These are some of the dead crypto games for this cycle

In Brief:

• A widely shared list of crypto gaming casualties names Nyan Heroes, 9 Lives Interactive, Ember Sword (official site) and Bright Star Studios (official site) as four separate failures. They’re two: 9 Lives built Nyan Heroes, and Bright Star built Ember Sword.
• Both closed within four days of each other in May 2025, each citing an inability to raise. Their tokens are down roughly 99% from peak.
• The tally is also stale. Proof of Play, Forgotten Runiverse and Wildcard have all wound down since, and Caladan put the sector’s failure rate at 93% in April.

A list of crypto gaming shutdowns circulating on X this week counts four entries. There are two.

9 Lives Interactive is the studio that made Nyan Heroes. Bright Star Studios is the studio that made Ember Sword. The list, posted by @StarPlatinum, assigns each a separate raise, producing a combined figure of $68 million plus $203 million in land sale pledges from what were really two corporate failures announced four days apart in May 2025.

The underlying collapse is real. The accounting isn’t.

What 9 Lives actually raised

9 Lives Interactive, the Singapore studio formerly known as Rude Robot Studios, ended development on Nyan Heroes on May 16, 2025. It had raised $8 million at a reported $100 million valuation in May 2022, then another $3 million in March 2024 in a round led by Mechanism Capital with Sfermion, 3Commas Capital, Momentum 6, Kosmos Ventures, Devmons GG and CSP DAO participating. CryptoRank lists $13.5 million across eight rounds including the token launch.

The game wasn’t short on players. Its four play tests drew more than one million participants, and more than 250,000 people wishlisted it across Steam and the Epic Games Store.

“Despite these accomplishments and discussions around publishing, new investments, grants and acquisition—we weren’t able to secure the required capital to see the game to completion,” the studio posted on X. It then disabled its Discord community channels and restricted replies on the post.

Max Fu, co-founder and CEO, told Decrypt the studio was shopping itself. “Currently, we are exploring acquisition of the studio and/or the IP,” Fu said. “Some discussions are underway, but I suspect it may take some time to finalize a decision.” No deal has been announced. NYAN, which listed on Bybit in May 2024, fell more than 40% on the news and sits about 99% below its all-time high.

The studio was founded in 2021 with staff drawn from Electronic Arts, Bungie and Ubisoft. Fu came from medicine. Co-founder and advisor Wendy “Wengie” Huang came from marketing.

The $203 million that never arrived

Bright Star Studios announced Ember Sword’s closure on May 20, 2025, first in a Discord post that appeared after the server’s channels and chat history had been wiped.

The Aarhus, Denmark studio started the project in 2018 under the name So Couch Studios. It raised roughly $7.8 million in publicly announced venture funding from Bitkraft, Delphi, Mechanism, Dialectic and Play Ventures, mostly across 2021 and 2022, with Dr Disrespect, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and former Blizzard WoW lead designer Rob Pardo also on the cap table. Its initial land sale brought in more than $11 million.

The $203 million figure is a different thing entirely. In 2021, 35,000 applicants pledged that amount into a raffle for land allocation. The actual sale brought in a fraction of it. Bright Star never held the money.

“We explored every possible way forward, but the current web3 and gaming market made it impossible,” the studio wrote. “Our journey, and servers, go offline today.” A version posted to the game’s website called it “one of the hardest announcements we’ve ever had to make” and said the team “were ultimately unable to secure the funding needed to continue.”

Ember Sword had run a closed beta in mid-2024 and entered early access that December. EMBER, launched on Ethereum in July 2024, trades about 99% off its first tracked price, with a circulating market cap of $85,312. Bright Star made no mention of refunds for landholders.

The list is already out of date

Both closures are more than a year old, and the attrition hasn’t stopped.

Proof of Play, the a16z crypto-backed studio behind Pirate Nation, is winding down after concluding that its bet on fully onchain games failed to produce sustainable engagement or token value. It will open-source Pirate Nation’s code and hand stewardship of the PIRATE token to an independent foundation. It had closed a $33 million seed in September 2023.

Forgotten Runiverse pulled its Ronin MMORPG offline “until further notice” on Jan. 26, citing financial infeasibility. Wildcard ended all multiplayer operations April 27 after burning through $55 million, including a $46 million Series A in 2022 and $9 million more in May 2025. Pixel Heroes Adventure, 77-Bit, XOCIETY and Sidus Heroes have all cut back sharply or gone dark.

BitPinas counted at least 22 crypto games in 2025 alone that either shut down or stripped out web3 features to return to conventional publishing. More than 300 have closed since the segment’s peak.

The capital is gone with them. DappRadar’s numbers show quarterly venture inflows falling from $1.6 billion at the 2021-2022 top to $18 million, with annual funding down from roughly $4 billion in 2022 to about $360 million in 2025. Q1 2025 drew $91 million, Q2 $73 million, Q3 $129 million. From Q4 2025 into early 2026, somewhere between $50 million and $90 million closed across fewer than 15 deals.

Caladan’s April report put total venture money into the segment at $12 billion to $15 billion between 2020 and 2026, said 93% of GameFi projects are effectively dead, and found token values down about 95% from their 2022 highs. The Blockchain Gaming Alliance found 32.6% of gaming developers named cash shortages as their biggest obstacle to survival.

Average project lifespan, across a year in which token launches rose 200%, is four months.