Infamous YouTube personality Logan Paul has hit back at an investigation into an NFT game he’s developing which accused Paul and the game’s development team of shady practices.
The currently unfinished game, CryptoZoo, introduces a new cryptocoin and has players buying and selling eggs that will “hatch” into animal-based NFTs, which can then be used to breed new NFTs.
The game has been described as “play-to-earn” by Paul, who suggested players could earn money simply by playing the game normally.
NFTs are digital tokens that are “minted” on a blockchain, which is a digital ledger that can’t be changed once written to.
They’re largely considered controversial, because they’ve traditionally used a lot of energy to process and typically don’t improve on the gameplay experience.
The game has hit several snags along the way, and Paul says that he and his team have invested over a million dollars into the project so far. One of those snags involves developer Zech Kelling, who allegedly lied about the number of people working on the game, and then reportedly fled to Switzerland with the game’s code.
YouTuber Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findelsen, whose content specialises in controversy surrounding cryptocurrency and NFTs, published a series of videos exploring the game and its creators, in which he accused Paul of engaging in shady practices.
One of the claims made in the videos is that the game never surfaced, and that players couldn’t hatch eggs as intended.
Another is that Paul marketed a game based on cryptocurrency, which has shown to be a volatile market, towards children.
The most damning claim from Findelsen is that Paul and other founders of the game stealth-launched it several months before telling fans about it. This allegedly allowed the team to purchase as much cryptocurrency as they wanted, which Findelsen says inflated the value.
In a recent video, Paul refutes the claim that the game doesn’t work, and shows footage of others successfully using and playing CryptoZoo. Paul claims Findelsen’s videos were “not anchored in truth” and “often speculative”, and that the videos weren’t well-researched and contained many errors.
Paul’s manager Jeffery Levin said the project is currently facing legal issues, which prevented the team from talking in-depth about the game. Paul confirmed this in the video, saying he was “not cleared from legal” to speak about the proceedings.
That said, Paul claims that the development process for CryptoZoo is still ongoing, and that the development team intends to deliver the game as promised. Paul says that he discourages children from investing in the project and the game’s ecosystem.
He also did not deny that he and his team purchased coins before announcing the launch of the project, but claimed that he and his manager never sold any.
NFT games have been somewhat of a controversial topic among gamers, with many saying that the technology is not useful for games. Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix recently doubled down on NFT games, with president Yosuke Matsuda committing to further investment into the field.
The Pokemon Company also recently took an NFT game to court, over what it says was an unauthorised use of Pokemon characters. A lawyer for The Pokemon Company said that Nintendo and TPC had “made a deliberate decision” not to get into the NFT market.
Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.
