Thread by @YellowAfterlife

A thread on Matthew Bowden / @TrueValhalla, Kingfall / @kingfallgame, and how to go from being a local role model to hiding from responsibilities.

There are 30-something tweets in this so I'm going to post it in small portions.

Wayback Machine URLs are in alt-texts.

What happened: Kingfall was going to be a browser-based fantasy P2E Web3 MMORPG on Flow blockchain. Development started in late 2016. On March 17, 2023 it was announced that development has ceased, less than 48 hours after reassuring people that the game is "preparing to launch".

Although the game has been in development for more than 6 years, not a whole lot was known about it apart of occasional screenshots/concept art. A beta test was promised in 2020, but seems to have never happened in the end. Web3 aspects remained unclear.

The game didn't start as a crypto project either - apart of Web3 still being a niche idea at the time, Kingfall wasn't branded as a P2E project before 2021 and those who invested back in 2016 were doing so with even less information than what is known today.

"And who's this guy anyway?"

True Valhalla / Matthew Bowden is a long-time GameMaker user.

In late 2000s he was primarily known for a little strategy game called Globules, a slightly less ambitious MMORPG called Myriad Online, and a "How to Make An MMORPG" website.

This changed in late 2011 as he found a new beginning in making HTML5 games for licensing, and selling people the story of his success.

At a few points of time we have collaborated, such as on the "Sudoku Editions: Japan", which I ported to HTML5.

Selling the story to people came in form of selling "Mobility Engine", a "Making Money With HTML5" e-book, and consultancy services. And, of course, a couple ads on the blog - those are the least concern here, really.

Mobility Engine was a sort of a display scaling engine for GameMaker when targeting HTML5 - centering the canvas, telling the user to flip the device to correct orientation, handling some quirks - that kind of stuff.

It also featured some horrendous code by me that was quickly written for one of the Matthew's games and not really intended to be reused in something that people pay $60 for. If you bought this thing and were wondering why there's inline JS everywhere, now you know.

Mobility Engine was still on sale as of early 2023, though almost all of the quirks that it handled were long addressed in GameMaker itself (some by me during 2018 work with YYG) and by most means it could be replaced by this tutorial
gamemaker.io/en/tutorials/t…

Kind of forgot about this bit - the "engine" also did some unintentional sabotage (disabling GameMaker features) because target hardware at the time was phones with 500MHz CPUs and little to no ability to draw pixels quickly. And then this was never undone

Next up, "Making Money With HTML5"

It was a $19.95 (and, later, $29.95) e-book with 54 pages of text in a generous font size, of which there were roughly 40 pages of actual content. First edition had more compact formatting at 30 pages total.

The book covered topics ranging from public knowledge (be 18+ to run a business, browser market shares, people might flip the device) to slightly less blatantly obvious (licensing models, pestering the publishers with follow-ups), leading some people to consider it "snake oil".

I make an appearance in this e-book as a mysterious "expert JavaScript programmer" next to a couple links for buying the thing. If you're wondering, yes, the book didn't shy away from plugging Matthew's products/services/affiliate links at any opportunity.

Over years this dynamic with conveniently omitting names of collaborators would only become more apparent, use of the once-username as a name for a studio with an unspecified number of mysterious contractors perhaps being the culmination.

The book was later updated with an appendix containing a list of HTML5 publishers, which some considered to be unethical to sell. After some backlash the list was mirrored in a post that required people to share it to read it. And promised more data as part of consulting service.

Yet, the book's primary downside is the obvious: if someone's telling you to get on a hype train, you're too late. The ship has sailed, it'll take a whole lot of paddling to catch up to it. And the sea is ever-changing.

Matthew's other activities included being the owner of GameMaker Blog from Oct 2012 to Nov 2016.

GMB used to be one of the most popular GM-related publications at the time, but the original owner no longer had the time to write for it, and thus was willing to sell the website.

Under Matthew's reign, GMB had seen a short return of activity, but was also periodically used to advertise his products and services - with or without disclosure. And little controversy like the alleged 2013 interview with the person that hacked GM forums via a 0-day in IPBoard.

Over time publications slowed down and then ceased completely in 2015. The blog was sold to Mark Smith in 2016, and Mark would be trying to pass it on "for the same price of $2500" just 6 months later. This was the beginning of the end of GameMaker Blog.

(this is not the end of the thread, I'm just re-drafting some things since more information became available since yesterday thanks to people discovering this and contacting me)

At the time it seemed like advertising your thing in a competitor's topic *twice* is Kind Of Shit, but knowing what happened behind the scenes gives Matthew's posts here a whole new look

It wasn't just GMB that changed after 2016 - Matthew's monthly reports became quarterly reports and then stopped after 2018. Consultancy and upcoming second book vanished in 2021. The blog became a redirect in 2022 - no more posts, no more products, only Invest In Kingfall.

Around the same time Matthew displeased a handful of GameMaker professionals by trying to recruit them to work on Kingfall a little too aggressively, but those are stories for people themselves to tell.

2020 came and went, the promised alpha test didn't seem to happen.

In late 2021 the game was re-announced as a P2E title and re-opened for investments, this time aiming to raise $250K.

Investors were "free promised priority access to alpha tests" and an NFT.

We don't really know how'd that go - the "funding progress bar" was replaced by a "TIME IS RUNNING OUT" label a month later, and stayed that way until the end.

You could say that the time to invest really did run out.

Apart of lack of transparency, there were a few more red flags, of course - like full terms only being available at request, or this generous comparison: you'd break even after the game earns $3M, so to turn your $1000 into $2M the game would need to yield *7 billion dollars*.

In January 2022 Kingfall also launched a separate NFT collection, which would later emphasize on "earning passive income".

I'm sorry, did I say NFTs? I meant "a promise of NFTs", because they "will be minted at a later date" (and in the end never were, by the looks of it).

This might have been a fundamental misunderstanding of why people buy NFTs - yes, getting an in-game thing with unclear advantages is good, but also it's a speculative investment that can be conveniently resold if game gets popular, or (at loss) if things aren't looking so good.

Judging from the mentions of the game across the web, it hasn't been able to gain much traction among the crypto enthusiasts OR people looking for the MMO part of it, but still, some number of people took the risk, including some people I know from GameMaker community.

Collapse:
After the Discord announcement, every channel except for the "announcements" channel was deleted along with the game's website and socials, leaving people to voice their discontent on Twitter instead.

I'm told that at least some of the investors were also sent one last email with a link to a ZIP with some media (15 screenshots and a 15-minute gameplay video).

Some were hoping that a well-intentioned project would at least open-source the code+artwork (ex: Glitch, Duelyst),

and the sight was less than what you'd expect from a project years in the making, but still, at least you could tell that there was more to the game than what was shown in short GIFs and images on social media.

... not that there's much to do with this information now.

Things became less ambiguous the next day when the Discord server got deleted. But not just that - Matthew seemingly deleted everything he could - from his website and social media to random images on IMGUR and an account in a private Slack chat that's been inactive for a while.

And what about those mysterious contractors that did most/all of the actual work on the game?

Well...

(is that what "I cannot express my gratitude enough" means these days?)

Conclusions (before I forget):

Based on Matthew trying to recruit fairly high-profile developers for the project, I would say that he didn't start it with intent to rug pull, but for reasons that we'll probably never know it was taking much longer than originally envisioned.

It could be technical challenges, or key team members parting ways (say, over the pivot to P2E - as if "just" a web-based mobile-friendly MMORPG isn't enough trouble), or even just poor management.

If there were contracts, there were probably NDAs too, so we can only guess.

P2E and NFTs seemed more of an afterthought - with seemingly no timeline, no litepaper, and often less transparency than your average scam, decisions to pledge were more likely made based on Matthew's perceived reputation than the project itself.

At some point Matthew must have figured that mysteriously disappearing is much cheaper than refunding everyone (especially if that money is already spent).

Not paying the team either is a new low, of course, but hitting rock bottom is no concern if it's your last act.

The March 16 newsletter would have been either the last call to see if it generates enough attention to save the project, or an attempt to grab a bit more cash before vanishing.

Whatever the case, the last months involved routinely misleading people about the project's status.

There is, however, a certain difference between this and your average rug pull: if you intend to run a scam, privacy is important, which is why most of these take funds via crypto and carefully conceal founders' identities. Not here though.

Matthew did this under his own name, with an officially registered company in Australia. Contractors have his bank info from wire transfers, and he'd occasionally even post photos of himself on vacations. You can't usually expect to do something like this and get away with it.

On this note, if you lost money in this, you should probably let ASIC know, but also let AUS police know as well, as I'm told that running this kind of investment scheme is highly illegal over there.

cyber.gov.au/acsc/report