Dev of successful Kickstarter quits game due to ‘drama’

In 2014 Bear Simulator raised $100k on Kickstarter. The game itself was released on Steam last month. But backers and buyers have been told that future development of the title has been canned.

Well the game didn’t have a great reception, has a stigma against its name and there’s plenty of other problems so making any updates or going further is basically a lost cause now,” creator John Farjay said in a Kickstarter update. Plus [I’m] not skilled enough to make the game better than it currently is or write better updates than previously.

Was really hoping the Steam release would go well but why would it, should have just gave the game to backers and not bother with Steam. Also don’t want to deal with the drama anymore. Can’t ignore it because that causes more drama and can’t do anything about it because that causes more drama.

It was really fun making the game, trailers, updates, websites, tutorials, blog posts and stuff, hopefully you all liked those things. Am glad most of you guys are happy with the game though, unless you were just being nice. Must be doing this PC game dev thing wrong because it is way too hard to stay happy and productive.”

So what is the drama Farjay speaks of? That remains a bit of a mystery. The game has a ‘mostly positive’ review rating on Steam, and much of the criticism seems to have come in the wake of the developer’s surprise announcement.

What may have irked Farjay, however, was that his game was featured in a video by PewDiePie, who spoke about it in less than glowing terms, according to Kotaku. The video, which incidentally has been viewed over 2.5m times, has since been removed by the Swede.