10 Times Crowdfunded Video Games Slapped You In The Face

In theory, crowdfunded video games can be a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, reality does not always reflect that.

Spurred by a watershed moment in 2012, when beloved developer Tim Schafer went on crowdfunding website Kickstarter and asked the public to provide funds for him to make a point-and-click adventure game (a genre no publisher wanted to touch). When his meagre proposal of $400,000 exceeded 1 million dollars within 24 hours, it signified a whole new and exciting type of funding in the industry.

Suddenly everyone, from long-respected developers to ambitious greenhorns, jumped on crowdfunding web sites to speak directly to the public and get funding for their 'passion project'. For a two year period, almost all of these projects received landmark funding campaigns.

Several years later though, the entire movement soured as several of these projects failed to deliver. On many occasions, the resulting game could vary from average, to broken, to terrible...or worse yet, resulted in no game at all.

At present, gamers have grown bitter and sceptical about the concept and for good reason; by directly investing money into a game project, they also get burnt when the concept falls apart. Here are some of the most baffling and tragic occasions when a crowdfunded project went south.

Yogcast is the ridiculously popular YouTube channel with 7 million-plus subscribers. This would explain then, how a proposed open-world Minecraft-lite game based on their characters and concepts, doubled its $250,000 price tag in a brief crowdfunding campaign.

It was full-steam ahead then as the channel hired Winterkewl Games to take on the game's development. Although a rough Beta eventual came out, the title was otherwise delayed numerous times over a two year period. Not surprisingly, it was eventually axed as the cash ran out in 2014.

Plenty of angry backers naturally fired off in forums, and then things went really ugly in a sand-throwing competition between Winterkewl and Yogcast concerning over $150,000 of the game's budget being 'unaccounted' for.

Backers were eventually given access to a new Yogcast's backed game called TUG as a consultation - ironically, that had its own ugly crowdfunding tale. Not to mention, it was a sub-par title that is proposed to go free-to-play...if it ever releases.