Russia strikes again - Areal seeks alternative funding

People may not have heard about what transpired this past weekend, but it seems Ukraine can't do anything without Russia telling people how much the country belongs to them... including when making videogames.

Areal is a spiritual successor to the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and, since it's inception, has been under considerable fire at the hands of the Russian government. In co-operation with the game's original creator and writer, the Ukrainian team West Games aiming to produce it had a page on Kickstarter, until the service decided to terminate their account after the team received over 16,000 comments; the majority of which were death threats from Russian sources!

You can read the full story here, or donate on their own website now that Kickstarter refunded all the pledges.

 

A few sites, such as Kotaku, have questioned the belief that the studio can build a brand new engine for $50,000, though both Unity3D and Unigine have been sold for fairly reasonable prices (the former for about $3,500 before it became a global phenomena) since they first appeared, so anything's possible.

On the Kickstarter event they broke their initial funding target, which is no different than some other peculiar games that have appeared there... the fact that thousands of comments then flooded their page from hundreds of new accounts, nearly all of which were to tell them to shut down, is very similar to a DDOS attack.

I think we would've heard by now if the game wasn't a legitimate project.