The losses pile up

Victor told Ars that “there were a few players for a few days” but that “the economy was dead in about two weeks.” That was particularly disappointing, he said, because he had spent $10,000 on a high-end Legacy Conglomerate plot after playing an early demo of the game at 2023’s Galaverse 2 show in Malta. In the end, Victor said he earned “less than $100” from that plot, mostly by loaning his deed to other players. Including his spending on Gala’s other games, Victor said he is “down seven figures total… Fortunately, I’m not destitute, but it’s absolutely brutal.”

After spending “thousands” on Legacy after hearing it hyped at the first Galaverse, Ed777 said his total in-game earnings amounted to $9.84. Another player going by the handle tsappydays said they paid $100 for the cheapest plot of Legacy land only to abandon the game after a few days when “it was clear daily users wasn’t enough” to support any earnings from competitions.

While other Legacy players Ars spoke with were hesitant to discuss precisely how much they had spent, everyone said they regretted buying into the game. Many early Gala Games faithful told Ars that they avoided Legacy entirely after getting burned by the collapsing economics of earlier Gala titles.

A player going by Tim T told Ars he got into Legacy “in December 2021, during the heady days of Gala,” when rising crypto values made it seem like a sure thing. By the time the game came out months later, though, “I and all the other OGs knew that neither Gala, nor 22cans, really cared about the game and wouldn’t put much into maintaining or improving it.”

The only users I found who actually made money from Legacy (outside of Gala Games or 22cans) were the ones who focused on flipping virtual real estate rather than playing the game itself. “When Legacy started out, the degens, IMO, were the ones buying,” said Faz, who runs a longstanding Discord full of disgruntled Gala Games players. “When a sale would start, they would buy a bunch of land then resell at a profit anything that was sold out in the store… People spent thousands, and tens of thousands [of dollars].”