The Internet itself isn’t an inherently evil or benign device; what gives it morality is the intention of its users, such as Seth Westfall. Westfall (or so he calls himself) began a Kickstarter for Mythic: The Story of Gods and Men, an RPG from Little Monster Productions to rival World of Warcraft and Skyrim, built by a team of former Activision Blizzard developers. The project asked for $80,000 and it had raised $5,000 until, three days ago, it was canceled. Little Monster didn’t say why it was canned, but backers accused the whole thing of being fake.
Potential donors did some research before forking over their money to Mythic, and they declared that most of the artwork was stolen, Little Monster Productions didn’t exist outside of Kickstarter’s universe, pictures of its offices belonged to another company, and that even the rewards were word-for-word copied from The Banner Saga‘s Kickstarter. By the time the apparent scam spread to Reddit, Mythic was doomed.
Little Monster Productions responded to scam claims on the Mythic comments page: “It seems we have been subjected to false claims of ownership right to our concepts. The game itself is well in progress and is NOT a scam of any kind. Thank you for understanding. If you have any furthur questions please feel free to ask.” The Little Monster Productions Kickstarter account has since been deleted.
As the $80,000 funding goal wasn’t reached, those who contributed to the $5,000 donation pool won’t lose any money, but we hope they did gain a bit of caution.
Gaming Kickstarter canceled after audience outs shady practices originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 01 May 2012 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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