Ember Sword—Crypto Gaming’s ’Seven-Year Itch’ Ends in Shutdown

Another blockchain gaming promise bites the dust. Ember Sword—the once-hyped MMORPG that lured players with NFT land sales and play-to-earn dreams—has abruptly pulled the plug after seven grueling years of development.

The collapse leaves a trail of unanswered questions: burned developer hours, skeptical investors, and yet another case study in crypto’s ’build first, monetize later’ hubris. Remember when their 2021 land auction raked in $20M? Neither do the players.

Gaming studios keep treating blockchain like a magic revenue multiplier. Meanwhile, traditional publishers are quietly profitable without forcing users into tokenomics seminars. Funny how that works.

So how much funding did Ember Sword have? It’s unclear. Bright Star Studios, the team behind the game, raised $700,000 in 2020 and another $2 million in 2021 in publicly disclosed rounds, according to data from BlockchainGamer.biz and a press release. Before 2020, Bright Star was called So Couch Studios.

In 2021 — a peak time for NFTs more broadly — prospective Ember Sword players collectively pledged a total of $203 million in NFT land sales for the unreleased game. 

VentureBeat reported in 2023 that the game had over $18 million in funding from investors ($7.1 million) and land sales, not including the game’s 2023 “Alpha land sale.” 

As we’ve heard from some VCs recently, it’s not always a good idea to monetize your crypto game too early. 

It’s also difficult to know for certain how much money a studio has raised in total, as some blockchain partnerships and grant deals are not publicly disclosed.

Ember Sword had apparently been in development for over seven years, since 2018. The game only offered full early access in December 2024, though there have been some community opportunities to playtest earlier versions of the game since at least 2023. 

The game’s token, EMBER, deployed in mid-2024 and is now down over 99% from its all-time high that it saw at its launch.

Image: EMBER price over time.

The studio previously ditched Unity in favor of developing its own game engine, and then cycled through five different proprietary engines before making a final decision (Bright Star’s website, now purged, has deleted its past webpages with these details).

“As a team we have developed and worked on 5 engines in total,” an archived copy of a webpage published in January 2023 from the studio’s site reads.

“Make no mistake — this is not just another browser game. This is a fully functioning highly competitive MMORPG,” the team claimed on that now-deleted page, further adding: “Having a game accessible via the browser is made possible by our own proprietary engine, Project SERIUS which allows for much higher accessibility, allowing hundreds of millions of users to enjoy it as opposed to a few million.”

Now, it looks like not even a single user will get to play it.

Ember Sword did not respond to my requests for comment.

• The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
• Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
• Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
• 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
• Lightspeed: All things Solana.
• The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
• Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.