SAN FRANCISCO—Pledging to never leave behind the many millionaires and billionaires from the region who helped shape him into the person he is now, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance vowed in a speech Tuesday that he would always fight for the forgotten communities in Silicon Valley. “Many of the Democratic elite are happy leaving behind this little tucked-away corner of America, but I will always remember what this place did for me—hell, half of you have probably donated to my campaign,” said Vance, looking at the faces of the tech entrepreneurs in the rally’s front row before tearing up as he described how venture capitalist Peter Thiel scraped together spare change to make a $15 million contribution to his 2022 Senate bid. “Many of you dropped out of college to invest in a unicorn startup. Some of you don’t have jobs because you retired at the age of 35. And if you are struggling to cobble together a pitch in an incubator somewhere, they still call you tech bros behind your back. Basically, this country doesn’t care about you. But I do. Know this, Silicon Valley—I will fight for you tirelessly from day one.” Vance added that despite this, he still felt those in Silicon Valley had no one but themselves to blame for the microdosing epidemic ravaging their community.
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For the past year a company known as Irreverent Labs have been working on a game called MechaFightClub, which was to be driven by NFT sales and be based on the proud and ancient sport of cockfighting.
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Not using actual chickens, mind, they were mech ones, but still.
Here is the game in action, which it was hoped would inspire the sale of a ton of mechabots, the NFTs that players were supposed to buy and then use to fight each other with:
MechaFightClub First Glimpse – Fight Scene in the Cockpit
You may be shocked to hear this after seeing such an accomplished demonstration, but it’s now May 2023 and the game—or collection of concept videos built around NFTs, however you want to describe it—has been essentially cancelled, with the developers announcing an “indefinite hibernation”:
While it would be easy to blame the cancellation on the fact it looked like shit and was built on a dead market, the developers have instead decided to blame the SEC’s recent crypto crackdown, saying “We are an American company, and a lack of clarity is making it difficult for blockchain companies to operate here. In the current regulatory confusion, we simply couldn’t create an in-game economy without concern about the regulatory ramifications.”
Their Overstock Is Your Savings Amazon overstocked on a ton of everyday items, and they’re all up to 50% off. Whatever is on your list to grab this week, they probably have a sale.
The game’s official YouTube account, which had stopped posting gameplay videos a long time ago (though its Twitter account had kept hyping the game until earlier this week, using mostly AI-generated images), has recently begun posting AI interviews instead, and Decrypt reports (via Web3IsGoingGreat) the company has now pivoted entirely away from games development and towards using machine learning to create “short-form videos from images” instead.
I’m not posting this here to point and laugh at one bad game that was probably never going to be a game and which you’d likely never heard of. I’m posting this because this company got $40 million in funding to make MechaFightClub, and only a year later can just cancel it, shift their entire focus onto a premise as flimsy and ethereal as crypto was and just carry on like nothing happened.
Linette Lopez’s excellent piece last week argued that “Silicon Valley has entered the Hail Mary phase of its business cycle — a desertic part of a tech-industry downturn where desperation can turn into recklessness”. Irreverent Labs going from “mech chicken fighting game” to “AI-driven video creator” in the space of a year is the perfect example of this desperation, a case study in everything wrong with so many companies working in these tech spaces and, even more damningly, the idiots who keep giving them all this money.
