Vidjama Gmaes Work

Offered free gold and nobody wanted to play.

I wanted to talk about Spaceminers today because until the day I draw my last breath I will never be as entertained as I am watching crypto bros fail to break into the gaming market and walk away with their tail between their legs. And that’s no different with Spaceminers, a game you’ve absolutely never heard of but probably wish you had right now, if only for a moment.

Spaceminers popped up on my radar because I was looking back at 2023 releases tagged as MMOs on Steam. Spaceminers is a free to play game where the game looks like total crap. But like most crypto video games, the developers are not gamers nor are they looking to bring gamers in to play a game. The whole endeavor is to boost their fraudulent crypto schemes, so before even talking about the gameplay Spaceminers discusses its real selling point; Winning real gold.

Well, winning gold vicariously. What the developers wanted was people playing the game and taking part in tournaments where the winner would come away with a crypto called DGLD that, to be fair, is theoretically gold. The value of DGLD is backed by gold held in Swiss vaults, assuming you believe that sales pitch, and apparently can be swapped out in some official capacity for the gold it is backed by. Cool.

Evidently the prospect of real gold wasn’t enough to make people care, because despite being free to play it still bombed hard with a peak of 9 people. As such there was only one tournament ever held and I have no clue they ever paid out. On September 28, the same month as the tournament, the dev announced they were shitcanning development for the foreseeable future for lack of funds.

We all knew developing games was tough, but the market is so saturated that crappy crypto games can’t even give free gold in return for players. It does go to the sad desperation that crypto games need to go to to entice players, as most of the market has intelligently realized these games are overwhelmingly garbage and refuse to play them.

That is the real travesty. On the other hand it’s very funny. One of the positive reviews is for Tekken 7.