Kickstarter et alia

[Xerophyte]

Hasn't this been reported yet? A scam is a scam.

By multiple people, myself included. I'm not sure Kickstarter have staff on weekends and if they do they're probably going to want to do their own brief investigation and give the people involved the chance to reply. After which I assume this project will be purged, since there's no way it's legit. I'm not criticizing Kickstarter for this, it's not their fault some people are greedy dicks.

I don't think Mythic as such is all that interesting: it's an incompetent scam, the project will go poof and possibly they'll get sued for some form of fraud or however things work in the US. What I do find interesting is that this is, far as I'm aware, the first scam that's been published on Kickstarter. I'd be surprised if that didn't have some repercussions on how Kickstarter operate and it also shows how easy it would be to get a few thousand dollars of funding for a fraudulent project if you're not dumb enough to copy all your art from the internet.

[Keep]

Much more interesting are the questions raised for when someone competent does the same successfully, which seems pretty inevitable, and the consequences for Kickstarter as a concept for when it happens.

Add to it when some earnest upcomers set up a kickstarter, but are a bit liberal with the artwork they use to illustrate their pitch/the ability for the conmen to hide behind such an excuse.

The two are impossible to tell apart. How do you distinguish good intentions from bad?

[pakoito]

Probably some other project is already a scam and we will find out on the long term, but the first priority is to get this one out. I have already sent some stuff to reddit to grow awareness.

I have recently read about some kickstarter alternative with more legal safety in Penny Arcade. I thought it was a bit madness, and I thought Kickstarter was careful with their entrants and there was someone greenlighting the pitching, but apparently not...

[pakoito]

Having a second thought. This looks too amateurish...what if it was an inside job from someone in /v/ or SA or something to either get rich (lol) or to point out Kickstarter's faulty application system.

[ColOfNature]

I looked at that earlier and was wholly unimpressed with their video and poorly photoshopped T-shirt. With luck they'll get pulled pretty quick.

I'd like you to point your ocular organs at constFLUX which I think looks quite interesting - although they might struggle to raise the cash they're looking for in the brief time remaining.

[Xerophyte]

Some other goon asked Mythic why their art was apparently all over the internet and actually got a reply:

The in game screen shots are from OUR game environments and our concept work was purchased 6 months ago (yes the concepts were outsourced as we did not have an artist on staff to produce high end hand done work). We have just taken action against an individual who was abusing our face book accounts and have filed accordingly as with the Facebook staff. We have put in a lot of man hours into our game so far and the idea of our project being a scam is absurd. If you have any furthure questions feel free to ask as we are trying to clear this whole thing up as it has become a mess and deeply affected us. Thank you

Their Facebook page was taken down once people started commenting on the Burton Design pictures being just that. It seems this will at least be an entertaining meltdown.

[Zag]

Well, it was pretty much inevitable that someone would try to use Kickstarter in a scam and here's contestant number one: Mythic: the Story of Gods and Men.

Points of evidence (Internet Detective-ing not mine, but from some nice young men at Something Awful):
- God character art is from here, just with a sepia filter applied.
- Backgrounds are from here and here.
- Poster consists of this icon on top of this texture.
- Their sword reward pictures are from here.
- The reward tier text and values are copied wholesale from The Banner Saga's kickstarter, with just a game name search & replace.
- Their office photos are just crops from the Burton Design Group.

Suspicious but not conclusive skeezyness:
- They're "the same team that left Activision / Blizzard in search of something better!" and apprently worked on Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft (2009-2011), which isn't very likely.
- "Animations will be done via motion capture thanks to some friends at Disney/Pixar!", also not very likely.


This attempt was really too amateurish to actually succeed, although the project still got $5k in pledges. Not bad for the few hours worth of effort it seems to have involved. Much more interesting are the questions raised for when someone competent does the same successfully, which seems pretty inevitable, and the consequences for Kickstarter as a concept for when it happens.

Kickstarter does take 5% from any successfully funded project as I recall. I'm very curious as to what its legal obligations will be if a funded project turns out to not actually exist.

Wow, that is scum-tastic.

I can answer a few of your last questions (Geoff here, from Sandswept Studios, about to hit our deadline on Kickstarter for The Dead Linger.) They won't be getting any of that money anyway if they didn't hit their goal and I'm sure KS is going to take their project down momentarily. Nothing is charged until the deadline, so those peoples' money remains safe. Kickstarter does take about 5%, and Amazon Payments takes about 2-4% for card processing. The only thing in the "terms of use" are that if you have to cancel your project, you officially cancel it. I've no idea what they would do in the event a fully funded project was literally a scam. Maybe Tim Schafer can tell us!

(joke)

Well, I'd personally say Kickstarter is a pretty awesome outlet doing a really cool thing for indie devs, I'm sure this will be a glorious moment for people who feel as though 90% of the projects that get funded are totally stupid and no one should give money to them.

Just my two cents.

[Wizardry]

FUNDING CANCELED

Funding for this project was canceled by the project creator 4 minutes ago.

[pakoito]

Well, I'd personally say Kickstarter is a pretty awesome outlet doing a really cool thing for indie devs, I'm sure this will be a glorious moment for people who feel as though 90% of the projects that get funded are totally stupid and no one should give money to them.

Yet this is a free market and they can do it, as long as they get a final product. So far out of my 2 KS backed projects one has been delayed for a year and No Time To Explain was far from perfect (and close to a Kongregate game). I do not feel buyer's remorse though, I knew the risks. Hopefuly Schaafer and FTL stuff will be more successful.

[Rube]

I just registered so I could chip into this discussion, because it's something that's been irking me. I'm an aspiring indie dev that decided to jump onto the crowd sourcing bandwagon, and being a UK resident I decided to use Indiegogo.

In flogging my Indiegogo project I got what I considered a surprising amount of people who, as some in this thread voiced, believed that Indiegogo was just for scam projects because the authors were getting funding up front rather than if they reached their goal. This kind of mystifies me. There are Kickstarter projects with nothing but 3D modelling software render shots and/or concept art that get tens of thousands of pounds while there are Indiegogo projects with videos showing ingame footage that get nothing. Even if those Kickstarter projects are legit, they haven't demonstrated any ability to actually create the game they say they will.

Hitting some funding goal doesn't mean it's any less or more likely to be a scam. If anything I think it reduces people's ability to be critical about a project, because I see a lot of people saying things like "if it gets to $100,000 it COULDN'T be a scam!", reasoning that sounds like some form of sunk cost fallacy. If an Indiegogo project only gets half it's funding, it can still do a lot of things with that money. Get the game to a state where it can seek more funding from, for example, pre-order sales or independent backers.

[pakoito]

Thing is, people believes, heck even I did, that Kickstarter has some sort of filter for projects, that they check for viability or planning or some kind of backbone to make them legit. Apparently it is not that way and after the Double Fine stuff a lot of people thought they had found a goldmine. I am all-in for Kickstarter, not so long ago I was lamenting the lack of videogame projects, but I think they should start filtering some of them, like those "just render and idea" ones you just said.

As for indiegogo, it lacks visibility and juridical safety so their offer is not good for me, hence I do not buy.

[Rube]

What do you mean by visibility?

Kickstarter has as much juridical safety as Indiegogo - none. Both services say that you must deliver your project if you receive funding, and both are as opaque in how they're going to go about ensuring that. There have been a few Kickstarter projects that were revealed to basically be scams after receiving funding, and Kickstarter did nothing about it.

So long as you don't literally run with the money and release something Kickstarter wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court anyway, assuming they were willing to spend the many tens of thousands of dollars required for a civil lawsuit in the US. They've never done so before.

Crowd sourcing is just innately open to this kind of abuse, Kickstarter is no different.

[Capt. Eduardo del Mango]

Don't stress it - internet crowdsourcing's popularity and exposure is very new and very awsome and, provably, very useful - too useful to vanish. The potential for scamming has (entirely reasonably) been to the fore since people started collecting suge huge sums over Kickstarter, but it's like any new thing, especially any new thing involving money.

It's a bit like internet shopping - remember how that was perceived at the start? "How can you trust it? What if it's a front? What if it's a scam?" And with a bit of time and collective experience we realised that yes, there's no problem doing your shopping over the internet if you're armed with that bit of savvyness and familiarity. You can't 'trust' an online store in the same way as a brick and mortar store because they're not the same thing, but when we became collectively aware of how they worked and understood them then we realised you could use online shops just as if not more efficiently and safely than the 'real' thing.

Once we've seen enough of these projects to get the required experience then I'm sure scam crowdsources projects will become a fairly minor issue - it's possible to make a scam out of any business venture, and I don't think it reveals any gaping hole in crowdsourcing logic. People will avoid Kickstarter scams the same way they avoid banking scams, cold calling scams and online shopping scams - with the use of experience, and almost always successfully.

[Skull]

People will avoid Kickstarter scams the same way they avoid banking scams, cold calling scams and online shopping scams - with the use of experience, and almost always successfully.

I used to work for one of those cold calling scam companies, you would be surprised how many people will fall for it.

[deano2099]

Over in the music world, Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter for her new album and tour is doing crazy numbers. I especially like this bit:

**ALL SHIPPING COSTS ARE INCLUDED IN EVERY PACKAGE, NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE!**please bear this in mind when you look at the prices. it was easier to do things this way, but it also means, in the spirit of art-in-the-mail-democracy, that those of you living in new york might be paying a little bit more to cover the shipping to the people in, say, tibet.

[WetWired]

Well, it was pretty much inevitable that someone would try to use Kickstarter in a scam and here's contestant number one: Mythic: the Story of Gods and Men.

Points of evidence (Internet Detective-ing not mine, but from some nice young men at Something Awful):
- God character art is from here, just with a sepia filter applied.
- Backgrounds are from here and here.
- Poster consists of this icon on top of this texture.
- Their sword reward pictures are from here.
- The reward tier text and values are copied wholesale from The Banner Saga's kickstarter, with just a game name search & replace.
- Their office photos are just crops from the Burton Design Group.

Suspicious but not conclusive skeezyness:
- They're "the same team that left Activision / Blizzard in search of something better!" and apprently worked on Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft (2009-2011), which isn't very likely.
- "Animations will be done via motion capture thanks to some friends at Disney/Pixar!", also not very likely.


This attempt was really too amateurish to actually succeed, although the project still got $5k in pledges. Not bad for the few hours worth of effort it seems to have involved. Much more interesting are the questions raised for when someone competent does the same successfully, which seems pretty inevitable, and the consequences for Kickstarter as a concept for when it happens.

Kickstarter does take 5% from any successfully funded project as I recall. I'm very curious as to what its legal obligations will be if a funded project turns out to not actually exist.

A workmate informed me about this scam today, the 3d environments in the "in game" video\screenshots are taken from my portfolio www.brentwaller.com

[Keep]

So not gaming related, but entertainment media-wise I'm finding this very interesting.

Indicative of changes afoot?

[SirKicksalot]

This must be a social experiment by Tom Chick.

[vinraith]

This must be a social experiment by Tom Chick.

The return of Tom and Bruce? Now there's a Kickstarter I'll fund!

[Firkragg]

Have pledged to Kinetic Void. Just, uh, throwing it out there I guess, should anyone be interested :) Found the ship designer fun to play with, they plan on having the space you fly around in procedurally generated. And capital ships. It's the kind of game I dream about. Pledge at your own risk.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...void?ref=users

EDIT: This particular design made me laugh out loud when I first saw it, bonus points for reference: http://i.imgur.com/3ALxL.png