A video game kickstarter that ran off with the money

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I came across this kickstarter which was successfully funded in Feb 2010, for $10,000. Not nearly as much as recent kickstarters, but still a good amount of money to be given to one person. The person who launched it is apparently a well-known figure from Telltale Games.

She apparently fell off the face of the earth, posting about 1 "I'm not dead!" update since 2010. There is a facebook page that hasn't had updates since 2010 either. Look at the butthurt comments recently: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hlogas/ill-make-the-world-you-shape-the-story-lets-b/comments

The current craze is all nice, but who will be the first high-profile one to fail to deliver? If this $10,000 money grab exists, I'm sure there are others out there. What happens when a multi-million dollar kickstarter runs out of funds mid-development? It could easily happen; games are cancelled all the time.

You mean "pulling a Hervé"? Getting tons of funding then "mysteriously" run out of all money in the middle of development, not really producing anything?
I'm pretty sure it's totally *inevitable* until scum takes over and kikstarter gets canned.
But at least it might produce a few good titles until then, and shows that there is quite a market for games for specific audience.

BROS LOLLOLOL HER LAST LOGIN WAS MARCH 2012 LOLLOLOL SHE IS CHECKING OUT THE CARNAGE

Has been already addressed, well known developer will just ruin themselves in doing something like that, this woman is just a lonely no name.
And most of all, no demo, no assets, no nothing, she just asked money to pursue her dreams and people gave it to her.

I thought the funds were not finalized until delivery.

I report only the facts, fair and balanced.

Yeah, this?

As soon as the timer runs out on the kickstarter the funds are given to the person who launched it.

It wouldn't make sense if they only got the money when the product was delivered. The whole reason Brian Fargo launched the WL2 kickstarter was to get funds to make the game.

Nope, the funds are given out once the kickstarter ends and if it is funded (if not, no one gets actually charged). The entire point of the kickstarter is to get funds to actually make your idea come true. If the money was released only after the product was done, then there would be no point to kickstarter.

People shouldn't have given her money, nuff said.

How so? I'd think there would be much more of a point to it in that case, as it would serve as an incentive to actually create something that was promised, instead of just getting free money to do whatever with.

Currently, even the biggest developers (or especially them) are treating this as a magical fairy godmother giving them initial funds to develop a product they still intend on selling later on. But to whom? With the money released only after the product was done (as described in the initial design docs or reasonably close to it), it would actually mean that the product was supposed to be made for the very people who funded it.

As it is, they already have the money from people who were enticed by the initial buzz, so they don't have to please them at all anymore (just spin the whole thing so that it appears that they're a vocal minority), and they can freely develop a game that will be bought by everyone else.

If someone bothered with watching the pitch video would understand that there is nothing to discuss here, she literally showed two bad drawings and the rest was just blah, blah, blah, without mentioning that with 10K$ she should hope that they are enough to start a new career, no one will never ever hire her again.

Well I mean I assume they would be contractually obligated to return the funds if the project weren't finished by a certain date.

Nope.

But THIS, zeitgeist, is an important rule to this new game, of funding games development.

You must make the decision YOURSELF which projects you want to fund and which not. Now one can almost understand the plight of the big publishers.

And that's why I said many times that we need to become more concerned with learning how we can judge and understand kickstarters projects.

Yeah, without marketing and with sub par graphics, they will surely sell more than Bioware.

And how obvious that was. I actually let the full video run and it was clear that she had no idea what she was going to do.

I think alot of these kickstarter projects are going to have issues. Developers usually go over budget and it takes a great project manager to deliver the goods on-time and on budget. This dosn't even include kids and well meaning idiots who don't have the skills to produce anything but manage to con people into funding them.

What happens if a kickstarter runs out of funds during development? Do we get another kickstarter to finish the game?

zeitgeist

Well, I actually was using an hyperbole when I said it would be pointless, as kickstarter could still be used as an aggregator of projects and a measurement of popularity. But the big draw of the kickstarter is that it is a way for you to get funds to actually create what you want to create. If you didn't need the funds in first place, you could just create whatever it is you want to make and sell it through conventional means.

Wow, she ripped a whole 167 people off.

Possible. I don't know if the kickstarter terms allow this, but some developer could ask for a second batch of money to finish the game.

Some even stated explicitly that they are using the money to make an alpha. And from the point of software development it can be stretched very far what an alpha is.

Projects could also get cancelled, and the people would have to live with the consequences.

But there's really no reason to go into panic "ks is a scam" mode because of this. Because many people actually mean what they say. You must just be able to make them out.

The conclusion is of course, that kickstarter is going to become a hard business for such one man shows.

Which should not be surprising, because that's common sense.

This is correct, but you have to take into account that the vast majority of people doesn't exactly do too much research into, well, anything. And having them pay money in advance probably won't make them change that habit (since this is quite similar to simple preorders).

There will, of course, be people who will inform themselves, have a healthy dose of skepticism, analyze the developer pitch and the company, but there will also be so much more celebrity developer fans, people who donate because their social circles are donating, people interested in controlling some part of development as representatives of their interest groups, and so on. And the biggest portion of the donators will likely end up being just "regular" people swayed by marketing. If the bubble doesn't burst spectacularly in the near future, the whole thing will likely end up in the exact same people who currently buy games buying them in the exact same fashion and with the exact same reasons/motivations, only a year or two in advance.