Evidence Suggests Catly Is an AI-Generated NFT/Web3 Project

The Witcher 4, Elden Ring Nightreign, the Okami sequel – while not without its share of controversies and some arguably questionable award picks, this year's The Game Awards ceremony was filled to the brim with exciting game announcements that are sure to keep the gaming community buzzing for months to come. Among them, a peculiar title wormed its way into TGA 2024 – a game that, while not as thrilling as the aforementioned lot, still drew significant attention, leaving many gamers with but one burning question: Is it, or is it not, an AI-generated, NFT/Web3-peddling project?

The title I'm referring to is, of course, Catly, a somewhat mysterious open-world game about cats – developed by an equally enigmatic team known as SuperAuthenti – whose official reveal trailer aired during the event and immediately drew a wave of negative attention, leaving thousands of gamers wondering how it even made it to The Game Awards in the first place.

The trailer's visual style, which to many screamed "AI-made slop," didn't sit well with the community, with the project itself getting bombarded with dislikes and pieces of evidence emerging over the weekend claiming that Catly has strong ties to a certain blockchain company.

Without getting too ahead of myself, let's start from the most surface-level aspects – the trailer itself, the game's Steam page, and its website. Speaking of the trailer, while we can't confirm whether its visuals are AI-generated, they certainly look and feel a bit off, with the overall art style and finer details – particularly the fur and character animations – not resembling something set up by a Grooming Artist or rigged by a 3D Animator.

While an argument can be made that the trailer is almost a minute long, serving as a strong indicator that it isn't AI-generated, the frequent cuts and lack of uninterrupted shots lasting longer than five seconds leave room for doubt, as generating somewhat-convincing footage of that length falls well within the capabilities of current AI text-to-video tools.

Catly's Steam page and website were also scrutinized by the community, with the images and text there being, while maybe not AI-generated, at the very least very weird. Assets from the title's "Chic" and "Style' collections exhibit irregularities commonly associated with AI-generated visuals, and the Steam description reads more like a collection of tags hastily glued together with prompts like, "Hey chat, write a description for a video game about cats." Take a look for yourself:

Having covered that, we can move on to the juicier details uncovered by Reddit user Nat-Chem over the past few days. In their investigation, the user found that SuperAuthenti's Co-Founder, Kevin Yeung, had previously co-founded TenthPlanet, a game studio that, in 2022, reported working on two blockchain games – Mech Angel, a game confirmed to have NFTs, and more interestingly, Alien Meow, "a digital cat metaverse" project that sounds an awful lot like Catly.

Nat-Chem's report continues by claiming that, prior to adopting the name SuperAuthenti, the company was known as Shanghai Binmao Technology and worked on the blockchain app Plantly: Mindful Gardening, a botanical and gardening experience that has been scrubbed from the internet, with only some information available about it via AppAdvice. Furthermore, the connection to Catly is also highlighted in a resume by developer Yingzi Kong, which specifically mentions that he worked at Binmao Technology on Catly in early 2023.

While all of that could be written off as nothing but circumstantial evidence, the user's report concludes with what is perhaps the most smoking gun-ish link of all, which leads to the Chinese website Qichacha, a reliable source of information on the activities and details of Chinese companies. While Nat-Chem wasn't able to access the website, the 80 Level team was, and sure enough, SuperAuthenti is listed as the only shareholder and, as such, the owner of Shanghai Binmao Technology, confirming the connection between the two firms:

So, where does this leave us? We have a game with likely AI-generated visuals and a strange Steam description, a website filled with what looks like future NFTs, or as they now call them, "digital collectibles," a Co-Founder who previously worked on blockchain projects, and a confirmed connection between SuperAuthenti and its subsidiary blockchain developer Shanghai Binmao Technology, making it incredibly likely, if not a guarantee, that Catly is indeed a Web3 scam in the making. Once again, how was it allowed to run its trailer at The Game Awards?

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