In October of last year, the director of the video game Kickstarter Midora, which had raised $US73,470 but run out of money, wrote in a backer update that he was looking for outside investments.
Shockingly, he didn’t find any buyers — hard to imagine why investors wouldn’t want to latch onto a Kickstarter with no money — so now Midora‘s director, William “Mhyre” Ledent, says he’s offering refunds. Sort of.
“I first have to pay back close relatives and other parties that helped me way before the kickstarter,” Ledent wrote in an update yesterday. “Then, I will have to stabilise my own situation. I can’t offer refunds as soon as I earn money from a new job. I will need to save up money to create my own insurance, to be able to cover unexpected situations, emergencies.”
Ledent continued: “However, once that’s done, I don’t have many options and I won’t be able to offer refunds to certain people. Some people have pledged quite a bit of money on this Kickstarter and I can’t exactly repay them in full. Not at first. There is also the problem of how money will be transferred, and for this only one option is available to me: PayPal. This will certainly make some of you upset but, as someone who currently lives in Europe, I don’t have many other options.”
Backers will be able to start requesting refunds this summer, Ledent said. That’s when he’ll be able to afford them. “With the decision of offering refunds, Midora certainly becomes a distant dream,” he wrote. “However, I am not giving up on it at all. My goal is to get back on this project as soon as possible, using money I will hopefully make on other projects.”
Credit to Ledent: At least he’s keeping backers updated, unlike, say, Michael Wong, who raised over $US30,000 for a video game and then disappeared without a trace. But this is a sad situation all around.
“I am hoping some or most of you will not ask for a refund, at least not yet, in order to help me find some sort of balance,” Ledent wrote. “The less refunds, the sooner you can expect me to go back to Midora and bring you the game we all believed in from the start.”
Comments
10 responses to “Failed $73,000 Kickstarter Offers Refunds (Sort Of)”
Why not just get a job, keep working on the game in his free time?
Screw giving refunds. The backers knew the risk of their investment.
I agree on this in principle being a ks backer and a backer of the game itself if a project flops out that’s part of the risk.
But
1) It’s still a nice token gesture
2) Technically w/ the new ToS he has to do a refund since the project organiser needs to at least produce a product “as best attempt”. So far all folks have got are 1-2 beta stages. Not exactly “best attempt”
3) At the end of the day it’s also a pr excercise. It would be very hard to get any job at all if you’re listed down as someone who had a KS project and didn’t release a single thing
I agree. I backed it. I’m not asking for a refund. If he ever makes it, I’ll get a copy. If he doesn’t, I put in money knowing that it may not ever happen. Sucks to be me.
I can’t agree with this more.
It’s like trying to argue with the croupier that you want your chips back if you don’t win. You put them on the table – you heard last call – you sat through the roll of the dice.
As long as it wasn’t a scam and work was done on it, its fair to say you just lost the roll and you have to accept that.
He shouldn’t give refunds at all, people have to understand that using kickstarter isn’t purchasing a finished guaranteed product. There is always risk.
This part of the Kickstarter TOU means he has to though unless he can sufficiently explain how the remaining funds will be used to complete the project in another manner. Since he seems to have run out of viable options for an alternate path to completion, refunds are the only choice he really has at this moment
TIL, thanks haha. Guess I should understand more about kickstarter as well.
It’s things like this that make me wonder how Fig is going to handle the inevitable failed projects. Unlike Kickstarter which is more or less throwing money into someone’s hat in the hopes they can fulfill their objective, Fig has the option of actually investing in a project and getting a portion of the returns. If a project fails in the corporate world, investors get very upset and are generally first in line when assets start getting liquidated so they can recoup their losses and it can get very messy legally. I wonder if Fig has similar protections?
One would hope they’d have a fire sale clause or something. If the investment goes under, some company should be nominated as the asset liquidator and recoup money on behalf on investors. Then that money should be distributed back to the investors based on how much was invested and at what point of the project.