Thanks to the detectives on several online communities, including Reddit, Something Awful, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a scam to exploit Kickstarter, the crowd-funding website, has been unveiled.
According to the game's Kickstarter page, the team consisted of two former creative directors, one vice president of production, one former CTO, three senior programmers, one user interface designer/programmer, and four 3D experts. The team allegedly worked on both World of Warcraft and Diablo II.
However, it wasn't long before users started noticing something fishy. Namely, that game's artwork displayed on the Kickstarter page had been lifted from other websites, the text for rewards had been copied from another Kickstarter project and the game poster was a mash-up of stolen artwork. The scammers even stole fake office photos from Burton Design Group for their Facebook page (now defunct).
The page even included a promotional video featuring "Seth Westfall," alleged creative director and cofounder of "Little Monster Productions":
There's no word yet on who Seth Westfall really is, but he's talking about the game, so we can only assume that he's probably in on the scam.
Kickstarter has recently been a very successful platform for indie game developers, so it's no wonder that people are trying to take advantage of the system. Most notably, game studio Double Fine raised more than $3.3 million for its new game, dubbed Double Fine Adventure -- $1 million of which was raised in less than 24 hours.
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