It was going to come to the public's attention sooner or later, but it looks like the first attempt at scamming the KickStarter program has come to fruition. Little Monster Productions' MYTHIC: The Story Of Gods And Men, has been cancelled after a number of questionable and allegedly false information surfaced on the project.
So, some guys from the forum Something Awful [via Blues] happened across this bogus KickStarter game called MYTHIC: The Story of Gods and Men, which is supposed to to be due out in 2013, and is basically described as an open-world action-RPG with "Skyrim" like graphics and multiple story routes. Sounds like a $100 million dollar game right? Well, the Little Monster Production chaps were asking for $80,000 to finish off the production of the game, including the soundtrack and motion capture.
On the official KickStarter page, the team states that...
"We are trying to raise the 80k in order to secure the motion capture animation team and studio time for the games sound track. If we can save a little then it will be put back into programming the game engine."
Before going forward, I'll just point out that you don't finish a game with "motion capture". Finishing up a soundtrack makes sense but mo-cap is done early on in the game's design structure otherwise you will have a lot of incontinence and inconsistencies in the animation, especially if most of everything else was hand-animated and then you try to bring in motion capture for other aspects of the design. In fact, once you finish the model designs the next step in the design process is skeletal rigging and animations.
However, for the sake of argument even if the former were the case, these guys, if they really wanted to finish off their game and add in mo-cap, would have come across something called iPi Software, the link explains why asking for $80,000 for mo-cap is bogus for an indie group who can already do a "Skyrim" type game. Trust me, if I'm going to be designing a big game on a small budget I'm going to be flexing all sorts of middleware muscle and cost effective measures. Asking for close to $100k for mo-cap when I could buy the iPi suite for a minimum of $395.99 is straight up BS.
Anyways, Rock, Paper, Shotgun noticed that the Something Awful guys had basically pointed out that the MYTHIC game was using a lot of plagiarized assets to promote their game, and readily posted about it on Reddit to help spread the word.
What's more is that if the plagiarized assets didn't tip anyone off to this being an obvious scam, the description page on KickStarter is riddled with poor grammar and ambiguous references, such as the [elite] team consisting of ex-veterans from Activision/Blizzard with no actual references or background details other than a brief allusion to working on Diablo 2 as well as WoW between 2009 and 2011. Also, the chap in the video, Seth Westfall, the self-proclaimed game director, doesn't seem to have any attachment to any previous Activision/Blizzard game(s), either.
Anyways, the KickStarter page has rightfully been cancelled for this game after backers put in close to $5,000 for the game. Since the KickStarter conditions were not met within the time frame Little Monster Productions will not be receiving a dime.
This is a shining example that ignorant, greedy mofos will try to capitalize wherever they can. But the gaming community is keeping a close eye on crowd-sourcing initiatives because we take our gaming hobby serious and we have to deal with enough schemes and scams in the mainstream gaming space, so let this be a lesson to scammers: we will send you running to the hills if you try to screw up opportunities for people to crowd-source. So don't do it!
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