been completed, and with this, the Discord server will be shutting down shortly.”
However, the team’s Gnosis wallet still holds roughly 16.5 ETH in the form of ETH, WETH, and ETH from Blur royalties.
The Dimensionals and Mino Games teams did not respond to The Defiant’s requests for comment.
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