Tropes/The Great Extinguishing of 2022


 * “Planet Neo” was a combination of a play-to-earn game, several NFT collections, a virtual reality metaverse, and a worldbuilding universe created by “Planet Neo Labs”. Ellen saw an ad for one of their projects, “Momo and Yeti”, on Twitter one day in August 2022, and proceeded to perform a dubiously-legal hostile takeover of the company by (depending on who you believe, Molly White’s “web3 is going just great” or the r/MTM_meltdown subreddit) either lying to the founder Charbel Zeatier that she had changed her tune on crypto to get him to agree to an acquisition, or using a fake identity “Erenko Yamamoto” associated with her El Kadsreian citizenship; either way, she went into turnaround immediately once the deal was done, scrapped the majority of their projects, merged Planet Neo itself into their existing VRchat/Second Life clone ArgopolisVR, reassigned everyone who was working on Planet Neo’s various projects to the Yahoo/AOL/HuffPost/Cheezburger/Cracked/Gawker/Gizmodo/Onion group of blog sites, and held on to the IP (several suspicious trademark transfers to holding companies with names like “ArgosyMTM Libraries Inc.”, “MTM Films Income Fund II”, “MTM/7A Communications Inc.”, and most egregiously, the long-dormant Manhattan Pictures (which was shafted by what was then the US unit of Corus in 2001 because its logo prominently featured the Twin Towers, and well…) were noted in publicly-available USPTO records). And the worst part is that Ellen got away with it, due to the FTC not caring about relatively-minor Web3 startups.
 * Soon, Gala Games and Endless AI, two other Web3 startups, were bought out by the “Mary Tyler Moore Memorial Foundation” and “KMTM Channel 3 License Inc.” respectively, followed by “embracing and extinguishing”. (They didn’t even bother to do the “extend” part.) A lot of their employees were placed into other roles, and NFT sales suddenly came to a halt. It was clear that Argosy is only in this to get devs for its webgames such as NationStates.
 * RECUR, which Argosy had legal issues with in the past, was also “embraced and extinguished” not that long after. It was clear that Argosy only wanted RECUR’s licenses related to college football teams and Paramount Global IPs for ArgopolisVR, their own virtual world.