The Lords of Light’ Is Shutting Down

Another one bites the dust.

The list of promising and/or once-prominent crypto games shutting down in 2025 just gained another entry, as Raini Studios announced Thursday that it will sunset its Avalanche NFT card-battler Raini: The Lords of Light next month.

According to an X thread, Raini will pay out 2 million in RST token rewards (about $3,340 worth) for June and July ahead of the game’s permanent shutdown on July 21.

Similar to Blizzard’s popular Hearthstone, along with Web3 games like Gods Unchained and Parallel, Raini: The Lords of Light is a competitive game in which players create decks of cards and take them into turn-based battles. It’s available to play via the Epic Games Store.

Raini first issued collectible NFT cards on the Ethereum blockchain starting in 2021, but later moved to Avalanche and issued additional NFTs there. The studio’s RST token was issued on Beam, a gaming-centric Avalanche L1 chain.

The Lords of Light has a fantasy theme, much like Hearthstone and Gods Unchained, but also leaned heavily into crypto culture and embraced humor, with cards that referenced Dogecoin, pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, and disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

“Over $1,000,000 in rewards and prizes have been paid out to tens of thousands of gamers,” wrote Ceden CEO Sam Moody in a Discord post Thursday. “The title has been a huge success, but that success has waned, and player stats are now quite low and not sufficient to justify the cost to maintain the game for the studio, which also represents a systemic cost to RST holders who continue to suffer from the emissions the game generates monthly.”

With Lords of Light shutting down next month, Raini Studios will instead shift focus to a pair of upcoming action-oriented games: Lucha Throwdown and Uncaged: The Jon Jones Brawler.

Furthermore, the studio revealed a shift in tokenomics to a deflationary model, with plans to buy and burn RST tokens using a percentage of studio revenue, along with a transaction tax used to burn more tokens from the supply. Raini hopes that dumping play-to-earn rewards with Lords of Light will provide a brighter path forward for the studio.

“It remains a bittersweet moment for Raini Studios,” Moody wrote, “as we are on the cusp of launching some of the biggest gaming titles featuring blockbuster global brands, and RST begins a new and exciting chapter with a fully deflationary future, and we also say goodbye to the game that started it all.”

RST is up 14% on the day to a current price of $0.0016, per data from CoinGecko. It’s down nearly 99% from its peak price in March 2024, with a market cap under $1 million.