One Pixelmon holder tweeted that his Pixelmon hatched half-submerged in a patch of grass and looked “dead,” while another complained that he had received what appeared to be an empty patch of grass with no Pixelmon in sight.
Even the Pixelmon founders acknowledged the NFTs were, indeed, “poor quality.”
Pixelmon raised a whopping $70 million upon mint on Feb. 7, marking one of the biggest launch sales completed for a project in the NFT market. Buyers spent up to 3 ETH per mint (about $9,200 based on historical ether prices), with the project completely selling out in less than a day.
According to the project’s road map or “lite paper,” it promised the “the largest and highest quality game the NFT space has ever seen.”
That included building out a Pixelmon metaverse with play-to-earn features, as well as perks for holders of the “Generation 1” Pixelmon, which included land airdrops, access to the Pixelmon token presale and staking rewards.
The backlash on social media prompted a swift apology from the Pixelmon team, which immediately switched into damage control mode.
“I would like to apologize on behalf of myself and Pixelmon for everyone that has been affected by this,” project lead Syber said Sunday in an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) forum held on the Pixelmon Discord channel. “When we began this project, we were not thinking it would get as big as this.”
Syber attributed the botched artwork to poor execution and a “really small team,” and promised to make amends to holders of the Pixelmon NFTs.
In another Discord announcement, the pseudonymous Syber said he was a 21-year-old male named Martin. He also said “the lives of my team and family have been threatened.”
“The plan was always to use the funding raised from mint to create proper and better models –- our NFTs are updatable and what they look like now is poor quality – we own up to that – they will be made better,” he wrote in a Discord announcement. “We felt pressured to push reveal and the reality is we weren’t ready to push the art work.”
According to Syber, Pixelmon is taking steps to remedy the situation. On Saturday, the project announced it has formed a partnership with video game development studio Magic Media to build out the game.
In a Discord post today, Syber wrote, “The team has taken a step back to assess the situation so we can move forward even stronger. We are currently in talks with multiple advisors, reputable project managers and PR firms.”
As of Monday afternoon, the Pixelmon NFTs were trading at a floor price of about 0.4 ETH, or $1,100, on marketplace OpenSea.
The whole ordeal, however, seems to have spiked the value of some of the Pixelmon NFTs.
The viral “Kevin” character, which some have described as ugly zombie Squirtle, is selling for over 3 ETH on OpenSea.
DISCLOSURE
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Tracy Wang is a senior reporter at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS, various stablecoins, and some NFTs.
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