Yogscast Kickstarter game cancelled; backers ‘unlikely’ to be refunded

A Kickstarter campaign for an adventure game based on popular YouTube channel Yogscast has been scrapped, with backers likely to lose out on a refund.

The Yogventures project raised $570,000 on the crowd-funding site back in 2012, with indie developer Winterkewl Games set to create the title in time for release this year.

That now isn’t going to happen, as the project has now been dropped and disowned by Yogscast, leaving Winterkewl at risk of bankruptcy.

As you may have heard, Winterkewl Games have stopped work on Yogventures – but this is actually a good thing,” Yogscast co-founder Lewis Brindley told backers in an email (via Eurogamer). The project was proving too ambitious and difficult for them to complete with their six-man team.

The game as it stands it is not capable of being released and certainly wouldn’t live up to the expectations of the people that backed the Kickstarter or pre-ordered the game.”

Those who have pre-ordered, including five individuals who personally donated over $10,000, will instead be offered a Steam Early Access code for open-world survival game TUG.

Some additional rewards, including T-shirts, DVDs, plush toys and in-game content, had already been sent to some, but not all, higher-paying backers.

Because Yogventures was never completed it’s going to be impossible to deliver the rewards relating to the finished game,” explained Brindley regarding the fate of the remaining merchandise. However we’ll do everything we can to find cool things to take their place.”

TUG is being developed by Nerd Kingdom, with whom Yogscast recently announced its partnership.

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,” Brindley commented.

In many ways TUG is the game we were hoping Winterkewl would create – and it has huge potential for the future.”

Lead developer at Winterkewl Kris Vale stated on Reddit that the firm would have to shutter its doors following the project’s failure, and would likely be unable to offer refunds to those who had invested their money.

The Yogscast have been given full ownership of all things Yogventures including all work that’s been done up to this point, code, art, project files etc.” he said.

My company Winterkewl Games will unfortunately, probably need to go out of business and possibly file for bankruptcy if things get much worse.

If we would have limited the scope and made a solid plan for working more closely with the Yogscast I have every faith this project would have been a real stand-out achievement in the indie game world.”