Eleven Line Items, Zero Finished — Field Dispatch #02

DISCLOSURE — READ THIS FIRST

I build assets, models and maps for Siege Worlds as an unpaid community contributor. I have also put thousands of dollars of my own money into LightningWorks: Portals, comics and the game. I hold no ownership stake in any of these companies. I am not neutral and I am not pretending to be. Every number below comes from a public page you can check, and the links are at the bottom.

This is not a review of the gunfight. We covered HordeTek and the extraction patch in August and gave credit where the game earned it. This one is about the man standing behind the game, on top of the IP, and holding the keys to all of it.

Geoff McCabe is the founder of LightningWorks, co-founder of Divi, and co-founder of Games Interactive, the studio that builds Siege Worlds. His own X bio calls Divi a “former Top65 crypto.” Note the word former. He wrote it, not us.

Three companies. One name on all of them. And one habit I have watched since day one as a paying customer: nothing gets finished before the next thing gets announced. Here is what each one promised, what each one shipped, and what got started instead.

Fact Sheet

LightningWorks: founded 2019. Publisher of record for Siege Worlds on Epic. Described by Games Interactive in 2024 as its investor.
Funding: one round. $2.5M seed, June 2023. The investor was McCabe.
Portals: 777 NFTs. Sold out in 24 hours, November 2022.
Siege Worlds Zero: the “world's first interactive comic,” January 2023.
Divi: ICO closed November 2017. All-time high about $0.35 in November 2020. Trading near $0.002 last month.
Divi Labs: ceased operations September 2024.
Siege Worlds: in development since 2020. Epic release July 14, 2026. Still shipping. Has hit #1 on PlayToEarn.com's game ranking.

The Roadmap Grades Itself

We did not have to audit LightningWorks. Their homepage does it for us. As of this week the public roadmap reads:

TARGET	ITEM	THEIR OWN NUMBER
2023 Q1	SW0, first NFT comic drop	90%
2024 Q4	Siege Worlds #1	60%
2025 Q1	Throng #1	70%
2025 Q1	Moon-1 #1	70%
2025 Q1	Creator App Beta	80%
2025 Q1	Gunflowers manga, “$500K+ in prizes”	10%
2025 Q1	VALOR #1	10%
2025 Q2	Shi Yang CLAN launch	15%
2025 Q4	Pumi #1	25%
2026 Q1	LUMA & ME #1	40%
2026 Q1	Anastia #1	10%

Read the first row again. The comic they put on GlobeNewswire as launched in January 2023 is still sitting at 90% on their own page.

Read the last column again. Every date in that table has already passed. Nothing after the 2023 marketplace launch is marked done.

The pitch was bigger every time it was told. January 2023: eight original comics in production, a dozen more scripts being written. Today's homepage: over 20 comics and 100 characters in production. The count of things in production keeps climbing. The count of things finished does not. To be fair, Starblind shipped, on the Alien Worlds lore. That is the list.

The Creator App is the one that matters. It was sold as the tool that lets anyone build an NFT comic without touching a smart contract. Due Q1 2025. Stuck at 80%. That tool was the entire “fans become co-creators” promise in software form.

Ten titles were announced behind a first issue that is still at 90%. That is not a publishing schedule. That is a list of starts.

The Portals

The Portal was the genesis mint. 777 of them, pitched as owning a Web3 comic shop: distribution rights to LightningWorks titles at a heavy discount, free comics, access to the whole ecosystem. McCabe told the press the Portals would carry a utility “never before seen in the NFT space.” The same release bragged that Portal value had risen five times since mint.

A comic shop needs comics.

Distribution rights are worth exactly what the catalog behind them is worth. The catalog is one zero issue, one Starblind book, and a table of percentages. Four years after the sellout, Portal holders own a storefront with almost nothing on the shelf. I know. I am one of them. Go look at the OpenSea floor yourself and compare it to the five-times victory lap.

Nobody here is calling that a rug. We are calling it what the roadmap calls it: undelivered.

Count the collections on the LightningWorks site: Portal, Siege Worlds Zero, Satoshi Roundtable, New York Comic Con, Art Basel. Selling the next collectible was never the hard part. Finishing the comic was.

The 5-Second Wallet

LightningWorks says it pioneered collecting digital comics inside chat apps. Open Telegram, type a command, have a wallet in about five seconds. No app download.

That is real friction reduction and we will say so. It is also a chat bot that makes a wallet. Telegram wallet bots and Lightning tip bots were doing that for years before this one. “Pioneered” is a marketing word. So is “world's first interactive comic” for HTML5 pages with animation and an Easter egg.

A wallet is a container. The bot gets you an empty one in five seconds. Filling it was supposed to be the comics. The container got finished. The contents did not.

Divi: The First Time We Saw This Movie

Before LightningWorks there was Divi. “Crypto made easy.” ICO in late 2017, a few million dollars raised. One-click masternodes, a smart wallet for the masses, a debit card and merchant plugins on the roadmap.

The price peaked around $0.35 in November 2020. It was near $0.002 last month. That is about 99% off the high. ICO Drops puts the dollar return for ICO buyers at 0.46x. Market cap rank is somewhere in the 800s to 900s depending on the tracker.

Then September 20, 2024. The Divi Project announced that Divi Labs, the company that had built the flagship wallet since 2019, was ceasing operations. The reason given was money: the financial situation made continuing unsustainable. The mobile wallet went dark for months. Users were told to restore from seed phrase in another wallet or wait for a stripped-down Divi-only version. Staking Vaults and other desktop conveniences went offline with no date attached.

Divi did not die. The Foundation kept the chain alive. But the product that was the entire pitch, the easy wallet, hit a wall because the operating company ran out of road.

Now look at the dates. ICO in 2017. LightningWorks founded by 2019 or 2020, depending on which company profile you read. Siege Worlds in development by 2020. Divi's wallet company was still trying to make its product pay when it closed in 2024. By then Divi's co-founder had been running a comic company and a game studio for years. Big promise, long roadmap, on to the next thing. Remember the shape. It comes back.

Always the Next Thing

June 2023: LightningWorks announces $2.5 million in seed funding. The investor is its own founder. A man moving his own money into his own company, then sending a press release about it. The release said the company was now ready for go-to-market on the comics.

What we can see since then: a cosplay team with its own section on the homepage. A New York Comic Con collection. An Art Basel collection. An esports team. A company bio that lists “video game and cosplay teams” and “an e-bank” among its assets. And on McCabe's own bio and Medium: Perceptron Network, TapGoat, LaunchGoat, IfThen.ai, Level Up Labs, LetsGo.

Cosplay is photographable. Booths are postable. A new project is always more fun than issue #1 of the last one. That has been my gripe from day one. Nothing is finished before the next thing starts.

What we cannot see is Siege Worlds #1.

The One Thing That Works

Here is the part that should bother him more than it bothers us.

Siege Worlds works. We said so in August. The horde scale is real. Extraction shipped. The AI got meaner. Jake O'Connor's team patches on a cadence the comic side has never once matched. Of everything with McCabe's name on it, the shooter is the only piece that is live, growing, and getting better.

The scoreboard agrees. Siege Worlds has hit #1 on PlayToEarn.com's ranking of blockchain games and made the site's top five for October 2026. It got there on gunplay, drops and patches. It did not get there on comics.

Notice what is different about it. It is the one project on this list with a co-founder and CEO who is not Geoff McCabe running the build. It is also the one that kept getting finished, patch after patch.

And the community is feeding it. Concept plates. Modular armor. Boss designs. Pets. Free work, from people who play the game, aimed at the exact gap the comic side left open.

Now go back to what he sold. In 2023 McCabe said the future of Web3 entertainment was to involve customers “as co-creators.” The same announcement promised Portal and SW0 holders a Derivative IP License to mint their own creations. In an Alien Worlds interview he predicted the community would write side stories and build the lore alongside his team until it became a network effect.

Now look at the gates, using only what is on the public record.

The Creator App that was supposed to let fans build is not out. The comics that would define the canon are not out. The only money on record at LightningWorks is the founder's own. And every one of those gates has the same name on it. McCabe owns the IP. LightningWorks publishes the game. The comic roadmap is his.

The co-creators showed up anyway. I am one of them. Nobody waited for the app.

So here is the question, asked in public because the promises were made in public. What is the canon waiting for? You cannot protect the integrity of a universe you have not published. There is no continuity to break. There is one zero issue, a roadmap, and a game with players in it tonight.

Here is what it looks like from inside the lobby today. I own the comics. Among the players I squad with now, I have not found one other who does. Most of the crowd I knew from the Portal days is gone. The new players I meet found the game on the play-to-earn rankings. They were looking for a good game, and they found one. Ask a full squad who Andrew Phillips is and you get silence. He is the lead of Siege Worlds Zero. The canon never reached them, because the canon never shipped.

A game that works has earned more than the lore side has given it. More content, more hands, more partners who can ship what has not shipped. All of that exists outside the building. Whether it gets in is one man's call.

If there is a good reason the working product should wait on books that are 10% done, say it where the players can read it. If there is not, open the gate.

Verdict

As a publisher: eleven line items, zero finished since 2023, by their own count.
As a Portal seller: sold the shop, never stocked it.
As a tech company: a decent onboarding bot wearing a “pioneer” badge.
As a track record: Divi down 99% and its flagship wallet company closed for lack of money.
As an IP owner: holds every key to the one product that works, and has not turned them.
The pattern: start, announce, sell, move on. The game is the exception, and the game is the one he does not build alone.

Siege Worlds does not need a finished comic universe to run on a Tuesday night. It needs the guy with the keys to either ship the lore or open the gate. Pick one. Then finish it before starting anything else.

Geoff, if any number in this dispatch is wrong, it came off your own website. Fix the page and we will fix the post.

Sources

No Quarter — Still Angry

— M1LL3NN1UM
Field Dispatch #02 // November 13, 2026
Previously: Changing Sides (#01) · the 5.3.4 audit · EST 1987. From the trenches of the 80s. Be cool or get muted.

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