Kickstarter goes one better than the white Elephant.
Fully Funded Kickstarter Project Goes Belly-Up
Lusipurr.com’s illustrious namesake has oft times banged on about the immanent prospect of fully funded Kickstarter projects failing, leaving precious little recourse to the financial backers who were promised a product that will never be delivered. Despite charges of slippery slope alarmism it would seem that the other penny has at last dropped and the sky has finally fallen in because Kickstarter has this week notched up its first fully funded project to fail. Chicken Little has been vindicated.
The project itself is a turn-based haunted house game titled Haunts: The Manse Macabre. The developer, Mob Rules Games, set a modest goal of $25,000, which went on to be funded to the tune of $28,739. The finances were intended to see the four-man studio through while they finished the game, yet toward the end of the project their lead programmer, Jonathan, left to work at Google, while the studio’s other programmer similarly departed for other employment opportunities, leaving the project to be completed by artist, Austin, and designer, Dakan, who were barely capable of reading the game’s code, leading to attempts at quashing bugs only serving to create new ones.
Obviously a small $30,000 project is not exactly going to spell disaster for Kickstarter, yet it may serve as an interesting microcosm of what to expect once a large project is eventually seen to fail. There has not as yet been much fallout from the project’s difficulties owing to the fact that the game designer has been making big promises of being in talks with undisclosed benefactors to get the project finished; yet backer patience is not infinite, and Dakan’s plans appear to be highly dubious.
Sega’s future.
Sega Port Old and Mediocre Game to PC
Sega have this week proved why they are such an amazing publisher by releasing a PC port of the 2008 Creative Assembly game, Viking: Battle for Asgard. The game was originally released to a decidedly mixed response, garnering a 68/100 metarating on Metacritic, which apparently is sufficient to meet Sega’s selection criteria for which projects warrant a 2012 release on the PC.
The port is not being handled by Creative Assembly themselves, but instead by Hardlight. Sega promises that the game will feature a full accompaniment of PC options for graphical gee-gaws, and is currently retailing on Valve’s Steam service – so now at last PC gamers can enjoy this timeless gem which was hitherto forgotten in the mists of 2008. This is definitely a better use of resources than releasing weaboo crap like Valkyria Chronicles 3 or a Shenmue HD Collection.
EA Hand Out the Keys to the Candy Store
Chavs nicked me loo.
The past week has seen a blunder on the part of electronic arseholes lead to a ransacking of their Origin bloatware storefront, as gamers suddenly realised that EA had left the shutters unlatched, so to speak. The situation arose when EA decided to hand out $20 vouchers to a select few Origin customers who elected to complete a survey on the shitty service, yet the joke was on them when customers came to discover that the codes were not set to expire upon use.
This turn of events quickly saw the voucher codes as the subject of their own Reddit thread, inviting hundreds of gamers to download scores of games for free. Due to the fact that the error occurred on EAs end, the company has elected to honour all transactions made with the faulty codes. In all honesty this situation may not have turned out too poorly for EA, as any gamer wanting free Origin titles would have to first create an account in order to use the codes – and to that end events probably transpired no differently than a promotional giveaway. At any rate, at least EA now know how it feels to have their own system invaded by greedy arseholes.
