The Ouya #FreeTheGames Fund, an initiative to match funds raised via crowdfunding on Kickstarter, continues to be a lightning rod of controversy.
We covered Gridiron Thunder, a game that raised over $170,000 on Kickstarter allegedly thanks to some friends in high places. The average contribution was over $900, an unusually high average contribution for a Kickstarter game.
Elementary, My Dear Holmes was also participating in the program, but funding was suspended by Kickstarter after some suspicious contributions were discovered.
Now a campaign for Dungeons the Eye of Draconus has been cancelled by the project creator after the game was rejected from Ouya’s FreeTheGames fund, and project creator William A. McDonald expressed his disdain for the move in a recent backer update…
Well apparently OUYA has decided to change the rules on us. With less than two days to go they have removed our #Freethegames link from the OUYA homepage and delisted us from www.Freethegamesfund.com website. The timing aligns with winning back of some devs that threatened to pull their games through conversations on twitter.
It appears we were thrown under the FTG bus. OUYA gets their fall guy and Grid Iron keeps their money. So while a bunch of ex-EA employees with rich friends can apparently receive $171,000 in match funds for a game they, allegedly, already finished. A person whose father was willing to make a large sacrifice so his son’s team could qualify for the fund and actually develop their game properly is disallowed. If we had remained silent we very likely would have received the funds, our transparency and honesty apparently was our undoing.
McDonald had admitted that a significant portion of the over $50,000 the game had raised was contributed by friends and family. Ouya took that as reason to remove the game from contention in their fund.
Despite the objections of Mr. McDonald, some backers have accused him of gaming the system and being unethical in his execution of the campaign.
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