‘Greed and Stupidity’ Are Killing Crypto Games, Says ‘Mystery Society’ CEO

The Mystery Society, a Web3 game that pairs the casual-friendly gameplay of Among Us with a murder mystery vibe, has suspended development after developer Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow said it struggled to find funding to continue supporting the game.

The web-based game debuted in early 2024 as the studio raised $3 million in a funding round led by Shima Capital. Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow was founded by game industry veterans and led by CEO Chris Heatherly, who previously oversaw Disney’s Club Penguin gaming platforms and later NBCUniversal’s gaming division.

Mystery Society initially launched on Ethereum scaling network Polygon and then migrated to Immutable late last year, with plans to launch a MYSTRY token around the game. But now the token is on hold following Monday’s announcement.

“We will keep the game live for as long as we can while we look for a new home,” the team’s X post read. “We are considering a relaunch without the Web3 elements on Steam. And we are open to shifting the game to a publisher—either in Web2 or Web3—if there are any willing to take it forward.”

The post briefly pointed to issues securing funding to continue development on the game, and when reached for comment, Heatherly didn’t mince words about the current state of play.

“It’s the mother of all clusterfucks for Web3 gaming right now—the crypto market’s crashing, VCs are tapped out, and a poor track record of game token [generation events, or TGEs],” he told Decrypt. “Most of the dry powder was deployed months ago, and many VCs have been forced into liquid trading of alts and memes to try to show returns to LPs so they can raise new funds. The risk appetite is non-existent.”

Indeed, crypto prices have been battered of late. While Bitcoin and other assets surged in the wake of President Trump’s November election win, with some reaching new all-time peaks, many top coins have already shed most of those gains. Bitcoin traded below $83,000 on Thursday, barely a month after peaking above $108,000.

Gaming tokens have taken some of the hardest hits, trading much like meme coins with their volatile swings. And as of this writing, only two gaming tokens remain in the top 100 coins by market cap, with several falling from the list in recent months. Most of last year’s biggest new gaming tokens have since cratered in value.

In his comments to Decrypt, Heatherly pointed the finger at a desire from investors and traders for quick returns on a token, all while recent momentum around meme coins crashes.

“Meme coins have really fucked the space more than people want to admit,” he said. “It lured people into magical ‘ponzinomic’ thinking that you don’t need a real product, you just need hype, and you can just rotate from token to token, narrative to narrative by chasing alpha.”

Heatherly said this is why many crypto game creators are launching things like dedicated layer-2 networks, Telegram spinoff games, and AI agents in an effort to keep the hype alive.

“It’s not that some of this isn’t potentially worth doing,” he clarified, “but it’s being done to court investment or hype a token, not in a principled or long-term way.”

Heatherly still thinks Web3 gaming has a future. A model in which players can sell their NFTs or tokens for some level of return when they stop playing a digital game could help boost Web3 adoption, he believes. But that only works when expectations are kept in check, and players don’t demand a massive token reward just for trying out a game.

The Mystery Society was developed while considering the performance of comparable “Web2” games like Among Us and Stumble Guys, which Heatherly said have each earned hundreds of millions of dollars without crypto economics. He believes the free-to-play industry would rapidly shift on-chain if such a model was proven out, but that requires moving past the “get-rich-quick fantasy” that remains pervasive in the space.

“Greed and stupidity from just about all players is killing the space before it can prove itself,” Heatherly added. “We need to be focused on building healthy on-chain businesses first, and end this TGE-to-nowhere ponzinomic fallacy. Every Web3 gaming founder I know is frustrated, burned out, and just doing what they are doing to try to survive—but with true conviction evaporating by the day.”

But there may be light at the end of the tunnel. On Wednesday, Heatherly wrote that he’s received outreach from various chains and creators in the space, and is considering an idea to “tokenize the IP” for The Mystery Society or pursue another path forward.

“I got into this because I missed Club Penguin and I wanted to do Club Penguin for adults,” he wrote on X. “And somehow, all the people I got introduced to just wanted to extract, and it just felt soulless and so disconnected from what I want to do and am good at.”

“But the last few days, you’ve let me know that you may still be out there,” Heatherly continued. “You may still care. You may want to build something together that’s more than a pump and dump. You may want to build a real clubhouse for Web3. If you are still out there and you want to figure this out, I think I see a way.”