Chronicles of Elyria: Soulbound Studios Closes After 11 Years

By Indie Kings | October 20, 2026

Updated October 20, 2026: Jeromy Walsh confirmed on LinkedIn that he has closed Soulbound Studios, the company behind the crowdfunded MMO Chronicles of Elyria, and is looking for a job, per Massively Overpowered. The post went up on October 19, 2026, more than eleven years after he founded the studio and six years after its first closure announcement. The game never released.

The one-sentence version: a crowdfunded MMO raised roughly $9 million, shipped nothing, survived its own funeral in 2020, and has now closed for good with the founder writing a job application instead of a postmortem.

Image credit: Chronicles of Elyria logo, via Wikipedia.

The announcement

Massively Overpowered reported on October 19 that Walsh had confirmed the studio's end on LinkedIn and was seeking new work. The publication quotes his post: "After more than eleven years running my indie game company, Soulbound Studios, I'm looking for my next opportunity." It also quotes him describing what he wants next: joining a team, owning difficult problems, building technology and not wearing every hat at once.

MMORPG.com carried the same story under the headline that Soulbound Studios has closed as the founder seeks new work. Wikipedia's entry on Chronicles of Elyria records the closure on October 19, 2026, and describes the studio as active between 2016 and 2026. The game itself is listed as cancelled, with no release.

There was no farewell post on the game's website that we could find, and no refund plan in the reports. The announcement is a professional update on a personal profile, which is a strange way for a decade long project to end and also a fitting one. The audience that funded the game learned about its final closure the same way a recruiter would.

The money

Chronicles of Elyria raised money in two waves. Its Kickstarter ran from May 3 to June 3, 2016, with a goal of $900,000 and a final total of $1.36 million, according to Wikipedia. The studio then raised more through its own website during events such as Settlers of Elyria and the Searing Plague, and by October 2019 the total raised through that channel had passed $7.7 million.

Add the two figures and the project took in roughly $9 million from players before releasing a game. That number is the reason the story still matters. Crowdfunding a large MMO is not a new idea and not automatically a bad one, but the gap between $9 million and the cost of building a persistent online world is enormous, and the project never closed it.

The Kickstarter campaign promised a persistent world with player-run kingdoms, a story that continued after death, and a simulation heavy design that depended on backend technology the studio did not have. The scope was the pitch. It was also the thing that made the schedule impossible, and the timeline slipped from an estimated December 2017 release through every subsequent target.

The closure that did not stick

In March 2020, the studio held a virtual land auction called Settlers of Elyria, then released a pre-alpha parkour demo, then announced it was closing, laying off all staff and putting the project on indefinite hiatus. That sequence took about two weeks, and the auction before the closure is the part backers remember.

Two weeks later, Walsh released a statement saying the announcement had been misinterpreted. Former staff would continue working pro bono, he said, while he sought new funding. Development was described as continuing under the Soulbound label. Wikipedia records that claim without endorsing it, and the years that followed were a cycle of updates, missed dates and statements that the engine was nearly ready.

In 2021 the studio admitted it had run out of money and had been losing cash, according to Massively Overpowered's timeline of its coverage. Later updates moved release estimates to late 2024, then to nothing. A Kingdoms of Elyria colony sim spin-off ran alpha tests, but the MMO itself never reached a state anyone could buy or play.

The lawsuit and the years after

Backers organised quickly after the 2020 announcement. A class action was filed against Soulbound, and according to Wikipedia it was later dismissed. The same entry notes that a suit against the payment processor Xsolla was deferred while the case against the studio proceeded, and that the class action was eventually split between two states before its dismissal.

Dismissal did not settle the underlying question of what backers were owed. It ended one legal route, and the studio continued in a reduced form. For the next six years the public record is mostly blog posts, roadmap revisions and community updates, with no released game and no refund program announced in the coverage.

That history is why the October 2026 announcement reads as final in a way the 2020 one did not. There is no pro bono staff to carry the project, no new funding round described, and the founder's own statement is about his next job rather than the game's next milestone.

Date	Event	Source
May to June 2016	Kickstarter raises $1.36 million against a $900,000 goal	Wikipedia
October 2019	Website fundraising passes $7.7 million	Wikipedia
March 2020	Land auction, pre-alpha demo, then closure announcement and staff layoffs	Wikipedia
April 2020	Walsh says the closure was misinterpreted, development continues pro bono	Wikipedia
2021	Studio admits it ran out of money and was losing cash	Massively Overpowered coverage timeline
October 19, 2026	Walsh confirms the studio is closed and he is seeking work	Massively Overpowered, MMORPG.com

Sources: Wikipedia entry for Chronicles of Elyria, Massively Overpowered, October 19, 2026, and MMORPG.com, October 19, 2026.

What backers have now

They have no game. Chronicles of Elyria was never released, and Wikipedia now lists it as cancelled. They have no announced refund plan, and Massively Overpowered describes what happens to Kickstarter money as an open question. They also have a class action that was dismissed and a studio that no longer exists.

Some backers paid for virtual land, titles and roles in a world that was never built. The land auction in 2020 happened days before the closure announcement, which is the detail that turns a failed Kickstarter into a trust problem rather than a scheduling problem. Whether any of that money is recoverable is a legal question, and nothing in the public reporting suggests a mechanism for it.

It is worth being precise about what is known and what is not. The closure is confirmed by the founder's own post, as reported by two outlets. The absence of refunds is an absence of any announcement, not proof that no private arrangement exists. What is certain is that the product does not exist and the company does not either.

The lessons Walsh listed

The most quotable part of the LinkedIn post is the list of management lessons. Massively Overpowered quotes Walsh saying he hired the wrong people for the wrong roles, waited too long to make difficult personnel decisions, and both micromanaged and, when his attention was divided, failed to provide direction at all. He calls them the hardest lessons of his career and says he leads differently now.

That is a more honest paragraph than most postmortems from failed studios, and it is also carefully scoped. It is about management, not about the design scope that made the project unbuildable, the land sales that preceded closures, or the money that backers put in. A job application needs to show growth. A postmortem needs to account for harm. This post is the former.

None of that makes the self assessment false. It makes it incomplete. The technical and business decisions that turned a $9 million crowdfunding success into a cancelled MMO are the part backers would want explained, and the LinkedIn format is not built for that explanation.

FAQ

What was Chronicles of Elyria?
A crowdfunded persistent-world MMO from Soulbound Studios, designed around player-run kingdoms, a story that continued after character death and a simulation-heavy world. It was announced in 2016 and never released.

How much money did it raise?
Its 2016 Kickstarter raised $1.36 million against a $900,000 goal, and the studio raised more than $7.7 million through its own website by October 2019, per Wikipedia. Together that is roughly $9 million.

Did the game ever come out?
No. Wikipedia lists Chronicles of Elyria as cancelled. A pre-alpha parkour demo and a Kingdoms of Elyria colony sim test existed, but the MMO itself never shipped.

Are backers getting refunds?
No refund plan has been announced in the reporting. Massively Overpowered describes what happens to the Kickstarter money as an open question, and the class action filed after the 2020 closure was dismissed.

Didn't the studio already close in 2020?
It announced closure and laid off staff in March 2020, then reversed course weeks later and continued with pro bono work. The October 2026 closure is the final one, confirmed by the founder.

What is Jeromy Walsh doing now?
He says he is looking for his next opportunity after more than eleven years running Soulbound Studios, and describes wanting to join a team and work on technology without running every part of a company.

Our take

The tragedy is not that a hard project failed. Ambitious games fail constantly, and most of them fail quietly. The tragedy is that the funding model let the project fail in public for a decade while continuing to sell places in a world that did not exist, and that the final accounting arrives as a LinkedIn post about personal growth.

The $9 million figure is the whole argument in one number. It is a lot of money to raise from players and nowhere near enough to build a persistent MMO with original backend technology, and the pitch never resolved that contradiction. Scope was the selling point, so scope could not be cut without killing the thing people paid for. That is a trap, and it was visible years before the first closure announcement.

I do not doubt that Walsh learned the management lessons he lists. I doubt that a list of them is what the people who bought virtual land needed. A real postmortem would say where the money went, what was built, what was sold after it was clear the game could not ship, and what happens next. The studio is gone, but the obligation to answer those questions is not.

Bottom Line

Soulbound Studios has closed, and founder Jeromy Walsh confirmed on LinkedIn on October 19, 2026, that he is seeking new work after more than eleven years, per Massively Overpowered and MMORPG.com. Chronicles of Elyria's Kickstarter raised $1.36 million in 2016, its website fundraising passed $7.7 million by 2019, and the game never released. The studio announced closure and laid off staff in March 2020, reversed course with pro bono development, survived a dismissed class action, and continued missing dates until this week. No refund plan has been announced, Wikipedia lists the game as cancelled, and the founder's own summary focuses on management lessons rather than where the money went.

Sources: Massively Overpowered, "Chronicles of Elyria's Jeromy Walsh has dissolved Soulbound Studios and is now seeking work," by Chris Neal, October 19, 2026. MMORPG.com, "Chronicles of Elyria's Soulbound Studios closes as founder is now seeking new work," October 19, 2026. Wikipedia, "Chronicles of Elyria," accessed October 20, 2026, for funding totals, the 2020 closure, the lawsuit and the cancellation status.