Ultra Pro Wrestling Development: Inside 4 Years of Problems

On January 8, 2025, Sam Vallely sat right down to reply his critics.

The founding father of Hyperfocus Games had been quiet over Christmas, and the folks funding his wrestling recreation had observed. In the challenge’s public Discord server, somebody had used the phrase “vapourware”. Vallely posted an extended message to everybody.

He defined the silence—a spell in hospital, then a winter bug that put him in mattress for per week. He set out the staff, title by title, and was candid about its dimension. 

Editor’s Note: This story options cases of vulgar language that was stored to point out the character of the conversations that have been had. Discretion is suggested.

“For programming and actual game engine development, there’s only me,” he wrote. Then he addressed the accusation immediately.

“We aren’t scamming anyone here, and I’m thankful the majority of you can see that,” Vallely mentioned, earlier than making a proposal that has aged fairly poorly.

“To anyone out there who thinks there is the slightest possibility of this being a scam, here’s a real easy way to find out,” Vallely wrote, and listed six colleagues by title. “Message any one of them privately and ask them if I kept any money from the Kickstarter or Patreon for myself. These people have zero personal allegiance to me and are working with HFG purely because of the promise of this game. They see everything going on behind the scenes, and if I was in any way scamming anyone, they would take to social media in a heartbeat.”

Eighteen months later, 5 of these six folks have gone.

Ultra Pro Wrestling was alleged to be the sport a technology had been ready for.

The pitch was easy and, to a sure type of wrestling fan, irresistible: a religious successor to WWF No Mercy and the N64 video games constructed on the AKI engine, titles which have spent 25 years because the benchmark no one has managed to match. 

In February 2023, a Kickstarter asking for £17,000 (⁓$24,000) cleared its goal in three days and completed with £61,801 (⁓$83,000). Over the years that adopted, roughly 156 wrestlers and estates signed on, amongst them The Hardys, Demolition, and the households of Eddie Guerrero and Chris Candido. Backers on the prime tier have been additionally promised a full-scale reproduction championship belt.

What adopted was a sluggish procession of receding dates. In December 2024, replying to a potential purchaser who had solely simply found the challenge, the official account wrote: “It’s coming next year!”

A month later, in the identical publish the place he invited backers to interrogate his workers, Vallely instructed them that “unless I get hit by a bus, it is highly likely we will have new gameplay footage by Q2.” This yr, backers have been instructed to anticipate early entry within the remaining quarter.

Today, there isn’t any launched recreation. There isn’t any playable demo. There is, nevertheless, a Patreon that’s nonetheless accepting subscriptions and has solely not too long ago resumed offering updates to backers.

Insider Gaming has examined tens of 1000’s of inner messages spanning years, executed contracts, funds paperwork, United States Patent and Trademark Office filings, and the challenge’s public report.

Together they describe one thing significantly worse than a small studio working late.

They present a recreation whose animations have been extracted from different corporations’ titles, a course of Vallely described himself in writing. Former staff members who spoke to Insider Gaming mentioned they weren’t concerned in that course of. They present a sole programmer working with out model management, who as soon as deleted the whole challenge accidentally and recovered it solely by luck; an investor who spent greater than two years asking, in writing, for a construct he may run, and by no means obtained one; round 50 championship belts promised to backers, costed internally at as much as $875 every, and quietly put aside when the cash to pay for them by no means arrived; and so they present a trademark utility now suspended by the United States Patent and Trademark Office pending an investigation into the filings made in Hyperfocus Games’ title.

All whereas the CEO fails to reply a lot of the questions offered to him.

Thousands of Animations, Extracted From Old Wrestling Games

Late on the evening of November 11, 2024, Vallely posted an replace to his staff.

“I’ve processed over 900 animations now,” he wrote. “Since each move is labeled with a hex code, I just gave ChatGPT the starting and end hex codes. This way I could figure out exactly how many animations there are… 5,787!”

The methodology he was describing is well-known to individuals who modify previous wrestling video games. The AKI-engine titles retailer every transfer at a selected tackle in reminiscence. With an emulator and sufficient endurance, that information will be situated, learn, and transformed right into a format a contemporary engine will settle for. Modders have finished it for years, free of charge, for different followers.

Vallely was doing it to construct a business product.

Later that day, when requested whether or not the animations must be cleaned up individually, he defined the plan.

“Smoothing them out can likely be done in a batch process,” he replied. “So that would be a script just automatically fixing each one. But hands and facial expressions will be manually with each one.”

That final clause issues. Anyone who has watched Ultra Pro Wrestling’s public footage carefully has seen the palms. Fingers curled into inflexible claws, held at odd angles, transferring independently of the arm they belong to. It is the attribute signature of animation information lifted from a recreation whose skeleton by no means had fingers within the first place.

By December 5, he had “processed 3,285 animations”. By June 2026 he had widened the web: “I’m now able to get all the [WCW/nWo] Revenge, and [Virtual Pro Wrestling 2] moves too, and can convert the .anim files which is what the modders use.”

And in January 2025, in the identical public publish the place he invited backers to analyze him, Vallely instructed followers plainly what had been finished.

“Someone asked about the number of animations we’ve done,” he mentioned. “I’d say as of now we have recreated around 70-80%. (That’s of all animations across every AKI game).”

Nor was it solely AKI. In May 2026, making ready a pitch, Vallely requested his workers whether or not anybody had fashions from AEW: Fight Forever he may use as placeholders. Internal discussions additionally reference fashions from EA’s Def Jam and UFC Undisputed sequence.

Put to him immediately, Vallely was categorical, however exact.

“I deny that UPW has been built by importing finished animations from AKI games or Fight Forever,” he instructed Insider Gaming.

He didn’t tackle whether or not animation information had been extracted from these video games by reminiscence tackle, which is what his personal messages describe, and what the phrase “finished” leaves untouched.

Insider Gaming has in contrast publicly launched Ultra Pro Wrestling footage towards the supply titles body by body.

There is a sensible consequence to all of this, and it might be a very powerful factor on this story. No writer completes due diligence on a recreation constructed this fashion and proceeds. For 4 years, Vallely has instructed his backers that the one impediment between them and Ultra Pro Wrestling is time and endurance. The report suggests the impediment was all the time going to be the sport itself.

On August 30, 2026, weeks after a mass exodus from the staff, and days after telling this outlet he wouldn’t interact additional, Vallely revealed new footage for Patreon subscribers exhibiting animation work in progress.

The description is value quoting in full.

“Just a quick one to show some of the process with updating the animations. Also, just to clarify before anyone asks – what’s being shown here is a development side tool. This isn’t something which players will have in-game. And before anyone asks, the AI images I mention will of course not touch the actual game. Sometimes AI images are used as placeholders or to help with things like this, but all AI-generated images used in the dev phase will be completely removed from UPW upon the game’s actual release.”

It is a proactive disclosure. Nobody had requested him about AI-generated photos, and his clarification—that they’re placeholders and might be gone earlier than launch—is in line with what he instructed Insider Gaming when he denied that AI was getting used to generate the completed recreation.

In the video, he describes having the animations and working “a batch process” to appropriate them: the identical pipeline he set out privately to his workers in November 2024, now described to paying subscribers.

He doesn’t say the place the animations got here from, nevertheless.

Three Years of Development Came Down to One Programmer

Vallely’s January 2025 admission that he was the one programmer was easy, and every part else on this story follows from it. There was no second programmer, no code evaluation, no redundancy of any sort.

There was additionally, for a very long time, no backup.

In October 2023, he tried to place the challenge on GitHub, a typical device builders use to retailer and model their work. He bumped into file-size and filename limits, after which, in his personal account to his staff, “I thought ‘f*** this’ and tried to delete the git repository which somehow deleted the entire game project!”

He had backups, he instructed them, however had not made one in just a few weeks. What saved the challenge was a replica he had made for an unrelated virtual-reality experiment, sitting in one other folder by likelihood. Months of crowdfunded work have been recovered by luck.

By early 2024, the challenge had an investor: a veteran developer with credit on Assassin’s Creed and Madden, who started sending cash month-to-month. He requested for 2 issues in return. 

He by no means bought both.

“Still waiting on a build,” he wrote in June 2024.

“I continue to send money regularly, but I really need the contract and a build,” he wrote a month later. “I’m keeping my end of the bargain.”

In September 2024, a construct did lastly arrive. “It didn’t run,” the investor reported.

The similar day, the investor set out what he thought the issue was. 

“Having one programmer is the problem,” he wrote. “It’s madness.” 

He had been asking for a manufacturing schedule for the reason that spring, and had already delivered the decision that now reads because the abstract of the entire enterprise.

“Games aren’t made like this,” he wrote. “Games die like this.”

By July 2025, his endurance had thinned. “This fucking project has been 3 years of animations hahaha.”

He was additionally, by his personal account, uncovered. “I just don’t have anything in writing yet other than a letter of intent, and I suspect the shares of the company with the lawyers don’t have anything about me.”

Vallely’s personal personal evaluation, delivered in an extended voice message that Insider Gaming has heard, was not far more optimistic. 

A Team Built on Unpaid Work and Personal Expenses

In March 2024, Hyperfocus Games had a payroll of kinds. An outsourced 3D studio in Ukraine invoiced $5,750. The artwork director was on $1,000 a month. An animator was on $1,250. Vallely paid himself $500. The complete the challenge wanted to cowl its folks every month was $8,500. It was cash that got here, largely, from an investor by way of a intermediary, by Vallely’s request, to keep away from speaking to the investor himself.

Vallely has been constant that he took little or no. Answering rumors within the workers channel in March 2024, he wrote: “Considering how little I pay myself (£420 a month) for the work I do (7 days a week). Also considering the additional money I’ve put back in (from the money I paid myself).”

Six months later, explaining to a workers member why his wage wouldn’t be rising, he used the identical comparability. Almost everybody else was paid nothing in any respect.

One former worker went 4 years with out a cost whereas placing roughly $10,000 into the challenge, together with software program and wrestler agreements. One even paid members of his personal sub-team from his personal cash, together with shopping for one in every of them a graphics card, on the understanding he could be reimbursed when funding arrived.

Put to him, Vallely denied it in phrases.

“I also deny that HFG had a body of salaried employees who were required to work without pay or finance the project without agreed compensation.”

There was no point out of when or how those that invested private funds into the challenge could be reimbursed.

The Championship Belts That Could Have Cost $44,000

Aside from the sport itself, one of the concrete guarantees Ultra Pro Wrestling made to its backers was additionally the most costly. Supporters on the prime tier have been instructed they might obtain a full-scale reproduction championship belt of the sport’s in-game on-line championship, the “Global Internet Wrestling Championship”

In October 2023, eight months after the marketing campaign closed, the studio went searching for a producer and reported again to Vallely with a quote. An ordinary customized belt, 4mm zinc alloy on American leather-based, began at $675. A deluxe model with pure gold plating began at $785. The prime tier, CNC-etched and “closest to what’s used in the ring for most big promotions”, began at $875.

He had already given his evaluation of the numbers, calling it “pricey”. Vallely then instructed the belts could be “doable” with one other massive funding, however admitted they’d lose some huge cash to those that paid for them. So, a promised Kickstarter tier was being pushed down the road with out one other funding.

At the most cost effective tier out there, the roughly 50 belts wanted would have value round $34,000. At the standard Vallely thought applicable, nearer to $44,000. Against a marketing campaign that raised £61,000/$83,000, the belts alone would have consumed a lot of the cash, a truth the challenge’s founder understood, in writing, eight months in.

The large funding by no means arrived. In the three years since, backers have obtained no public replace on the belts they paid for.

What they’ve obtained is a request for extra money. In 2024, one backer, Kev Iddon, complained publicly on the marketing campaign web page that growth updates have been being positioned behind a paywall.

“It’s wrong that you’re asking for more money elsewhere for us to get the information that should be here,” the fan wrote. “The idea of Kickstarter is that we help get the project going and we’re the first for everything. As above … what have I backed? It’s very naughty and making me rethink my involvement.”

Vallely, replying as the corporate, didn’t settle for the premise.

“’The information that should be here’. What is this entitlement??” he mentioned. “We have zero obligation to produce behind-the-scenes content. It’s not something game companies do, and if offering this service turns out to not be profitable, we will stop. It won’t exist. Your initial backing is appreciated, but it does not entitle you to more than what was offered with the tier you backed. If you would like a refund, just ask.”

“We Own AKI”: The Trademark Fight Behind the Game

Everything about Ultra Pro Wrestling’s id rested on three letters. AKI was the Japanese studio behind WWF No Mercy and WCW/nWo Revenge, the video games Vallely had promised to succeed. In 2024, Hyperfocus Games utilized to register the title as a US trademark.

In December that yr, it was mentioned that the AKI IP and trademark had been acquired. Turns out, that was solely partially true.

They had a pending utility for the trademark, and it was about to run into hassle.

In February 2025, studying that one other firm had filed for the same mark, Vallely dictated a response to be despatched.

“They filed for it in September. We filed in what? November? They can eat my ass,” he wrote. “Theirs continues to be pending too. We have each proper to problem them.

“In fact, tell them this,” he continued. “‘Our brand is identifiable by our icon logo, and we have zero concern that their shitty 2-dollar brand would be confused with our iconic 25-plus years of recognition.’

Then, extra immediately: “We own AKI, and anything which uses that name as a prefix is in violation. Not the other way around.”

And lastly: “I’ll write it out better. I want to include the fact that our ‘brand’ has been around for 25 years and our trademark is simply being renewed.”

Hyperfocus Games Ltd was incorporated in Scotland in 2023. It has by no means launched a recreation. The 25 years of recognition Vallely was claiming belong to AKI Corporation of Japan, a separate firm with no involvement in Ultra Pro Wrestling. There was no present registration to resume.

He then requested numerous items of knowledge relating to the trademark struggles be held from different members of the staff.

The public report is unambiguous about what occurred subsequent. On June 3, 2025, the USPTO refused the applying. The battle was not with AKI Corporation in any respect however with AKI AKI, a registered mark held by a Delaware firm for social-networking and food-delivery software program.

The analyzing legal professional additionally discovered the applying had been filed unsigned, and due to this fact unverified, with charges paid for a single class towards items spanning three.

A second utility was lastly refused in November 2025. A request for reconsideration was denied on January 5 2026.

Then, on 16 March 2026, the USPTO went additional.

“This application has been suspended pending administrative review of suspected improper submissions made to the United States Patent and Trademark Office in connection with this application,” the discover reads. The workplace is investigating whether or not the submissions “violate the USPTO’s trademark rules of practice, including the rules concerning signatures, certifications, and representation of others before the USPTO.”

If violations are discovered, the discover says, the workplace will challenge an order to point out trigger why sanctions shouldn’t be imposed. It hyperlinks candidates to its steerage on trademark scams.’

Internal paperwork ultimately instructed workers to “avoid explicit references to AKI and ‘ripping’ in external communications when discussing our animations.”

The AI Fight Inside Hyperfocus Games

By the spring of 2026, Vallely had been alone on the engine for 3 years. He had simply returned from an accelerator programme in London the place Tencent had talked about velocity, and a couple of world wherein studios that moved quicker received.

He recorded an extended, exasperated message the place he laid out frustrations together with his artwork director, who had refused to work with a set of AI-generated 3D fashions.

“I just can’t help but sit and think about the models. Look, none of them are usable. None of them,” he mentioned. “If this is to do with AI and this is some integrity bullshit… We now live in a world where anybody can do that.”

He couldn’t see the objection. “Do I have that fucking reaction when it comes to programming? ‘Oh, Claude wrote it, so then I can’t get any credit’? Like, no, what the fuck? Who gives a shit?”

“It’s a fucking aversion to AI,” he concluded. “That’s how I feel. That’s all this is… that’s just holding everyone up because of your sensitive ego.”

He had checked the technical query himself, after a trend. “I know enough about 3D modeling to be able to ask Grok, ‘Can this be done?’” he mentioned. “Grok is telling me one thing, and then they’re like, ‘Oh no, yeah, it’d be too much work.’”

His reasoning said plainly: “That’s kind of the whole point of this: getting the game far enough along that we put it in front of a publisher, we get enough money, and then if it’s all about integrity, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.”

The issue is who was being requested to cross it. 

The artwork director was on £1,000 a month (and continued to work when unpaid for nicely over a yr). The idea artist held a proportion of a recreation that didn’t exist. Neither had any say within the matter, and in April 2026, whereas planning a pitch to AEW—which, sources say, by no means went wherever, nor did decision-makers at AEW learn about it—Vallely proposed eradicating the say altogether if they might throw a “hissy fit”.

“If a decision was made to include the AI art… we don’t include them in the meeting. We need to have our business heads on here.”

Asked about it, once more, Vallely instructed Insider Gaming: “I deny that AI is being used to generate the finished game.”

There isn’t any completed recreation.

The Dispute That Tore Hyperfocus Games Apart

The finish for a lot of with Hyperfocus Games came to visit cash and the invention of a troubling documentary in the summertime of 2026.

Some had spent 4 years working unpaid, whereas additionally fueling the corporate by paying payments and overlaying teammates’ bills, and by June there was a push by these contributors for a funding spherical massive sufficient to lastly put the staff on salaries. Vallely needed a leaner determine. The argument ran for weeks. 

But that disagreement unfolded alongside extra basic questions on contracts, roles, manufacturing planning and what may truthfully be put in entrance of an investor. According to former contributors, Vallely then went largely silent for nearly two months.

At the middle of the dispute was Hyperfocus Games’ chief working officer, one of many challenge’s longest-serving contributors.

The COO—in an try to diminish his position, Vallely would later describe him as a “project manager”, regardless of having publicly offered him as the corporate’s COO—ready working funds eventualities for dialogue with the investor. One early draft used the salaries contributors earned of their present jobs as reference factors and included a £175,000 reserve overlaying potential again pay and expense reimbursement throughout the staff. The investor was listed as an approver as a result of, in accordance with inner messages reviewed by Insider Gaming, Vallely had directed that monetary selections be signed off by way of the investor whereas Vallely stepped again from communication.

Vallely later alleged that the doc confirmed the COO awarding himself founder-level compensation and setting apart £175,000 for the staff. In personal exchanges, the COO was accused of “looking out for the boys.”

Those paperwork exist, however their model historical past issues. A model dated three weeks later eliminated the provisional figures from the operational funds, remoted them on a separate state of affairs tab, and explicitly warned towards presenting them as anybody’s authorized request. Internal messages additionally present Vallely eradicating total roles from a competing funds with out consulting the folks affected and utilizing AI-generated wage assumptions relatively than figures provided by the contributors involved.

On July 27, Vallely eliminated the COO with out discover, a gathering, or a possibility to reply the allegations. He was shut out earlier than different members of the staff have been knowledgeable. Vallely’s personal message was markedly totally different from the general public clarification. 

“You are done here,” he wrote. “COO and any other title you imagined yourself to have is officially revoked. No new role will be offered. You are not permitted to discuss any internal HFG details with anyone on the team or publicly. Doing so will be considered a breach of your NDA.”

“You fucked around, and this is where you find out.”

The title, Vallely wrote in the identical message, had been “an informal title given to you simply because you and Lew [art director] persuaded me by saying it would be more impressive in emails when reaching out to talent and potential partners.”

Eighteen months earlier he had introduced it himself, unprompted, to the whole group.

The non-disclosure settlement he was now invoking had its personal historical past. When it was first issued, one recipient learn it correctly and refused to signal. The model he had been given included a non-compete clause working to 2030. Vallely, he defined, “had just given out this standard one from the internet.”

Most of the sport’s contributors have now left. Vallely and a few others are the one ones remaining.

The wrestlers have been affected too. In January 2026, the challenge’s idea artist found that the income share in expertise contracts had been diminished from 50 per cent to 35 per cent, a change made, in accordance with inner messages, not less than a yr earlier, with out the expertise being instructed.

“Did you guys lower the percentage? I told them 50%,” he wrote. “Nobody told me it was lower… they’re expecting 50, so I don’t want that to be an issue down the road. It makes us look dishonest even though it was a lack of communication.”

Of one wrestler’s household, he added: “I don’t think she even looked at the number because she was told 50; she just trusted what was told to her.”

The idea artist’s personal settlement, executed by way of a Scottish regulation agency in November 2023, assigned roughly ninety-five authentic characters to Hyperfocus Games and waived his ethical rights in them. In change, he receives “3.85% of the profit generated by the Transferee from the use of the Characters in the Ultra Pro Wrestling video game on PCs or console platforms after all costs, including those of the platforms, have been deducted.”

Not income. Profit, in any case prices, on a recreation that has by no means shipped.

Vallely’s Past Comes to Light

Before Ultra Pro Wrestling, Sam Vallely made documentaries.

The first, Will Work For Free, was a movie about automation and the tip of employment. The second, launched within the weeks after the Charlie Hebdo assault in Paris, was referred to as We Need To Talk About Islam.

Vallely promoted it himself on Reddit, below an account that right this moment carries the Ultra Pro Wrestling emblem as its avatar.

“This is a new film from Maveric Media (producers of ‘Will Work For Free’) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack,” he wrote. “But before we all jump the gun, it is not an all-out attack on Islam. It is really more of a criticism of the elements within the liberal media and those who are failing to talk about Islam openly and honestly.”

He spent the next days defending it within the feedback, at size.

His personal framing was that the movie was not about Islam particularly. “Firstly I am an atheist,” he wrote, “and yes I use an Abrahamic religion as a vassal for the arguments against Abrahamic religions.”

At one level in his movie, nevertheless, he states that “in a certain context” he may say that “all Muslims are bad”.

But when challenged on the substance, Vallely was much less equivocal. Asked a couple of part of the movie coping with feminine genital mutilation, and instructed by one commenter that the movie “feels more like a polarising propaganda film”, he pushed again level by level. On whether or not the apply may very well be attributed to faith relatively than tradition, he wrote that “it is undeniably tied to the religion today yet I think we refuse to accept this fact because we do not wish to blame religion when it comes to Islam.”

To one other commenter who instructed the movie ought to have let Muslims take part within the dialog, he replied that the movie “specifically invites muslims to join it”, and dismissed the criticism as “word salad”.

Asked to make clear his view of the media, he named the broadcasters he thought have been getting it proper.

“I don’t mean to say that the media is liberal and we should criticise the media; I mean that we should criticise the liberal media, e.g. MSNBC, CNN, John Stewart, Russell Brand etc.. Bill Maher seems to be the only one talking about Islam honestly in liberal media, but on the other hand people like Bill O’Reilly, Hannity and Glen Beck are doing a great job of criticising Islam, and though I usually disagree with them they have been on the right side of history when it comes to Charlie Hebdo.”

The similar account, in the identical interval, was combative elsewhere. In an argument about an unrelated documentary, he instructed one other person: “I will however respond to your dribble for the benefit of others.” 

In one other, on a online game discussion board, he wrote: “You sound like you need friends. you can’t even handle a conversation on the internet.”

The feedback are round eleven years previous. The threads they belonged to have since been deleted; the replies survive on the account’s personal historical past.

Vallely has by no means publicly disowned the movie or his previous feedback. They all stay on-line.

Former contributors instructed Insider Gaming that they had been unaware of the documentary till it was circulated in July 2026. Several mentioned its contents, and Vallely’s subsequent failure to deal with their considerations, contributed on to their choice to depart. 

But it’s not simply the documentary.

Vallely additionally has a public report of transphobic posts, stating in a single on his private Twitter account that “being trans isn’t really a thing” and that “no amount of make up or cosmetic surgery can make a man a woman.”

He’s even despatched messages that seem to mock an worker’s title, saying “bless you” after being instructed their title, and following it up with “oh, that’s his name?”

Insider Gaming put the documentary and the feedback to Vallely on August 20, 2026, and August 22, 2026, asking him to deal with the Islam documentary and his transphobic social media posts. He didn’t reply any of these questions in both of his replies or in subsequent correspondence. Instead, he seemingly ignored them to concentrate on different areas of the request.

His private Twitter account has since been deactivated, although screenshots of his posts exist.

Vallely Denies the Allegations, Then Stops Answering

Vallely responded at size to an in depth checklist of questions earlier than declining to reply any extra, however failed to deal with a few of the largest considerations.

He requested Insider Gaming to pause publication whereas the provenance of the fabric was assessed, mentioned that contributors had been given entry “subject to executed written confidentiality agreements”, and requested copies of the paperwork and photographs on which the story depends, saying he couldn’t responsibly authenticate or clarify materials he had not seen.

That request was declined: supplying it could determine confidential sources.

His denials have been particular.

“For the avoidance of doubt, I deny that UPW has been built by importing finished animations from AKI games or Fight Forever. I deny that AI is being used to generate the finished game. I also deny that HFG had a body of salaried employees who were required to work without pay or finance the project without agreed compensation.”

He additionally mentioned the allegations “appear to originate from an acrimonious internal dispute”, and that he holds “substantial contemporaneous evidence contradicting the account being presented, including contracts, messages, financial records and recorded meetings”.

Vallely was invited to offer it. He didn’t.

In a second e-mail, he mentioned Hyperfocus Games was treating the matter as a possible unauthorized disclosure of confidential firm data and private information, and could be searching for authorized and data-protection recommendation.

“Given the apparent scale of the disclosure and the confidential company and third-party information potentially involved,” he wrote, “I will not engage in further substantive correspondence about the allegations.”

Across two detailed letters, he didn’t tackle the belts, the 70–80 % determine, the titles he publicly gave and later withdrew, the declare that his firm owned AKI, the suspension of its trademark utility, how he managed to “process” 1000’s of animations, the 1-to-1 examples of animations taken from basic video games, or the documentary, amongst others.

Vallely instructed his backers there was a simple solution to discover out whether or not he was scamming them. Ask the folks round him, he mentioned. They see every part happening behind the scenes.

Five of the six he named are gone.

What stays is a list. Around 50 championship belts, promised in 2023, value as much as $875 every, by no means delivered and by no means publicly talked about once more. Roughly 156 wrestlers and estates signed to a recreation that doesn’t exist but, a few of them on phrases that have been altered with out their data. A trademark utility suspended whereas a United States federal company investigates the filings made within the firm’s title. An investor who spent two years asking for one thing he may run.

And a Patreon web page which, as of September 2, nonetheless has 220 subscribers paying practically $1,000 each month with guarantees of a demo lastly coming later this yr.

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Editor’s notice: Quotes have been cleaned up for capitalization.

Mike has been overlaying the gaming business since 2012, and has reported on a few of the largest occasions within the business whereas additionally working as an investigative reporter. Outside of…

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