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The controversial ‘spiritual successor’ to STALKER has hit its $50k Kickstarter goal.
Having seemingly stalled, Eurogamer reports that a limited number of high value pledges have helped the game reach its target, including $12k worth of funding from two backers on Saturday July 19th and a $14k increase the following day from no new backers – meaning either some backers withdrew or existing supporters increased their funding.
The site also highlights the hundreds of lengthy copy-and-pasted posts a day” that could be seen as being designed to drown out the concerns being raised by some commentators.
The funny goings on don’t end there, however. Developer Wet Games claims to have received a personal letter from Russian president Vladimir Putin.
My daughter told me about your game called Areal, which is the spiritual successor to STALKER, and told me that she paid money to support your project on Kickstarter,” Putin apparently wrote.
I also love video games as well as shooters, and I like this idea. It’s important that our people do not shoot at each other, but instead, play games like this. If you give me the chance to play the alpha version of the game, when it is ready, then I invite you in advance to the Kremlin, to meet personally, be ready to play a little bit and talk about the interests of young people, the gamers of our country.”
OK.
West has also in a Kickstarter update attacked some areas of the press for its reporting.
Most sites who have written about us have been largely objective and fair, and report without bias and based on the information that they have,” it said. We feel that every journalist has a right to cover a subject from whatever viewpoint they possess.
However, we feel that two news sites have been completely one-sided and subjective in their coverage of us. We feel that their coverage of us lacks basic journalistic integrity and their articles have devolved into personal speculation and slander against us.
The first news site is Forbes, which was recently sold to a Chinese company. They continue to report based on completely outdated information and present personal speculation as fact. We believe that the level of unprofessional-ism that they have presented is due to lax editorial standards because of their recent sale to a Hong Kong based company.
We personally think that Erik Kain, the writer of the articles on Forbes, has a huge personal bias against us, and is doing everything that he can to wrongfully discredit us. His writing is the absolute antithesis of objective journalistic integrity.
The second news source we want to mention, is VG247, and in their most recent article, they summarize the teaser and say that our Kickstarter is, to quote, a ‘clusterfuck’. They go on to say that Survarium, a free to play MMO shooter, is the true successor to STALKER (which was a single player only series), and that you should all play it instead of supporting us.
We don’t want to point fingers, and of course journalism always has an element of subjectivity, but we feel that VG247’s article took things a little too far. We have also asked them to update their previous articles, wherein a moderator on Facebook expressed her personal opinions, and not the opinions of our company, so as to reflect the fact that her frustrations do not represent our company’s views in anyway, but they have declined to update their article (to our knowledge).”
