Steve Swink is an Arizona-based game developer and the man behind Scale, a video game that raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter in a round that closed late in 2013.
The game looks incredible, by the way. It elicits thoughts of Portal with a bit of an indie spin. The Kickstarter trailer is at the right and includes some gameplay footage.
As GDC 2014 continues in San Francisco this week, Swink took the stage to talk about crowdfunding the game. Recode has an excellent synopsis of the talk here.
One excerpt clearly sticks out, emphasis ours…
He opened with a crowd-pleasing bit, tiredly reciting how great Kickstarter is into the microphone while advancing through a series of slides with more sinister text, suggesting that running a crowdfunding project had led him to overstate and deceive to get more press and backer attention.
Material misstatements for the purposes of garnering more funding and attention in the press. The only questions are how often does this happen and how can it be mitigated? To brush it off is silly and risky for the industry. Eventually someone will have to tackle this problem.