We’ve covered a lot of Kickstarter games here on Niche Gamer, and while a good number of them have succeeded, we’ve also covered some that haven’t.

This has been an ongoing debate with both fans of traditional funding/publishing methods, as well as those who have backed other projects, only to see them fail or be plagued with delays.

Now we’ve learned about the highly anticipated Clang Kickstarter-funded game being officially cancelled. The game raised $526,125 dollars back in 2012, and on September 20th of last year, the team said that all their funds had been exhausted, and that a search for alternative funding sources had begun.

It’s been exactly a year since then, and now we’ve seen Neal Stephenson from Subutai Studio publicly state that no money could be found – the team has been laid off, the game has been canned, and refunds totaling over a whopping $700 dollars have been given out. To this day, Stephenson hasn’t disclosed what that half a million dollars really went towards – it’s just gone.

While only roughly two dozen people demanded to have refunds thus far, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when other backers inevitably ask for their money back as well.

To be clear, this has transpired before Kickstarter enacted their new Terms of Use to reinforce that “the creator must complete the project and fulfill each reward.” Naturally, this won’t stop failures from coming out still, but the new terms stipulate that if unfinished, the creator(s) “may be subject to legal action by backers.”

Coming from this, the only cop-out for a failed project to scoot on by after blowing all of its money is if they do the following:

– they post an update that explains what work has been done, how funds were used, and what prevents them from finishing the project as planned;
– they work diligently and in good faith to bring the project to the best possible conclusion in a timeframe that’s communicated to backers;
– they’re able to demonstrate that they’ve used funds appropriately and made every reasonable effort to complete the project as promised;
– they’ve been honest, and have made no material misrepresentations in their communication to backers; and
– they offer to return any remaining funds to backers who have not received their reward (in proportion to the amounts pledged), or else explain how those funds will be used to complete the project in some alternate form.

So, they’ve tightened up their policies but this is by no means a way to prevent mismanagement and such. As we’ve always championed here at Niche Gamer, the best way for you to show a game developer you mean business is to vote with your wallet or purse.