As if it wasn't bad enough that THIS game failed to meet expectations, the dev is now trying to crowdfund an MMO!
Let me put it simply... if you cannot even make a functional single player game, there is NO HOPE for a functional MMO.
Sure makes the crowdfunding seem suspicious, hmm? Well, it gets worse. This dev is providing an incentive to crowdfunders in the form of revenue shares. The idea is simple: Give the dev money, earn a very small share of the revenue for his next game. The contract ensures that the developer will work on the game, as long as it is financially viable.
That's the crux of the issue here... He is developing a lofty sequel without much public attention. A sequel to a game that famously crashed and burned. If the MMO sequel doesn't reach massive success (which it won't, It's doomed to fail) then you're essentially paying the developer for nothing. If his crowdfunding isn't sufficient enough, he'll abandon that too. If the crowdfunding *is* sufficient, then he'll milk his crowdfunders for cash. And when the game becomes available, everyone will enjoy their 0.002% of the game's revenue. Heck, they might make a few cents back! Too bad the game has no monetization scheme, so that revenue is doomed to be small as well.
Then there's the whole structure of it. He's selling revenue share tokens. It's essentially cryptocurrency garbage, minus the blockchain, which you cannot trade with. So it's "technically" not cryptocurrency. The 42-section-long legal breakdown of what you're purchasing, what the development plan is, and what to expect from it as an investment reads almost identical to the stuff you've seen on any other typical NFT game scam. "Buy my tokens and make money when the game launches!" Stop me if you've heard it all before.
Don't buy Pixel Piracy. Don't support Pixel Piracy Online. This developer cannot be trusted to manage his own game, nor his own community. I get the notion from his website that he thinks he's being transparent and upstanding.
In the best case scenario, he's making a horrible mistake (again) while believing that he's actually doing something right. In the much more likely scenario, he's nefariously using honeyed words to trick "gullible idiots" into giving him money so that he can produce the BARE MINIMUM of his ill-advised MMO, and walk away with the rest of the money while saying "jokes on you for agreeing to that bogus deal."
Vitali, if you read this, it's probably too late for you to back out of the contracts you've made with your backers, assuming you have some. But if not, and presuming my earlier "best-case-scenario" example is accurate, then honestly... you will be a whole lot better off applying for junior programming positions in much larger studios. You have a lot to learn before you try projects like that. Pixel Piracy should be buried in the past. Move forward from it, and accept the reality that you are not ready to go indie yet.
EDIT: So, there's another piece of this puzzle which I did not notice until AFTER posting this review. This developer has ALREADY started work on a completely different game, called IAH: Internet War. Working on other games was explicitly banned in the non-competitive clause in the Development Guarantee section on his Pixel Piracy Online contract. So, is he violating his contract then? Not necessarily. There's one little stipulation at the end of that clause which states it only comes into effect if the PPO portal has a monthly burn rate of 5000$. What does this mean? To be honest, I don't exactly know, but if he's working on other games, it means he's not making enough money from PPO, and thus... he can simply decide *not* to work on it if he so desires. Your investment goes in the trash unless he's being supplied with $5000 a month in crowdfunding. Talk about delusional.
EDIT 2: The Pixel Piracy Online website has been taken down. Used to be at pixelpiracy.net, which now just redirects to the Pixel Piracy Online steam page. I don't know when it was taken down, and I have no clue what happens to the people who backed the game, if there even were any. Do they have their revenue tokens? Have they been refunded? Is Pixel Piracy Online a dead project, as it was always doomed to be? Who knows. But one thing is for certain, you can no longer invest in Pixel Piracy Online to receive revenue tokens. I hope nobody has been scammed.
