The weird cat game announced at The Game Awards is not made with AI, developers say, and has 'zero blockchain technology' or NFTs

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Catly - Official Reveal Trailer | The Game Awards 2024 - YouTubeWatch On

Catly - Official Reveal Trailer | The Game Awards 2024 - YouTube

The developers of Catly, a game about cats, have denied using generative AI to create the announcement trailer that debuted last week at The Game Awards, and have also rejected suggestions that their game is built on blockchain technology or makes use ofNFTs.

(Image credit: SuperAuthenti)

Picture of a cat wearing yellow sunglasses and a purple cape of some sort

To reinforce the point, the representative shared a brief video showcasing elements of the trailer in a pre-finalized state, without textures and backgrounds applied. I’m not an animator so I can’t swear to its veracity, but it did appear to demonstrate conventional animation techniques being used in the making of the video.

The trailer wasn’t the only part of the Catly reveal to raise alarms. TheSteam page, which has since been updated but remains available in its prior state via theWayback Machine, said virtually nothing about the nature of the game, but contained what appeared to be a bizarre jumble of keywords in the game description: “A Cat Open World, with Beautiful Cats. Hyperrealism, Actions, Cuddle, Speed, Islands, Fashion, Dreams, Snow, Robots, Plants – all with and via Cats.” It also included a Steam update link to a “Catly fashion collection” of “cloth and accessories that redefine sophistication.”

The closing seconds of the trailer also seemed to point to many different ways to dress up your pretend cats, which some took as an indicator of NFTs in the offing.

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(Image credit: SuperAuthenti)

Catly trailer still

The rep said there is “zero blockchain technology” in Catly, however, and “no NFTs.” Furthermore, SuperAuthenti has “never issued” any blockchain currency or NFTs, nor does it own any.

Questions linger, though, because SuperAuthenti co-founder Kevin Yeung is also a co-founder of TenthPlanet, a game studio that is (or perhaps was) working on blockchain games, according to this 2022VentureBeatreport. One of them is called Alien Mews, “a digital cat life simulation metaverse” being built in Unreal Engine 5—just like Catly. Also raising some red flags on that front is the fact that Yeung seems to have nuked his LinkedIn account: A link to his page pops in search results, but the actual account has been deleted.

(Image credit: Pokimane (Twitter))

i had no idea, thanks for letting me know - sadly i found out too late but i’ll 100% look out for this when promoting games in the future :/

On the other hand, Ben Brode, the former game director of Hearthstone and currently chief development officer on Marvel Snap, stood behind his endorsement of the game on the Catly Steam page. “I actually got to watch like 20m of gameplay footage and I thought it looked cool!” he wrote onBluesky. “I got zero kickbacks. If I got played I got played but it looked real and I was excited and I said so. You really think I would sell out my rep for NFTs?”

As mentioned earlier, the Catly Steam page was updated today to provide a clearer look at what the game is all about, and now has a new trailer showcasing the game in action, with all sorts of cats wandering around in all sorts of outfits. Notably, the link to the Catly fashion collection has been removed.

Questions remain, and all told it still looks a little sketchy at this point, but that’s as far as it goes for now. It’s possible, for instance, that Catly started life as an NFT game (perhaps Alien Mews) and was reworked to remove them in order to enable a release on Steam, which doesn’t allow games with NFTs orcryptocurrency—you don’t actually need NFTs to sell stuff to people, after all. We’ll get a closer look at what’s actually going on next year: A release date hasn’t been announced but SuperAuthenti said “more on Catly will be revealed in 2025.”

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