Our first Kickstarter scam, rejoice!!!

Gokyabgu

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I have been searching the internet for the news and came across this in a site called Gameplanet. Since it's directly related with our site, I wanted to share it with you:

"Kickstarter game scam a non-starter

It looks like Kickstarter has seen its first attempt at a large-scale game fundraising scam.

The project in question was a fantasy RPG called Mythic: Gods & Men, whose Kickstarter campaign began last month with a goal of reaching $80,000 in donations.

The scam was unearthed when posters on the Something Awful forums realised that the majority of the content on the game's Kickstarter page was cribbed from other sources.

It appears the project's "developers", Little Monster Productions, cribbed concept art and models from various design blogs, copied its reward tiers directly from fellow Kickstarter hopeful The Banner Saga, and claimed that images of offices copied from the website of Burton Design Group were its own.

Suspicions were raised early, when Little Monster claimed that its team included nine developers who "had left Activision/Blizzard in search of a better game creation environment", and that the game's animations would be done "via motion capture thanks to some friends at Disney/Pixar". Further, a May 2013 launch date would have given the "developers" little time to finish the game.

Little Monster initially responded defensively to the accusations on their Kickstarter page, calling them "false" and claiming the game to be "well in progress and NOT a scam of any kind".

However, three days ago the funding drive was cancelled without comment.

Kickstarter only transfers cash from pledges if a project funding goal is met, so none of the 83 backers who together raised $4739 for the now-mythic Mythic will lose any money."

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3469966&pagenumber=14

I hope scams like this won't harm the trust of the gamers to promising developers who are sincere about their projects.
 
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I think it's great that Kickstarter infrastructure works and the scammers didn't get any money. Makes me feel better about pledges.

The gameplay characteristics will be similar to that of World of Warcraft and the graphics quality should be up there with Skyrim. Game will be release on PC first and then ported to Mac. Depending on funding amount reached we will aiming to get a multiplayer version online by Summer

I pretty sure any company would love to pull this off but saying they could do it for 80k was a bit of a tip-off. ROFL!
 
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Well it sounds like it was less about the Kickstarter infrastructure working, and more about some very diligent people in the general public who blew the whistle on the scam. It's impressive, but I doubt that this is something that we can count on happening all the time, especially if the "developers" are less sloppy.
 
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Wait a second. I think I know someone who was working on something called "Mythic" a few years back. Is this the same thing?
 
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Sure you're not thinking of Mythic Studios, of Dark Age of Camelot fame?
 
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The game rather than the studio was named Mythos or Mythic or similar, that's what made me think of it…hmmmmm.

Is it Mythica you're thinking of? That was an MMO in development by Microsoft but it got canceled in 2004.
 
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Who gots the smartest members? Watch got the smartest members. Trudat, yo.
 
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well it was the goons that did manage to itemize all the false information.

yeah, this scam wasn't that subtle - too many red flags. the big, bad one will come I think when its not an obvious scam but merely a collapse of a promised product. The anger over peoples lost lost money and unfulfilled promises I can see overwhelming any honest collapse. The graveyards are full of unfinished software out there

EDIT:just noticed this - the kickstarter page is still up after two weeks.the video the guy did is still there showing his face and his testimony! :rotfl:
 
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That's one ugly dude...
 
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Luckily the recipe for a large succesful kickstarter (at least for videogames so far) appears to be either established credibility of the people involved, a sufficiently well developed product to convince backers of their ability utilize funding to meet/exceed stated goals, or some combination of the two.

For video games at least, those seem hard enough to fake that any attempt at a large video game scam would be relatively easy to spot with some time on google assuming there aren't obvious red flags which don't require typing things into a search engine to notice. Making unrealistic and hyperbolic claims about the scope and potential of a project while using only vaugue terms to describe your actual plans come to mind; as do pledge goals that only seem substantial until compared to what they claim to be offering.

The more pressing risks are probably just plain honest failed projects as well as less ambitious non-game kickstarters that employ emotional and topical elements to manipulate backers into kicking them up to maybe a few hundred or thousand here and there. The latter would probably use identity theft to allow them to set up disposable accounts to use and abandon with each scam so that might be something Amazon Payments combats with whatever identity verification they use but even at its best that still wouldn't prevent leeches from pulling one off scams and moving on to something else.
 
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Who gots the smartest members? Watch got the smartest members. Trudat, yo.

Ewe are write wee half the smartist peepull. Eye four ecksampel am ecsilent at speling. Annd eye am a mastur ov the englush langwage.
 
Yeah, greed can be a huge driving force.

No wonder it was considered as one of the Deadly Sins of the Christian Church.
 
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