An update to the Gods Unchained review I posted around one month ago

One month ago I posted what I believe to be an impartial review of Gods Unchained, a free to play crypto / play to earn crypto game. I gave the game a score of 1.9 out of 5 due to its buggy state and lack of support. Since that time there have been many changes to the game and I am here to update my review accordingly.

Here is a link to the original review: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/u7f7vb/one_month_ago_i_started_playing_gods_unchained_a/

Disclosure: When I posted the review I had approximately $150 in GODS which is the reward token associated with this game. I currently have around $200 worth of GODS/ETH and cards and that is takes the overall crypto price drop into account. All of these have been earned via play to earn and I have invested $0 of externally sourced money into the Gods Unchained ecosystem.

As of today, May 16, 2022, the game is mostly unplayable due to a completely new set of bugs. Additionally the game's economy is in shambles. The developers have introduced a new set of cards that brought three new mechanics to the game. This update has rendered many older cards useless or non-viable which in turn has totally destroyed the game economy. It has also caused most of the new bugs I mentioned previously. They have also implemented a new and unreasonable tax on every single NFT transaction in their game which I will go into in more detail below.

Bugs
There has been a laundry list of bugs to fix in this game since well before I started playing. Instead of addressing these issues and fixing them the developers have chosen to release a new set of cards. These cards came with three new in-game mechanics. It's very obvious that they did not do enough testing as pretty much every change they made has resulted in a new set of bugs. There are at least thirty new game-breaking bugs I've seen reported on their Discord and their subreddit, few of which have been addressed. They have fixed maybe two or three of them. If you check out their subreddit every second or third post is someone either reporting a new bug or complaining about how their twenty five weekend ranked games were lost by a previously unknown bug or an opposing player exploiting a known one. Fewer weekend ranked wins means fewer, if any, rewards earned.

The game is utterly unplayable. I'm not sure why any competent programmer would ever have a hard time fixing such obvious and replicable bugs in a game but Gods Unchained has managed to make a bad situation worse instead of addressing these issues.

Developers
The developers themselves are just awful. As I mentioned they chose to create and release a new set of cards instead of fixing their broken game. What's even worse is that they don't respond to any critical feedback via the in-game bug reporting feature, Discord, Reddit or their email support system though they love to respond to praise. They have a page that lists the bugs of which they are currently aware and it has almost nothing on it.

They also have been making clear cash grab moves. Their choices feel like a slow crypto rugpull. The new card set was released and they made is clear that they wanted to raise $10m from their playerbase quickly. So far after one month they have only sold ~$1m of packs for the new set. As a result they have implemented a new 5% tax on NFT card transactions. That is every single transaction, and they have applied it to every older card that was minted before this change was made. That 5% is in addition to the 2% tax that already exists and they have plans to add a third tax soon. It feels like a punitive move.

Of that 5% tax, 80% of it will go directly to the devs and 20% will go to their staking pool. The most blatantly dishonest part of the tax is that last 20% because there is no staking in Gods Unchained or of their GODS token. Where does that 20% actually go? My bet is that it goes directly to the devs as well. They quietly released a blog post talking about how great this new tax will be for the playerbase and that's the most dishonest and insulting thing I can imagine them doing. This is designed to extract money from players and give it to developers and that cannot ever be good for players.

The cards from the new set also feature a ton of powercreep which means that any player who wants to actually win (and therefore earn) has to purchase said new cards. The developers make weekly 'balance' changes that blatantly promote one of the six card types over the others. Any player who wants to remain competitive has to buy cards that will work in the new weekly meta, and of course the developers take 7% of each transaction. I would call it a genius scheme if it weren't so blatant and evil.

After doing some research it seems that these devs did something almost identical with another game of theirs, Etherbots. They actually did rugpull this Etherbots game which left thousands of early investors and players who had invested thousands of dollars with almost nothing to show for it. Fool me once, right?

Economy
Dropping a new 5% tax out of nowhere would be enough to kill the economy, but it's unfortunately the scope of issues is not limited to that. Because of the two reasons I listed above much of their playerbase is choosing to leave the game, myself included. Cards have flooded the market and are being sold for a small fraction of what they originally cost. It's almost like the developers knew this was going to happen and implemented a tax so they could extract max value from players as they leave but that would almost be too evil and immoral, right? The resulting flood of cards has made it impossible to retain any amount of value. This is how ecosystems are destroyed and Gods Unchained has made it clear that they don't care about theirs.

Conclusion
I wanted to like this crypto game. Hell, two months of playing was longer than it deserved. I stopped having fun almost immediately after I posted that first review. Playing 25 games over the course of a weekend feels like a job and not a fun job that would make you want to go to work. Think of a really shitty job, like the person who cleans the toilets at a sugar-free gummy bear testing facility.

I still have high hopes for crypto games. The concept of play to earn is a good one and I think it could be done correctly by a more competent (or at least less incompetent) team of ambitious programmers.

As it stands now Gods Unchained gets a 0.4 out of 5 score for it's bug-ridden gameplay, scammy ecosystem and incompetent or just plain evil developers. I only give it 0.4 for the few fun games I played against evenly matched opponents. If you want to feel good about crypto gaming please do yourself a favor and avoid this shitshow of a project.