Yogscast's Kickstarter-funded Yogventures canceled
Winterkewl Games has halted development of its crowdfunded open-world sandbox game Yogventures, announcing that it will "probably need to go out of business and possibly file for bankruptcy" after failing to deliver a product to backers.
Announced in 2012, Yogventures featured characters from Yogscast, a YouTube channel that rose to prominence with a series of popular Minecraft-themed videos. Though the project earned more than $560,000 in backer pledges, developer updates ceased in August of last year, leading many supporters to question development progress and seek refunds.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Yogscast revealed that it will send Steam codes for Nerd Kingdom's in-progress RPG TUG to Yogventures backers as compensation.
"[W]e have organized for Nerd Kingdom to have the source code, assets and designs of Yogventures to ensure we're making best use of Winterkewl's work," Yogscast's statement reads. "For the Yogventures Kickstarter backers the physical rewards should already have been received and we're happy for people to contact us at yogventures@yogscast.com if any are missing so we can look into it for them."
"Although we're under no obligation to do anything, instead we're going to do our best to make this right, and make you really glad you backed the project!" Yogscast co-founder Lewis Brindley said in an e-mail to Yogsventure backers.
Winterkewl Games reflected on the game's cancellation at its official forums. "Working on Yogventures was an amazing experience and everyone at Winterkewl Games really wanted to achieve the very lofty goals the game set out to do, but lack of experience in planning and managing a project of this scope proved too much for our little team," lead developer Kris Vale said. "As you know we had a total of 6 people working on the project, Winterkewl Games was started to make Yogventures and while every member of the team worked tirelessly to make that a reality, in the end there was simply too much work to do on our own."
Vale continued: "We always knew that we were going to need to partially fund development ourselves so the lost money is not in any way regrettable, however without pre-orders to help offset those costs, eventually, after I had invested innumerable hours and over $25,000 of my own money in the game, we had to admit that without more funding we couldn't afford to keep the game going on our own.
"I can't speak for the Yogscast and I make no claims that I do, for their own reasons they decided the game wasn't up to the quality they needed it to be to make videos supporting our pre-order business model. That was and is their prerogative and we had no way of influencing that decision other than making the game as best we could with what we had to work with. As I said, we missed milestone after milestone and continued to come up short of the quality expectations and thus the Yogscast didn't want to advertise the pre-orders until it did meet those expectations."
[Image: Winterkewl Games]
