The controversial Kickstarter campaign for West Games’ Areal project has been suspended. Kickstarter hasn’t yet given a reason or released any official statement, but presumably the website’s ‘Trust & Safety team’ swung into action once rumours of bad practice and possible self-pledging began to circulate.
Not to be denied, the West Games team has instead begun a new crowd-funding campaign through its own website.
The news comes just a few days after the first footage of Areal surfaced. Unfortunately for West Games the damage had already been done; the project was suspected of self-pledging, in other words bumping up the fund level yourself to convince the public there’s interest in your project, when funds jumped from $40,000 to above the campaign goal at around $65,000 in just two days, despite only two new backers joining the project.
That’s not all of course - there were accusations from fellow developer Vostok Games and mod team Misery, some messing around with user comments on the campaign forum, and unanswered questions regarding the role of the mysterious Leonid Kovtun, who was set to receive all the money raised despite not being a member of the development team. Oh god, and I forgot the letter from President Putin.
In a statement on their new funding site, West Games say that their project was cancelled without warning. ”After Vice news wrote an article about us,” they write, ”people started contributing every minute, but Kickstarter was afraid of the controversy surrounding our project, so they suspended funding. We set our base goal at 50K; even with 2 days left, we raised more than 64 thousand dollars, and our competitors were doing everything that they could to stop that.”
”We are the creators of STALKER, and we know that we can make Areal even better than that series, because of advances in technology, gameplay mechanics, and story. We need your support to make that happen, so we have opened up a website wherein we will continue to raise funds.”
I think we can agree, for my sanity as much as anything else, that it’s a good thing Kickstarter stepped in when they did. West games may of course be genuine developers with good intentions, but their continued bizarre actions and lack of transparency were doing no-one any good.
