Otherside got $450M from Yuga Labs but its latest game is ‘virtually unplayable’

The latest game from Otherside, an NFT gaming firm backed with $450 million worth of funding from Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Yuga Labs, debuted last weekend with chaotic, buggy results.

Project Dragon, a third-person shooter hosted in the Otherside ‘metaverse,’ launched on Saturday. In the game, players compete to hold and capture objectives across an 8-bit city map.

So far, it’s received a mixed reception. Some users, many with NFT profile pictures, have praised the game, while others have described it as ‘chaos,’ ‘buggy,’ ‘unresponsive,’ and having ‘terrible aim lag.’

One player said on X (formerly Twitter) that they quit the game after just 15 minutes of gameplay. “Still can’t believe that after millions of dollars and several years, this is the product they came up with,” they said.

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Another complained, “We were supposed to have a fully functional metaverse by the end of 2023. We are approaching the end of 2024. We have none of that and every game has been a failure.”

One user had a more mixed response to the release. “It was pretty buggy, aim lag was terrible, and it wasn’t really all that fun to be completely honest,” they said. However, they added “A lot of potential here, I just hope it eventually comes to fruition (sooner rather than later).”

Yuga Labs raised $450 million in March 2022 and reportedly used these funds to build its ‘metaverse’ games project, Otherside. Both Yuga Labs and Otherside have released various games and events, including Dookey Labs, Trip 1, Trip 2, and an upcoming Dookey Dash sequel.

This year, Yuga Labs gave up the intellectual property rights to two of its games in order to ‘unshackle’ its team. The NFT firm also announced numerous employee layoffs this year.

CEO of Yuga Labs knew the game would be chaotic

Project Dragon was apparently playtested with just a few hundred players but then launched with a player count of over a thousand.

Yuga Labs CEO Greg Solano said on X, “Bad news: Doing this at scale revealed some bugs that didn’t show up when we did internal tests with only a few hundred.” As a positive, he said “It’s hilariously chaotic. On a platform level, shit’s working.”

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Solano did note before launch that this would be the case. He said, “This is early af. This is the worst version of Project Dragon you’re ever going to experience because we’re going to be iterating on this game every single month.”

Indeed much of the praise was based around the fact that it was chaotic, despite making parts of the game virtually unplayable. Others also defended the game’s early state.

Saturday’s Project Dragon launch was the first in a series of events scheduled for the coming months as part of an ‘always-evolving experience’ of demos. To play the game, players were told to log in with their X account and wallet of choice to create a Yuga Labs ID.

Players also needed an NFT from one of 13 sets, including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Otherdeed, Grailed Moonbirds, Meebits, and HV-MTL to name a few.