So Kickstarter have finally pulled the plug on the Areal project from West games. Kickstarter sent the following message to it's backers:
A review of the project uncovered evidence that it broke Kickstarter's rules. We may suspend projects when they demonstrate one or more of the following:
A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere
Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project
Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator
Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners.
They finished by pointing out:
We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message.
It is a sad ending but personally I do not feel they deserved the support that they could of got from the Stalker community, West games often made unfounded accusations against myself and others simply because we wanted our questions answered.
This one's for you KS
I.imgur.com
I've always been super cynical about crowd funding and this just makes me more cynical.
I like the idea of Kickstarter but I haven't had any experience of using it until this appeared so I don't know how often it suffers from being used dishonestly, This was my first experience of KS and it was interesting, The project was blatantly full of holes yet the amount of people that backed regardless was shocking.
Good. This came off as a scam from the very beginning and they did little to convince us otherwise since then.
I think a lot was learnt with this.Any project needs to be honest, transparent and "realistic" (no pun intended). Areal failed at this and subsequently so did their project.
Hey Dave, sorry I have no idea about the deal with kickstarter... but when people 'back' projects does the money go straight through to the project instantly, or is it when they reach 100% funded that everyone is demanded to fill in their payment details?
On Kickstarter the pitch lasts a month and at the end of the month if they have have reached or passed there goal the money is then taken from backers accounts. Because this project was suspended the money is not taken.
So, Who is to blame exactly?
Incgamers.com
With this type of duplicity, they only have themselves to blame. They still try to play the victim card to anyone who will listen, but I imagine that audience is shrinking on a daily basis.