Two of the updates, however, dealt with something that backers simply didn’t want to hear. Most of them are about the game’s development, including character breakdowns and some talk of engine enhancements. In the almost 8 months that have passed since Confederate Express was funded, only 4 updates have been posted. While this isn’t a particularly small goal for a game of this size, it probably wasn’t a realistic expectation, and as time went on, funds for the game dwindled while the developers remained quiet (in our interview with Maksym, development costs were now somewhere around $70,000). Here’s the skinny: Developer Maksym Pashanin and his team of artists, programmers, and musicians started a Kickstarter campaign for a game called Confederate Express. In November of last year, this campaign was funded and reached almost 400% of its original goal, ending on November 20th with nearly $40,000 in the bank. For those of you in the dark about this ordeal, I’m going to outline the situation and provide a way to process the outcome that you can use, if you like, to formulate a mature response to a company making a questionable decision. I even saw a reasonable portion of backers that understood the situation and reacted like grown-ass, responsible people. I saw a studio with a flimsy grasp on their fan base, I saw a community of entitled crybabies, and I even saw an overlap of interests that contributed to a delay, but I didn’t see a scam, and I didn’t see any reason for an investigation or mass refund – two things backers of Confederate Expresswere demanding. Maybe “con” or “scam” would be a better word for what I was looking for, and try as I might, I couldn’t find the “scam” that the comments section on the Kickstarter for Confederate Expresswas referring to. However, as I began to investigate this scandal, I had a really hard time finding anything worthy of the word. Want a sandwich? Even that requires an initial investment. Everything takes an initial investment, after all. The game doesn’t exist yet, so the developers aren’t trying to get you to buy a product that they’re not confident in, they’re trying to get enough money together to make a game that will sell on its own. Crowdfunding works very differently, believe it or not, because it’s not a pre-order. I think pre-orders of AAA games are a scourge on humanity, mostly because of the reason they exist: To get you to buy a game before a credible source has had the chance to fully analyze it. The hardest thing for most people to understand is that backing a project on Kickstarter or IndieGoGo isn’t the indie equivalent of pre-ordering a game. Consumers need to understand where their money is going. They certainly don’t exist to shame Kickstarter as a whole, they just help create a community of backers that know when a campaign looks fishy. I was approached by our Editor in Chief today about an article surrounding the latest “scam” Kickstarter had to offer.

Kickstarter scam