Legends of Aria’s crypto-spinoff nearly loses IP rights, promises pre-alpha this year

Yep, this one’s back on our collective radar again. We’re sorry. However, while we don’t cover crypto games as a general rule, readers may remember that Britaria sprang from the ashes of Legends of Aria, which itself transformed from Shards Online, a Kickstarted MMO – it’s because of the fact that the developers burned through crowdfunding money that we keep this one in our coverage. If you need a deeper primer, we checked in back in May.

So what’s new with Britaria? The title is now apparently owned by a company called Salvay, whose CEO Joseph Rubin entered into an agreement with Citadel Studio to purchase the LoA IP and the Shards Engine and also lists Citadel Studios, Blue Monster Games, and Reaper Games as “satisfied customers.” We note here that all three companies were listed at various points in the last few years as operators of the Aria franchise.

In July, Rubin announced on Britaria’s Discord that the game’s IP rights were at risk, explaining that part of the agreement would let Citadel terminate the deal if it experienced financial difficulty, which is precisely what Citadel was facing and so was considering exercising that option – and Salvay has no resources to build an MMORPG from scratch.

“This was not a problem that I, nor Citadel Studios, anticipated when we first began this project,” Rubin writes. “We assumed that we’d be able to have a game out quickly, but development has been much slower than we hoped.”

There followed a pause on development on Britaria while Salvay and Citadel would try to tie down the necessary IP rights, specifically those associated with the Shards Engine. A month later, Rubin announced that new agreements with Citadel “to protect [its] IP rights long-term” were finalized and the team building the game would be reassembled. The final announcement came in October, when Rubin announced pre-alpha is arriving this year with no progress wipes and no server downtime while the game is built.

Meanwhile, Britaria’s social media channels still appear to be quiet, so further announcements are likely going to be focused on Discord.

Further reading on Legends of Aria:

And further reading on the blockchain problem in MMOs: