Public statement

2024-05-28

Dear Spider Tanks community,

We deeply regret not addressing you sooner, and we apologise for any confusion or concern our silence may have caused. Initially, we chose to defer to Gala Games for community communication as a courtesy. However, our respect turned to apprehension, as Gala Games started threatening us with legal action in December. This inhibited us from speaking out sooner, but we believe now it is the right time to do so.

Our journey with Spider Tanks began when Gala Games approached us to form a partnership in early 2021. Under this partnership, Gala Games would publish, promote, and provide a development budget for Spider Tanks – one of our then-unannounced projects. In return, we were tasked with delivering specific development milestones, with the final milestone scheduled for completion in November 2021. Gala Games would in turn have rights to use the Spider Tanks IP for three years after reaching this scheduled milestone.

Initially hesitant and unfamiliar with NFTs and cryptocurrency, we were drawn to Gala Games' mission: empowering gamers to supplement their income and prioritising the well-being of both games and gamers. The overwhelming monetary support Spider Tanks received from the Gala Games community in our first year after passing the node vote reaffirmed that we were not the only ones who believed in this mission.

We continued to invest our share of the revenue into Spider Tanks as 2022 began and with all scheduled development milestones behind us. Motivated by our love for the game, our sense of responsibility to deliver on the community's expectations, and our trust in Gala Games to fulfil their part of the mission, we pressed on.

However, we soon began to notice troubling signs in Gala Games' behaviour. Not only in their collaboration with us, but also in their interactions with our players. While Gala Games outwardly appeared dedicated to games, gamers, and their mission, their actions painted a different picture. Required GalaChain features, marketing commitments, and revenue payments were repeatedly delayed, while punitive systems like Honor were forcibly introduced into Spider Tanks. We took up responsibilities like Spider Fridays, making trailers or organising events to compensate for Gala Games’ lack of resources for marketing and community engagement, while Gala Games aggressively expanded into unrelated industries like Film and Music, spending millions on fruitless celebrity partnerships, jets, and real estate. Gala Games’ prioritisation of rapid growth and enrichment over their core vision and promise concerned us deeply.

By 2023, it became evident that Gala Games had no intention of utilising their half of the substantial 2021 Spider Tanks revenue or to fulfil their promises. They announced having burned the remainder of this revenue with the introduction of Gala v2. Their publisher responsibilities – such as user acquisition for Spider Tanks – were suddenly gated behind an “eat what you kill” principle, while monthly revenue and daily active user numbers were at an all-time low. Gala Games held Spider Tanks players responsible for coughing up again what they had already contributed, all under the premise that “selling keeps the lights on and the game live”.

This realisation was deeply distressing for us, as we had not only invested significantly in Spider Tanks but had also committed heavily to a broader future with Gala Games based on their promises. We had invested considerable effort and resources into our other titles – STODA and Wizards & Warriors – to prepare them for this future. Contracts for these titles were drawn up by Gala Games and signed by us, but despite initial letters of intent being signed and Gala Games’ leadership continuously expressing their desire to have these titles on their platform, these contracts never ended up being signed by Gala Games.

We had gone as far as purchasing a new office building, fully prepared to accommodate new talented staff to work on these titles and Spider Tanks. Moreover, we had redirected all our focus and resources away from the revenue sources we had prior to our collaboration with Gala Games, so we would not be distracted from Spider Tanks and our future with Gala Games.

We were fully committed to Spider Tanks, its community and our future with Gala Games.

We have made numerous efforts to address our concerns and advocate for mission realignment and sustainable collaboration with Gala Games. We have even been open to more definitive solutions such as the sale of the Spider Tanks IP or even GAMEDIA as a whole. However, even in these conversations, Gala Games remained stuck in their pattern of making promises without delivering on them, further deteriorating our trust.

We felt incredibly misled and exploited.

In October 2023, we had exhausted all avenues to steer Gala Games back to their stated mission and away from the path that would mean squandering Spider Tanks’ potential and endangering the future of our company and employees. We could no longer allow Gala Games to continue to use our commitment to the game and our IP to enrich themselves at the expense of the community. With heavy hearts, we were forced to fully disengage from further investment in new content for Spider Tanks on the Gala Games platform.

Since then, Gala Games has publicly defamed us in an attempt to shift blame for their shortcomings. In their efforts to eliminate us, they have resorted to legal action and sought to unjustly take our intellectual property to further their own agenda. They have tried to portray us as opportunistic, greedy, and evil—a mere projection of their own behaviour.

As some of you may recognize, we are not the only ones who have fallen victim to Gala Games’ actions. A pattern emerges when examining Gala Games' other projects: failure to deliver on commitments, shifting blame, twisting the truth, and a reluctance to take responsibility.

Other third-party developers are also entangled in legal disputes with Gala Games, the internal VOX team faced terminations and accusations of dishonesty, the Mirandus team was fired and labelled as slow and non-cooperative, and numerous other projects massively lucrative for Gala Games in the past have failed without any accountability being taken by Gala Games.

Meanwhile, all of Gala Games’ co-founders, many shareholders and many employees have been fired, bullied away, or sued—all supposedly for the greater good, according to the Gala Games that remains.

We understand that our story contradicts much of the information Gala Games has been feeding you in the past months, but we possess an extensive record of communication between Gala Games and ourselves, some of which has been and will be further made public in the active legal dispute. This record should provide ample proof supporting our statement.

For now, we know that this narrative will resonate with many individuals, players, guilds, or other parties who are or have been involved with Gala Games over the past years. If this applies to you, please do not hesitate to speak up.

Yours,