Another Kickstarter horror story

joxer

joxer

The Smoker
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Why am I even linking to it?
Because I remember seeing it and instarefusing to back it (phonegame reason):
http://kotaku.com/video-game-kickstarter-disappears-with-over-30-000-1733558273

Intro snip:
It’s the ultimate Kickstarter horror story: You help fund a project. They succeed. They stop sending out updates. Their website expires. And nearly two years later, it’s become clear that they’ve disappeared with your money.

In December of 2013, gamers paid over $30,000 to fund a Kickstarter for a game called Mansion Lord. A month later, Mansion Lord’s creators opened up a PayPal account to accept even more money. And in August of 2014, after announcing that the PayPal funding round was over, they simply disappeared.
Click to expand...
 
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Looking at those screenshots, I'm not sure what would be more horrible. This scam or the game actually being unleashed upon the world :)
 
Its just starting....
 
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Scary how stuff like that can get so much money... and other great stuff does not even get funded.....
 
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That's part of the reason why I don't kickstart small devs. Chance of game not happening is way too high for me. Even ignoring the scam attempts, KS projects almost always go way past their expected release day (and I mean by years), and since real life happens, one dev or artist leaving means the project freezes or dies.
 
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Well, if someone intend to run with the money? would they really keep posting about their medical conditions, this has happened on several kickstarters... I guess there could be two reasons for this, one of them being that you get so much pressure from being late on delivering that you get health issues in your hard work and attempts to deliver.

Another that the updates with health reasons is just to prevent a few nice souls from taking legal actions against you.

My bet is that most scammers would just disappear with the money... and they'd not tell their location, show their appearance in the videos and so on.
 
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Icefire said:
Not trying to hijack your thread joxer, but just wanted to show yet another apparent ripoff.
Click to expand...
It's not hijacking at all so don't worry. As another (potential) example it's still on topic.
 
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I won't open another thread.

This is not about a game. But 3 years ago, there was a project that "promised" 3d printer for all backers who shelled out $100 or more:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-printer-the-first-100-3d-printer-and-sc

It was success, it got more than half a million and it all looked good… Till the company went bankrupt.

It's still okay, these things are risky, costly, anything can happen.

But the actual reason for company sinking was revealed a few days ago.
As you may see in two last updates, company director (or something) about a year ago took $310K from the company funds and built himself a new house:
http://www.bug.hr/_cache/e843fe2bf2e6d67dbccdaf71e0f004d1.6d7da91fc30126791348efc844546502.jpg

The whole case is now in the hands of the police.

Note: I used $ for CAD (canadian dollar) in this case.
 
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Kickstarter for hardware is really a hard bet. If you think kickstartered games have management problems and they overpromise or get delayed, when the main cost is developer's time, imagine how much worse it gets when they actually have to pay for physical materials and shipping, when most of them have never dealt with all those logistics.
 
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I've backed 80+ Kickstarters and never had issues. But I also only back reasonable pitches. The cheapest 3D printers have been $500 and someone who hasn't proven they can deliver on hardware says they can now beat everyone in the industry and offer the same thing at 20% of the price. That isn't a reasonable promise.
 
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I never realised that Kickstarter does nothing in situations like that but after some thinking - it makes sense. There is no way to make the crowdfunding risk free and still keeping its advantages.
I guess the only advice is to look closely at the team behind the project not only the pretty video full of promises.
 
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