NFT Viking Game goes off the rails amid crypto collapse, mismanagement

First announced in September 2021, at the height of the world’s collective NFT madness, Northern guilds was supposed to be “a fun-first, device-agnostic dungeon crawler blockchain MMORPG inspired by your favorite childhood games”. It may shock you, the reader, to find out Northern guilds have ended up being none of these things.

As first reported by Martijn van Wezelmember of the Northern guilds development team has posted a long update on the project’s Discord, telling everyone looking forward to the game that it was dead, that Pixie Interactive (the company behind it) was dead and claiming that everything had gone to shit because the management team had blown all his money on everything from crypto investments to “excessive business travel”.

Calling the past few months “a nightmare, a tragedy, a dumpster fire,” the former employee says that while it was initially claimed that the game “had just secured enough funding a few months before to get us through 1.5-2 years with development”, Pixie’s management team consisting of CEO Thomas Konig and CTO Wesley Peeters had been constantly busy trying to ensure more money, including meeting with “Russian citizens”.

It is also alleged that the pair “started (unbeknownst to the rest of the team) another project ‘NFTVault'”, which “quickly failed”, but also “shifted their attention away from Pixie for a while”, leading to a period “when our senior management and leadership climate started to change, and we all felt it.”

The employee also accuses Konig and Peeters of using the company’s tax dollars on a crypto investment—as thought-and that this was part of an $800,000 tax bill that could not be paid, and which ultimately led to the studio’s bankruptcy. In a statement sent to KotakuKonig denies this, saying “Tax money was not used to invest in crypto, as far as I know. I never had access to the company’s finances.”

Other claims made in the post include:

Tom started disappearing completely on and off in January and February. Our CEO was unable to lead the team, meet any deadlines and effectively communicate or attend meetings. It became more and more frequent to the point that come May, the team hardly heard from him at all and we lost weeks of work and momentum trying to manage the situation and rearrange roles, responsibilities and more…

Tom left Wesley through most of the fundraising, bankruptcy, communications and leadership process. Putting everyone together with promises of finished work and updates coming soon. Leaving the mess for Wesley (and the team) to clean up behind him. They are both responsible for what happened. Unfortunately so far Tom has taken no ownership of this situation and is avoiding all the consequences that Wesley is facing. Wesley has been the only one of our founders who has tried to support and help the employees through this. He has owned up to what has happened.

The developers now say they are trying to salvage the probably worthless IP and its assets so they can get something for the work they have done over the past year, and have also begun work on a smaller scale sports game based loosely on the same Viking premise.

While the statement was posted by the account of a single former developer, community manager Lynsey Christensen, it was also signed by a number of them, including “Adam, Rachel, Miha, Dave, Bruno, Rayan, Brendon, Hunter, Walter, Alex and Wesley “. The only Wesley on the development team is Peeters.

While he denies the crypto and tax charges, Konig says Kotaku that he blames the studio’s demise on his hiring of too many developers at too great a cost:

Much simpler, but no less heartbreaking and tough for everyone involved, and still entirely our fault, an MMORPG doesn’t make $2.5 million before Dutch taxes when you scale your company to 20+ people in under a year with a European pay structure right before a economic decline.

And add that we hired internationally, so we paid large fees to payroll companies as well.

That’s before accountants, lawyers (with crypto expertise and with crypto being a legally tough field), licensing, marketing, travel expenses, overhead, the list goes on.

I’ve also reached out to Peeters — who the post claims is “also now personally bankrupt as well and looking at over a decade of paying back what’s owed to his government” — and will update if I hear back from him. And please don’t confuse this story with the other one about an NFT game and crypto investments that went bad, there was one different game.