Richard Garriott’s NFT-based MMO, Iron & Magic, appears to have vanished already

Rusted & dispelled

    
60
Shame, shame, shame.

About a year ago, we first covered a new MMO, Iron & Magic, which was pitched as an NFT-based game with Richard Garriott at the helm – or at least attached enough to the project to give flowery interviews about it, which we turned down because he wouldn’t answer questions about Shroud of the Avatar. It’s no coincidence, then, that it was Shroud of the Avatar fans on Reddit who first noticed that the new game’s website has vanished.

Now, MMO gamers are no stranger to peculiarities with Iron & Magic; not long after Garriott and company set up a name and a website for the game, that website went down and started redirecting to the game’s Facebook page. Now it’s not even doing that; the website itself has been taken over by domain squatters selling railings, which you should not purchase, and the title’s Facebook page has been entirely dormant since September 2022. The official Twitter is no different.

It’s worth noting that if you check out DeHorizon, the company that appeared to be backing the project with Richard Garriott as its big name, Iron & Magic is still listed as “coming soon” in the company’s menu, although there is no working link there. This is accompanied by some truly unreadable horizontal scrolling text that cannot be interacted with and has not been proofread, judging by the lack of spaces and awkward phrasing. Most of the functional links are about mining for the company’s proprietary currency, which is currently valued at less than 30% of a penny.

The last post on the company’s Twitter account refers to a de-listing of currency for a different project, and there is no mention of Iron & Magic more recent than the September 2022 content on the Facebook page. The company’s Discord, meanwhile, is largely silent with no mention of Iron & Magic past confirmations that it was being developed back in 2022, with no official communications since March.

So if this is still happening, it appears to have let its website lapse and the company backing it appears to be floundering at best. You probably weren’t holding your breath for this one anyway, but you definitely shouldn’t now.

Source: Reddit; thanks to GreaterDivinity for the tip!
Longtime MOP readers will know that Shroud of the Avatar is a controversial game in the MMO space. Kickstarted in 2013, the project has been criticized for cutting promised features, crowdfunding excessively, delaying Kickstarter rewards, obfuscating its corporate leadership and office status, and neglecting SEC filings legally required by the game’s equity crowdfunding. In 2019, Richard Garriott company Portalarium sold SOTA to its lead dev and all but exited the game. Press inquires were met with stonewalling and insults, and equity crowdfund investors were abandoned without notice or any semblance of accountability; moreover, the groups are now building a blockchain MMO (or are they?). SOTA itself does still have a tiny playerbase and is technically still receiving minimal development.
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