Shady Video Game Kickstarters That Ran Away With Your Money

Valve's Steam platform first showed the world how the internet could transform the gaming marketplace: by allowing buyers to legally purchase games for download. This led to a revolution in who could make games, since anybody could publish to the Steam platform on their own. But even as digital downloads became more common, that new model never solved the problem of funding a game in the first place. Without the money to make the game, many talented individuals and teams would never be able to bring their visions to life. 

Crowdfunding changed all that. With the ability to skip traditional investors and go straight to the people, small teams could drum up the necessary funding to get their game ideas into the hands of players. Kickstarter remains the most popular crowdfunding platforms, particularly for video game developers. Some fantastic games which never would have seen the light of day otherwise have emerged from this process.

But not every Kickstarter project has been a success. Sometimes, the final result simply wasn't very good. And in the worst-case scenario, a project can be funded... and then disappear. Thousands of dollars can vanish into thin air, leaving backers angry, frustrated, and feeling robbed. Here are some shady video game Kickstarters that ran away with your money.

Project Phoenix was a massive success on Kickstarter, raising over $1 million. Why so much interest in the game? Because its team was composed of industry veterans who'd worked on blockbuster titles ranging from Diablo III to Halo 4. But Project Phoenix was intended as a Japanese RPG with strategy elements, and it was no coincidence that most of the team had deep experience in the legendary Final Fantasy series. Most notably, Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu was also attached to Phoenix.

Yet despite the fantastic fundraising and raw talent, years crept by...and Project Phoenix was still vaporware. Eventually, news of a different sort emerged: game director Hiroaki Yura would release, but it wasn't the one people had funded. Instead, it was an entirely different project called Tiny Metal. Backers rightly wondered if their money, meant for the former game, had instead gone into the latter. And then came the accusation from within: Tiny Metal's own PR manager, Tariq Lacy, accused Yura of running a scam. The crowd's money was indeed going to the wrong title.

Yura has since defended himself, claiming that Tiny Metal had to be produced first for business reasons, and that Project Phoenix' money hasn't been touched. He has also claimed that Phoenix will still be coming, just a few years late. But without any signs of progress five years after the game was funded, skepticism is running high.

Unwritten: That Which Happened was intended to be a 4X game like Civilization, but with a narrative twist. Not only would there be a story, but the player would get to make decisions that would affect the overall game. Combined with a cave-painting art style and a director who'd worked on Dishonored, the idea was appealing enough to earn almost $80,000 during its Kickstarter campaign in 2013. Five years later, the game hasn't progressed beyond the Kickstarter page itself.

Joe Houston, the driving force behind the game, admitted in a post to backers that he had been forced to abandon the original production schedule. While he said there were a number of reasons for this, foremost among them was that his wife and daughter developed health issues that required his time and attention. And while that much is certainly understandable, the question remains: what happened to the money? To his credit, Houston did offer a refund to those who wanted one. But he also promised that if people didn't take their money back, he would complete the game.

Since then, there's been silence. It's not clear whether or not a backer can request a refund anymore, despite the complete disappearance of the project. There's no question that Houston's family situation was tragic. Nevertheless, those who invested their money have been left in the lurch.

Dinosaurs are making a comeback in the popular imagination, with games like Ark: Survival Evolved and movies like Jurassic World finding enormous success. The Stomping Land intended to dive into the dinosaur fantasy even further, by providing an open world in which dinosaurs would systematically react and respond to everything that happened around them. If the player killed a dinosaur, a carnivore would seek to steal the carcass; multiple dinosaurs could be lured into a massive battle. All this would be wrapped inside standard survival game tropes like gathering resources and crafting new items. Plus, you could ride dinosaurs. The Kickstarter was funded with nearly $115,000.

At first, progress appeared to be going well. In 2014, the game arrived in early access on Steam. While in rough shape, the pre-launch version of the game pointed to exactly the game that backers had invested their money to get made. But later that same year, the game was pulled from Steam, and hasn't been seen since. The Kickstarter page hasn't received a developer update since around the same time. Backers have no idea what the status of the game is.

By this point, it appears unlikely that The Stomping Land is being worked on, or that it'll ever be released. Refunds haven't been offered. The Stomping Land is a survival game that, itself, failed to survive. But it took all the resources with it.

The massively-multiplayer online (MMO) genre has been around for a while now, which means it's gone through a number of changes. Old-school fans often lament the perceived "watering down" of these games, which was why they greeted the Kickstarter campaign for Greed Monger with such enthusiasm. Promising to take players back to an older form of MMO no longer championed by major studios, it was exactly the kind of niche-appeal product that Kickstarter was born for. The campaign eventually raised over $90,000.

From there, the developers got to work. And it went poorly. Different members of the team began publicly blaming one another, claiming hostile work environments and even threatened lawsuits. One of the leads then dropped out of the project altogether. Finally, in 2016 the game was formally cancelled, putting to bed any hope that Greed Monger would ever release. Backers, meanwhile, never got their money back. Where it had gone, nobody knew. But it certainly hadn't gone into a complete, playable, old-school MMO.

But as with all good fantasy stories, there's a twist! Though the official development team appears to have taken off with, or at least spent, all the money, one of the founders of the project recently came out of nowhere to offer full refunds to anyone who requests it, paid for entirely out of his own pocket. The original donations may be gone, but at least one guy is trying to put it right.

The developers behind Roam hacked a slick demo together, and released a video of it on their Kickstarter page. With its relatively good graphics and slick combat animations, it looked amazing for something that was apparently made in only six weeks. The description promised a much larger game that would combine the resource gathering of survival games, the loot and exploration of RPGs, and the base-building of tower defense. Plus, the maps would be randomly generated for infinite replayability. That pitch was good enough to raise $100,000.

Once the money was transferred, however, Roam's updates became few and far between. The last substantive update, in 2015, claimed that plenty of work was being done behind-the-scenes. But since then, none of that work has been publicly released.

Then things got interesting. In a backers-only post copied over to Reddit, one of the project's team members, Ryan Sharr, claimed that another member, Zach Barson, had reneged on his duties. There was a small matter of $30,000 of the Kickstarter funding involved, in which Barson had allegedly tried to cash a check without Sharr's permission. This naturally lead to lawsuits. There hasn't been any word from the developers since. And Roam is nowhere to be seen. Nor is the money, which by Sharr's own admission, has gone towards legal fees instead of game development. By this point, it's likely a bunch of gamers unwittingly funded a lawyer's vacation somewhere.