Pixelmon has discontinued all game development and cut its game team, the project announced on Discord, ending a four-year effort to build a games business around one of the NFT era’s most notorious collections.
The decision followed three weeks of playtesting with an external publisher that did not result in a long-term commercial offer, according to the announcement. Retention figures were described internally as not strong enough to justify further investment.
The core team remains in place and will shift focus to what the announcement called “other verticals,” without specifying what those are. A community town hall is scheduled for Thursday 18th September to discuss the future of the IP.
The original Pixelmon launched in 2021, promising an open-world RPG with NFTs as playable characters, virtual land and play-to-earn mechanics. Its February 2022 Genesis sale, a Dutch auction starting at 3 ETH — roughly $8,100 per NFT — raised $70 million.
The subsequent art reveal bore little resemblance to what buyers expected and became one of the defining controversies of the NFT boom. A green creature named Kevin became the collection’s unofficial mascot and has remained a fixture of crypto-Twitter memes.
In September 2022, LiquidX acquired a reported 60% stake in Pixelmon and installed Giulio Xiloyannis as chief executive. That team did not raise the $70 million; it inherited the brand and rebuilt around it.
The rebooted company shipped Kevin the Adventurer on Base in 2023, reportedly drawing 36,000 players at launch, and followed it with PixelPals. It then announced a broader slate including mobile title Wardens Ascent. In February 2024, it raised a further $8 million, adopting Avalanche as its blockchain in 2025.
The team also launched MON Protocol, positioning it as a token-based publishing network for in-house and partner games — “the Nintendo of Web3,” in Xiloyannis’s framing at the time — with Pixelmon as its flagship IP. A community presale reportedly sold 62 million MON for around $7 million, filling in eight minutes at roughly $0.11 per token. Buyers at that price are now down approximately 99%.
The total capital deployed by the team that shut down this week was therefore closer to $15 million across the 2024 raise and presale, rather than the $70 million raised by its predecessor.
Pixelmon’s closure removes one of the more visible remaining web3 gaming projects at a point when the sector’s survivors are increasingly few.
Thursday’s town hall is expected to address whether the Pixelmon IP is licensed, mothballed or handed to the community. Holders have already begun circulating proposals for a community takeover.
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