With five days left on their Kickstarter campaign and $750,000 to go till they’d reach their funding goal, Stompy Bot have pulled the plug on their crowdfunding mission. Well, not quite. They’ve ended the Kickstarter campaign (the rules of Kickstarter dictate that if you don’t raise the funds you seek in the timespan of the campaign then you receive none of the funds) but they’ve continued soliciting pledges through their website.
Of course, with no guarantee they’ll ever raise the $800,000 they say are necessary to develop the game that money may be spent on a project that’s doomed to run out of finances.
We’re running across more and more of these projects in which a developer fails at the Kickstarter stage but continues seeking funds through other means. the issue from a consumer’s perspective is the questionable safety of their investment. Back in April Ambient Studios ran out of money and shut its doors while developing Death Inc. Just two weeks before they’d begun accepting pledges through their site.
Now, in the case of Death Inc., Ambient returned all the funds that had been pledged, saying “Obviously we cannot deliver on the commitments we made in the various Death Inc. alpha tiers. If you’re one of the alpha backers, don’t worry – we will be issuing full refunds so you will not be in any way out of pocket.” But not all developers will be in a position to do so. If they run out of funds part way through development, having already invested pledge money into a game then that money isn’t available to be refunded.
Essentially, you need to be extremely wary of pledging money to developers who have already failed at reaching their goal through Kickstarter because, no matter the quality of the game, it may be a sign that they will not be able to find the funds to complete development.