Friday The 13th Exclusive Kickstarter Content Has Been Stolen

Jason Friday the 13th

Thanks to a bit of cyber sleuthing from a community member, we now know that Kickstarter-exclusive content from Friday the 13th: The Game has been stolen and sold online. Developer Gun Media has gone on to confirm the theft, saying they are attempting to track down the culprit.

It's amazing what you'll stumble across on reddit these days. In the case of Friday the 13th: The Game, one concerned player brought to light a series of sales tied to the game's backer-exclusive content. User JasonsThrowaway13 discovered codes for said content were being sold on eBay and, following a little digging, they may have helped pinpoint where the misdeeds took place.

As IGN points out, all of this is still being looked into at this time but, for now, it looks like they've at least narrowed down the search.

If you backed Friday the 13th on Kickstarter, one of the game's rewards was for a Tom Savini/Counselor Clothing Pack, which would give players access to a limited counselor and some gear to outfit their playable characters with. As noted in the original post, Throwaway saw that these codes were being sold online, decided to buy one and, seeing that it worked, started questioning why so many were being sold.

Throwaway got to digging and turned up a whole bunch of interesting tidbits that makes it look like someone from Gun Media, their distributor at Limited Run Games, or perhaps another partner was selling the codes online.

The post was only live on reddit a handful of hours before Gun Media reached out to say they were looking into the situation. Apparently they were aware of the eBay sales prior to the post going live, but assumed they were being orchestrated by someone who had purchased multiple copies of Friday the 13th through the Kickstarter campaign and were selling them online.

Based on the findings from Throwaway, though, they're now leaning toward something sketchy being afoot in house and are looking into it.

These are all allegations at this point, but Throwaway offers some pretty compelling additional details as to where these extra Friday the 13th DLC codes may have come from. The seller's other items include codes for LawBreakers, which had a physical distribution by Limited Run. They also include trading cards created by/for Limited Run, and four-pack passes to PAX. On top of that, the shipping source for the eBay account was originally set to Raleigh, North Carolina, where both Gun and Limited Run have employees.

Based on all of that, it appears Gun is trying to figure out who might be responsible for these eBay sales, whether internally or from one of their partners. As for the fans, we understand why they would be upset. One of the major draws of early backing is to earn content that proves you supported something from its earliest stages. Other folks having that content who didn't "earn" it doesn't hurt anybody, but selling access to that content en masse is certainly a crummy thing to do. Oh, and probably illegal.

Ryan Winslett

Staff Writer for CinemaBlend.