I've been looking a bit into Martin Repetto's background. According to his
LinkedIn profile, he was CEO or Minor Studio (a company of Hasley Minor) from 2008 to 2011, and was in charge of a game project called Atmosphir, which key feature was the ability to design your own 3D worlds. Looking at Youtube videos of Atmosphir back then, when it had 20 or so developers working actively on it (again according to Martin Repetto's LinkedIn), it looks strikingly similar to Voxelus.
Video tutorial of Atmosphir builder (2010):
hereVideo tutorial of Voxelus builder (2015):
hereThere are many more similarities, like similar textures used between Atmosphir and Voxelus. Search Atmosphir videos on Youtube and Voxelus videos on Vimeo.
So same entrepreneur, same CEO, same lead developer, same concept, very very similar engine and game mechanics, very similar texture and objects base...
This leads me to the question: is Voxelus an attempt to ROI Atmosphir's intellectual property (that belongs to Minor Studio and therefore Hasley Minor)? What happened to Atmosphir? Could the same happen to Voxelus?
According to
Atmorsphir's wikia page:
During November 2011, Atmosphir's website had been going blank. It is now confirmed that it is abandoned and all of the progress on it has stopped.
During February 2012, the site reopened. A new developer, called RohanArin's released a statement a few days after the reopening:
"Hi, I began working on the bugs last year. There may be short downtimes to update things. Your levels and accounts are backed up, so no worries. I work on several things at Minor Studios among which now include maintaining atmosphir until more developers are hired. I am aware of most of the bugs, but if you find something new post it so it can be tracked down. Anyway the site should be up for a while
Also stay tuned for some cool new stuff. Best, Rohan"
Not munch is known except the fact that new developers are slowly being hired. Updates may come in a very slow time due to the bugs and the problems Hayley caused to make him finish in first place.
then
Atmosphir returned at the hands of its old community as of January 7th 2013 (The game died due to lack of funding in 2012). While the game is currently up and running again, the website is no longer available. This project was made possible by two developers. One user began the driver by de-compiling all of Atmosphir. It was later revealed that another used had been working on a functional Atmosphir server as well.
So basically the project failed due to lack of funding after one or two years of uncertainty where progress seemed to have staled, site was blank, and little information was released in complete disregard of the community... Does that ring a bell? And when the project ultimately died, instead of releasing the code as open source to save the thousands of hours of work the community poured in building games and levels, Minor Studio just pulled the plug and hung them out to dry, and some community users had to reverse engineer the binaries to figure how to recreate an open source version of the engine to salvage everybody's work.
Three years later the project is relaunched as Voxelus, still closed source although it's been crowdfunded. And once again, funds dry up, development stales, information release slows down to a trickle. Are we headed for a repeat of the failure of Atmorsphir? Is the project going to agonize another one or two years while every last premine token is being dumped, and then the project will shutdown, and reopen under another name in a few more years? Or was Voxelus just a way to ROI the expenses incurred by Minor on Atmosphir at the minor cost of a simple GUI redesign and a bit of marketing?
How to interpret this is very much a question of subjective perception. Under the current circumstances where the leadership of the project can't even be bothered giving updates to the community that crowd funded their project, and yet still actively maintain a wash-trade bot on Bittrex to generate fake volume, the worst should be assumed.
Let's give one more week to Voxelus folks to get their shit together, give an update and answer pending questions on this thread.
If nothing is done, we should assume this is indeed a scam based on a rehashed and rebranded failed project, and start airing the matter more widely, including contacting Bittrex and Poloniex to ask delisting.