Pixelmon promised to be an intriguing NFT project and a long-awaited reboot of the Minecraft mod and fun server that closed a few years ago. Unfortunately, the NFT sale and reveal turned into a disaster that invited both outrage and ridicule on social media.
Pixelmon promised a preview of bright, detailed characters from the Pokemon universe, adapted to a Minecraft experience. Instead, a user reported getting an NFT that failed to materialize in any recognizable form.
Pixelmon got exposure for its failure, as it achieved a notable amount of sales over the weekend.
Despite the high-profile expected mint and a starting price of 2.7 ETH at a Dutch falling price auction, the actual image reveal did not go smooth. Pixelmon promised 7,750 characters and only brought a partially finished collection.
Pixelmon: Successful Mint, Bad Artwork
The Pixelmon mint turned out to be successful, with some items selling at $10,000 during the event. Overall, Pixelmon reported total funds raised at $70M, a phenomenal sum for a game item mint. However, the team was not actually ready with the art.
And whatever art was produced, caused more shock even than the invisible NFTs.
Pixelmon Generation 1 was actually present on OpenSea, with a floor price down to 0.35 ETH. Some of the images had a better quality preview, but others had nothing to do with the proposed type of art.
Fortunately, Pixelmon has not disappeared from social media, and has responded to criticisms about the big personal losses. Due to social media hype, some buyers managed to buy items for as much as 7 to 17 ETH.
The project has not mentioned anything about returning the funds, or why the preview art had nothing to do with the actual visualization of characters within the game. It also turned out Pixelmon used freelancers and not an in-house art team, now promising to find a way to re-create all promised characters for the buyers of the Generation 1 collection.
