Daniel Alegre, CEO of Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs, published a lengthy essay on Twitter (aka X) late Tuesday evening, part of which details the companyâs challenges and shortcomings with game developmentâincluding for its upcoming metaverse game Otherside.
âWhile Dookey Dash was a fun game and experience, we have fallen well short of expectations with Forge,â Alegre wrote, referring to the startupâs HV-MTL Forge game.
Released in June, HV-MTL Forge is a social building and mech management game where players must complete tasksâlike clean up after their NFT robots when they poop, construct tiles, and vote on other players’ created environments. It hasn’t yielded nearly the same kind of social media buzz as the viral and competitive Dookey Dash.
I want to address some of the feedback the company and I have been receiving from many of you recently.
I respect the relevant, pointed feedback as I know it comes from a place of wanting to see improvements in our Yuga communities.First, I will start with sharing some adviceâŚ
â Daniel Alegre (@dalegre) October 18, 2023
Yuga Labs has similarly acknowledged the technical issues with its latest game experience, Legends of the Mara (LotM), as it faced server issues and outages for maintenance in recent weeks.
âThe lessons that we are actively learning are that we need to rely on seasoned gaming partners to help build our experiences,â Alegre said.
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This is part of why Yuga Labs has recently undergone what it called a ârestructuring,â which involved laying off some U.S. staff two months after it acquired Roar Studios.
The very long Twitter post detailed Alegreâs observations about each of the crypto firmâs different NFT collections and initiatives over the past six months, which ranges from its Bitcoin Ordinals âTwelveFoldâ NFT collection launch to the âstrainedâ relationship Alegre noticed between owners of the CryptoPunks NFTs and Bored Ape NFTs when he joined the company in December 2022.
While the Otherside metaverse is a massively ambitious projectâa crypto-powered game that uses ApeCoin and offers a mix of metaverse socialization and MMORPG elementsâthe former Activision executive emphasized that he doesnât want Yuga Labs to be perceived as a âgaming company per se.â
âYet I do want to enable gaming and other digital experiences that our current and potential holders will find rewarding and fun, and can help expose broader audiences to our brands,â Alegre said.
Yugaâs CEO also acknowledged the eight-month delay between Yugaâs first and second playtests of Otherside, stating that âwe could have done betterâ to allow more Yuga Labs NFT holders into the test. The Second Trip playtest had about 7,200 players in it.
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âThe evolution between the First and Second Trips was also not where it needed to be,â he said. âWe needed to make changesâand quicklyâin order to live up to the expectations of what Otherside can and should be.â
As for Meebitsâthe voxel-style NFTs brand which Yuga bought from Larva Labs in early 2022 along with the CryptoPunks IPâtheyâre âa difficult situation,â the CEO said.
âFrom a business perspective, the brand has not flourished,â Alegre said of Meebits.
To help rectify this, Yuga is giving Meebits a space in Otherside with âMeetropolis,â a world with skyscrapers and voxel-style mazes where Meebits can fly around. Meebits will also be overseen by the Otherside team going forward, as Alegre noted when announcing the restructuring.
Going forward, Yuga Labs is looking to outside partners to help build and refine its future gaming experiences, with its work with spatial computing firm Hadean, game studio Faraway, Big Rhino, and its Roar acquisition all dedicated toward making Otherside a reality.
âWhile there is no doubt that the industry backdrop is challenging in the immediate term, I am focused on building and delivering for the long term,â Alegre said.