Usually it’s the consumer who ends up on the wrong side of dodgy Kickstarter behaviour, but yesterday it was 2Awesome Studio, a development team hoping to bring scrolling space shooter Dimension Drive to life.
With under an hour left on their Kickstarter campaign, the team needed €7,000 to pass their funding goal of €30,000. Then, just when it looked like they were going to be unsuccessful, a pledge came in for exactly the sum they needed.
Understandably, the team was thrilled. Messages of good will poured in on Twitter. Unfortunately, just a few minutes later, Kickstarter contacted the team to inform them that the €7k pledge was fraudulent. Someone had made the pledge as a cruel joke. The deadline passed, and the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful.
“Somebody pledge 7k to our Kickstarter just to be taken a way in the last moment,” the team posted on its Twitter account. “Trolling our end of #Kickstarter. Funded and it’s gone.”
“Don’t know what to do now, mentally devastated :( Don’t know what to do now,” read a follow-up tweet, and it’s hard not to read that and feel tremendous sympathy for the team. It’s one thing to see your project fail, after all not every project necessarily deserves to succeed, but it’s another to have your emotions toyed with like that.
According to 2Awesome the fake pledger was a known troll who’s done similar things to other campaigns. A Kickstarter representative confirmed to Kotaku that the user behind this pointless bit of spitefulness has been suspended. Which is good, but probably not much of a comfort to the 2Awesome team.
Fortunately, as well as being home to a hive of absolute dicks, the internet can also be quite a nice place. Hundreds of people sent messages of support to the team, and several fellow developers, including Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell, Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail, and game writer Rhianna Pratchett, have encouraged 2Awesome to attempt to get an extension or find another fund-raising platform so that they can donate to the project. There might still be a happy ending here.
