Tales of the Rampant Coyote

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Game Canceled After Partners Allegedly Blew Kickstarter Funds on Liquor, Bars, and Strippers

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 1, 2016

AntSimThis is both awesome and terrible, but leans more on the side of terrible:

Ant Simulator Canceled After Devs Spend Kickstarter Money on ‘Booze and Strippers’

Technically, it wasn’t the game that was funded by Kickstarter funds, but a tutorial series (unless there was another crowdfunding campaign that I missed). But the cash from crowdfunding plus investment money for making a commercial version of Ant Simulator was apparently squandered, causing the programmer and creative director Eric Tereshinski to leave the LLC he created and call it quits and resign.

The game was looking pretty sharp, too. Something cool and different, at least. A vast improvement over the original Ludum Dare project, but a good look into what it takes to turn a 48-hour prototype into something with of commercial quality.

Eric Tereshinski is looking to personally refund the money for pre-orders of the game, which is a stand-up thing to do, but … how? And was the pre-order money part of the reported funds that were misused? Assuming so and assuming his claims are legitimate, it’s going to be tough going.

I could make one of my usual warnings about being careful who you fund in a Kickstarter, but in this case, other than a bit of confusion about where the money was really going, it wasn’t such an unknown entity. The guy had done tutorial videos before, and so he was a known quantity. What exactly his partners were bringing into the mix was a little less clear, and maybe that could have been a warning sign.

But really, regardless of what may have happened here, I take this is more of a warning about business partners, and how to run a business, I guess. In any case, they were long-term friends who went into business together, and reportedly two of the partners raided the till to party – supposedly in a contractually valid way, but they still behind the back of the third partner (and the public face of the company, and the one who the company was kind of built around). ANY potential entrepreneur is terrified by scenarios like this one. Including me.

Of course, this is just one side of the story. But it’s easy enough to imagine.

UPDATE: Another side of the story – the partners speak up. Wherever the truth lay, it’s clear there was a dysfunctional business relationship going on there. Ick.

 


Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 2 Comments to Read



  • Andy_Panthro said,

    I’ve backed a lot of things on Kickstarter, and there’s a few that have seem to have stopped for whatever reason (including one where they seem to have taken the money and run), but thankfully I rarely pledge that much. I’d be quite upset at this sort of behaviour though, and it’s surely harmful for crowdfunding in general.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    It’s questionable how much was actually Kickstarter funds though… maybe “leftover” kickstarter funding? It could have been contributed investment capital (possibly money contributed by the other partners themselves, and they just decided to take it back out and partied with it without telling him). Worse, it could have been money from the pre-orders.

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