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$5,976,843 Taken, 3 Years Developed, Zero Game Delivered, Lawsuits Filed, Creators Missing
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- Published on Apr 18, 2026
- From a successful start up business by a creative who loved cute things. To a Kickstarter campaign that raised almost 2.6 million dollars from the public. To a court room for millions of dollars in unpaid invoices. A total of over 4 million dollars. And nothing to show for it. This is the story of Fluffnest, their game Puffpals: Island Skies and their journey from kickstarter to court.
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#kickstarter #gaming #2026
Went out to get milk. Got lost.
This video script was finished in June of 2025 before I took my "break". I did some rewrites, and since I no longer have an editor, did this myself over the last few days. Sorry if it sucks, my editing is bad.
Over the next week, I'll do some minor edits to 5 or so videos my previous editor finished prior to me taking this break, get those released every few days. Every video after that will be newly created by myself solo. So, expect more bad editing to come after those.
Thanks, see you soon.
Oh shiiiit. It's still great to see you putting up another documentary-style piece. I go back and listen to old ones from time to time.
Holy shit! I've binge watched your videos waiting for a new upload!! Right when I'm getting snug into bed. Thanks for the perfect timing! And your editing is better than mine 😂
About a minute in; editing seems tight
Nothing like a nice cozy glass of warm milk.
Same as my dad
The only winner was Kickstarter, earning 5% of the pledged funds.
Kickstarter is a scam
@IdiotEnforcer not all~ I appreciate kickstarter because of them, my comic series got an exposure~
@IdiotEnforcer It absolutely is not. There are so many projects that come out of it. The board gaming community has seen a golden era thanks to it. However, it is a platform that helps you launch products that don't exist. It is so easy to just not ship. Kickstarter could probably do a better job, but they can't stop it. To do so, would be to break the core of it. You need to vet companies. At that point it isn't an incubator. It's just venture capitalism for the projects with an established background. How does joe shmoe get their small run of Warhammer terrain launched?
If you don't like the risk, just don't back it. Avoid anything game related though. Very few make it, even non-mmos.
@IdiotEnforcer no it isnt. the facilitator taking a part of the profit is normal. it cant exist on literally nothing. what planet are you from?
@ArgentfanAbsolutely a scam, as much as Uber is telling you they aren't responsible for their drivers Kickstarter is telling you it's your fault if you get scammed. Indiegogo did better.
This David guy is insane. Not taking the settlement that Room8 offered is beyond words. They gave him a literal out and he told them he'd just make the game solo, as if that would absolve him of the money he owed them. A real genius, that one.
So many people let their ego stop them from making the one decision that would actually save them.
@iamjustkiwi it's the only possible explanation. He wanted to take full credit for the work. Utter lunacy.
@neurotoxinenthusiast Yandere Dev's situation is the opposite, but with similar results. He always planned to make the game himself and raised money via Patreon. When he was offered help and partnerships, it never worked out because of his ego and because he was a terrible programmer.
@Momoyuepeople tend to underestimate the size of game projects. They would do some proof of concept in a weekend and will fail to realise that a finished product is orders of magnitude more than that, and for inexperienced people it will be overwhelming.
Total genius move on his part to openly declare he intended to bankrupt the company to hide assets, so now they're going after himself and his estate instead.
Room8 claiming the game and making it a better animal crossing would be the cherry on top ngl
A delightful twist and a neat ending if they do. Hopefully gonna recoup some of the losses too
Oh man, I hope so.
Room8 sounds like a studio full of megachads.
I hope so, I was really looking forward to this game but (luckily) was broke when the kickstarter was around, otherwise I would've bought the top tier. I think it's unlikely though
A game close to or better than Animal Crossing would cost far more than the 3 million dollars. The best version of the promised PuffPals game would cost less but it wouldn't be a substitute for Animal Crossing by any means.
Like you said at the end - they had the sauce and they ruined it. Like, they LITERALLY could have just did the Kickstarter, pay Room 8 and be up front about their involvement, AND FUCKING PAY PEOPLE FOR THEIR WORK! Insane
But....if you pay other people, you have less money for yourself!
Do the math, they could never have afforded it.
@C5204 Cleeeearly lol They were just so poor
@MTLion3 A couple of million is not near enough to build a game of the scope they promised. Even using Chinese labor.
@RM_VFX But it’s enough to show people that a game is actually being made rather than showing a build that… basically has nothing and then showing nothing after that. Here’s the truth of it, they should have kept expectations in check for WHATEVER their kickstarter was. They clearly had a massive and generous audience for their shit, so supplementing their plushie business is a good idea and they could have crowd funded a smaller project like a short film or something.
Listen, at the end of the day, rampant greed destroyed them. I’m saying what a person who wants a sustainable business might say - not a grifter. So they obvy wouldn’t do ANY of this 😂
that voice message of her crashing out in the Discord is so funny.. like girl, you did this to yourself
Crashout queen 👑
_"Silly woman!"_
No, this happened to her
@turtlee-187 she chose to work with him, defended him, crashed out on people in discord, and quite frankly was willfully ignorant at best or intentionally malicious at worst.
uh. hello?? CALLMEFAKEONEMORETIMEILLBANUBIH
This is such a sad situation for the Room8 studio . I really hope they manage to secure the rights to what they created and can do something with it.
it's kind of on them for continuing work on the project when they are like 500k+ deep into unpaid invoices. like come on, net30, you miss 2 payments you send a final notice, you miss 3, you stop. what the hell were they doing?
@alpha.gamma.dingdong you are partially right. However, they are probably just bloating their receivables. I doubt they did actual work after 2 missed payments.
@badongjunior1261 I'm pretty sure they didn't and I'd argue Room 8 has a role to play in all this. I checked their Kickstarter as a dev myself and there is nothing remotely difficult to implement in this game. By all means for 2m$ and 1 year this game should have been %500 done. So either Room 8 are immensely incompetent, or they already finished the game and basically did so to get rights of the game given unpaid invoices.
@Navhkrinwe have no idea what is going on behind the development. "It could've been finished in two months" is easy to say when you never seen the amount that's already made what is still in process, how much content the client wants, how much bugs appeared during the implementation process and etc. Sometimes one little "we actually want trees to be a darker shade of green" means days of work for artists, QC specialists and developers. I've seen how "Oh, that's an easy fix" turns into weeks and months of chaos and trying to make something good out of it
@Navhkrin thats what i couldnt grasp in this story, how much time did room8 work on this, how much did they receive in paid invoices? it seems like there should be a partially complete game here for us to be looking at.. what did they do with the resources they were given, how did they take so much funding and time to turnout something thats reportedly an unplayable 1/5 star mobile game
Lily even had a full crashout and DELETED the alpha chat on discord. She later came back and claimed she was trying to archive it and 'accidentally' deleted it. Those were some wild times.
She should be banned by Discord and the server turned over to a community member
At least there's been an update with the beautiful word ✨️bankruptcy✨️ being mentioned
@serraramayfield bro, people don't even get banned from Discord for repeatedly committing s3x crimes with minors, provable by chat logs on Discord.
she sound be stoned on sight
@Be_kind_and_use_your_brain_uwu Bankruptcy is mostly a word for "we'll TRY to pay back what we can, but you can't really make us pay in full without spending way more than we owe you." I'm several years into trying to get a past employer to pay my invoices, but I'm quickly learning even a judge can't do that much to make a scammy company reimburse you for work already done.
7:47
Kind of terrifying when you look at this screenshot and realize that only 5/10 of those people listed as staff are actually employees who do real work, while the remaining 5 are all Managers, Directors, or above... Having half your company devoted to managing the other half is just pure insanity.
You'd be surprised how much that's a real thing in corporations these days. And it's always the same story, they keep dozens of wellbeing, scrum, and other bullshit jobs that bring zero money in the company while they justify they don't have money to increase actual IT jobs salaries, not even to compensate inflation. At this point it's clear to me that these are always closed circles of friends between the CEOs / executives and those people occupying stupid useless positions. They only keep them because they know each other and they give eachotehr all the benefits possible, at the detriment of the actual hard working employees. Shit world.
That's the dream apparently. I was extremely confused when during my studies the workforce was treated as a sort of optional extra. Apparently the most 'efficient' company is just a lean management team and the work just happens.
Lol my company has 24 field techs and 20 office staff.
We are so dang expensive because of the overhead. The boss didn't want to hear about his office staff.
@GoldenJackalTutorial As someone who has worked in corporations enough to understand the structure, I honestly believe it is a matter of ego and stubborn old people.
The setup of a million managers comes from a time of low tech companies and the need of managing data, documents and people manually. Back then they actually needed enough people to make sure things were checked properly and the time it would take one person was too great. Now with the help of technology one person can do the job of 5 managers/office workers or more! But of course they cannot accept that they are expendable, so they flipped the script; they claim your work as their own, your ideas, your labour, all to prove they are more useful than the actual working people.
And of course this breeds out when the next line of vultures comes and tells them "yes you are the most important" so they promote those people instead of the actual working ones, create their circles of back patting and bring the company to the ground.
The old company format of offices with lots of people etc is long outdated, but that doesn't stop them from fighting progress with all they have. Just to feel like their life and years of working all day was not actually a waste and they have nothing nice to look back to. Tragic really, even more so when they ruin our lives just to feel like theirs had a meaning.
Backing a video game being led by two "creative directors" who have 0 experience in anything video game related is just not a good idea (I say that as one of the backers that got screwed; hindsight is 20/20). Do not back video games by people who don't know what it takes to make them. Not to say artists can't make a game happen. Just, as a consumer, don't put your money into backing one. Only buy it once the final product comes out.
The evil music while introducing kickstarter is hilarious
Mermaid Man: EeeeeViiiiiiiiLLL!!
😂
There are many successful games that came from a kickstarter campaign (like Risk of Raing and Undertale) but unfortunately there mostly just scams on there when it comes to video games. They probably did have passion at some point, but then the money kept trickling in, and now they have no motivation to finish it.
There is a reason why Steam early access exists...
It requires the devs to always have something playable upfront instead of a crowd funding hype machine upfront.
It is not perfect either but certainly far more bound to reality.
ngl they could've been just a plushie business, their plushies are even well made and looked like it was going well too
This Kickstarter had SOOO MANY ads on Facebook and Instagram, to the point where it seemed too good to be true to me.
If i see any kickstarter ad on Facebook and the company doesn't have a track record of delivery or of that kind of product, it typically is.
Like in this case. Making pins and plushies does not equal video game.
I understand what you mean coral island had some many I thought the same but all worked out for them. This on the other hand….sheesh
@UrbanUni ive had kickstarters advertised to me and ive backed them before, all have been successful except for this one
@robsomethin4415 But they had a track record of delivery the products. Watch the video.
“How can anyone believe you can kickstart a video game for $75k” - you can, that was actually the problem. There are many indie super hits that made one dev in a year or two, with budget under $200k. Because they already had revenue stream and with what they showed in video, it was actually really believable.
"When one door closes, another one opens."
-Boeing
Rip, Unthor. He sadly took his own life by two shots to the back of his head.
They adopted that one from McDonnell Douglas
😂😂
@lukahierl9857While diving headfirst off of the roof of a 15 story building. With his hands tied behind his back. Gotta give him credit for being thorough.
BRUH
That's funny ^^
This one was literally the very first game I ever backed on Kickstarter, lmao. I really didn't think this kind of stuff could happen with cozy cutesy games 😭
I spent over $100, but for the record, I did order plushies as well from the extras they offered, and I did get those plushies and get to play the Alpha. They said something about refunds and I just never even attempted to get my money back, cause I guess I just accepted that I got the plushie so at least I got SOMETHING. Lol.
It was my first Kickstarter too. I sadly got nothing for my money.
I got the plushies too. And ngl I don't regret the money since I literally basically only did it to get the plushies. The sun and moon moths are so cute. 😭 I miss puffpals. I wish they had never done all this and had just stuck with plushies. The ones I have from them are still my favorites out of all my plushies.
Same. This made me not wanna do it again and just wait for the games to come out. People like them make me sick
Same here. I got the constellation dragon plush (which did arrive and was pretty well made) and a sticker pack. When the game never happened, I just wrote it off as one kinda expensive plush
Same here, i got 4 plushies too and was really looking forward to the game but waow...i never thought ppl would do something like this when so many ppl backed the project
"how can ANYONE believe you can KICKSTART a VIDEO GAME for only 75,000 USD??"
*nervously glances at the 7,000 usd risk of rain kickstarter campaign*
I HAVE backed and gotten small budget video games from Kickstarter -- under $50K, one as small as $500. But it was clearly stated what was going on -- a sole person doing the work, with the game in some form of development, and needed money to finish it.
The QUALITY of the games have varied, of course, but overall it's worked out for me. Lucky?
Madness project nexus 2 also comes to mind. I think it was around 75k too.
@nicholashubbard7146 Madness project at least had prior portfolio of flash games and animations over two decades. Was worth the backing and hype.
As a game dev, it’s an open secret that all game-related Kickstarter campaigns never ask for the full amount of money they actually need to complete it. That’s because most games would realistically require $500K-$1m+ and game devs know they are extremely unlikely to reach that goal. Because you don’t get any money if your Kickstarter fails to reach its goal, developers prefer to only ask for a fraction of the cost so they have a higher chance of at least getting a fraction of the funding their need. Most successful game Kickstarters usually subsidize the rest of their costs with another job on the side.
@SoulBlazer08I've backed several visual novels that asked only for a bit, but they're done by like... 3 people, using stock royalty free backgrounds for locations, and essentially the game was complete, they just wanted to hire artists for full CGs
the saddest part for me is how this whole situation tanked the plushie business. i have winston the sheep and he’s one of my favorite plushies. i wanted to get melon as well as the sakura deer, the bee, cow, honestly every single one but now that’s completely dead 😔
Maybe someone would be willing to do a custom commission to try to recreate those for you given the whole uhhhh original creator on the run for fraud thing.
I managed to snag the pink and blue dragons, along with the possum. Kinda sad I couldn't get the porcelain dragon.
same, I wanted a lot of those plushies, I did get a dragon plushie for backing the Puffpals' game and it's a really nice plushie
People in the room 8 studio are owed entire salaries for their work and your worried about some freakin plushies lmao
Be glad you got ANY!! A lot of us DIDN’T. I joined the kickstarter and obviously lost my money.
I remember when I first read up on what had been going on - what was saddest were the people who just wanted plushies. They just wished that Lily had focused on her plushies and were sad a IP they loved just died.
its just toys bro lol
@ThePainkiller9995 They might be 'just toys' but they started from an independent artist, tons of people would love a financially successful career in the arts and seeing someone realize their dream was very inspiring for many. It's not weird that people are disappointed in the way things turned out, especially when they may have spent money and not seen anything in return.
@ThePainkiller9995 People are allowed to like things. You still have time left in this world to choose kindness.
@greigenotbeige And people will exploit that kindness. This is why we can't have nice things.
the ‘just toys bro’ you were talking about are people’s interests and they are harmless. choose kindness, brother
Good move here to point out the basic fact that one senior games programmer is anywhere up to $150k per year. People _really_ do not understand how much games actually cost to make. Nintendo's budgets obviously aren't a matter of public record, but ACNH likely cost somewhere north of $30m-50m. The smallest of viable indie games, if the developer was paying themselves a fair wage, would be at least $100k, and the burnrate of a mid-sized triple-I studio is usually somewhere around $2m-3m per year. I feel really awful for anyone who spends significant money and personal investment on a kickstarter for a game that they simply aren't aware isn't being realistic about its finances or its likelihood of delivering, but I think educating people on what to look for helps a lot.
You CAN put out the equivalent of a AAA title without the AAA studio expenses , while still paying a living wage. The kicker is that everyone on the team has to be willing to have modest salaries and not work in expensive studios.
There are plenty of small indie studios putting out high quality work, which is proof that it can be done with less than multi-million dollar budgets.
It really just comes down to the real reason for making the game and competency.
What's more important? Making lots of money or a quality game that you and others truly enjoy playing?
And how competent are you (or your project manager) at organizing/managing the staff (or your time if doing it solo) so all the pieces work well together to bring the game's vision to life.
@d.w.6584exactly, if people can make rpg maker and just good quality indie games on their own with just a dream and a bunch of gumption then idc about the excuses of financials. Cause thats all it is an excuse. That im not human game or whatever its called was made by a lone dev and it got mainstream popularity (my bf is in the discord and dude pumps out updates daily sometimes multiple times a day)
ACNH what's nuts is they stripped out most features that previous versions had(gold tools should not break, less holidays, no minigames until this Jan's patch, no other ip amiibo villagers...)
@d.w.6584 I mean I don't think that's entirely wrong but I also don't think it's entirely right either. I understand the temptation to think that projects fail because of greedy villains and succeed because of passionate heroes but in my experience that's only occasionally the case. Obviously sometimes there _are_ villains, or people who've just somehow failed upwards into a position where they can damage projects and other people's careers, but typically there's no free lunch and the work costs what it costs. "I believe this indie team can make a AAA game on 1/10th of the money" is what we like to call "main character syndrome" and eventually people get over it or leave the industry.
But, yeah, you can spend more or less money for sure. You can estimate initial costs well or poorly depending on the information you have and how clear the initial vision is. It would be nice if this went well or poorly due to solely factors under a developer's control like passion and competency, but the reality is far, far more often projects fail for much more boring and pedestrian reasons (prototype turned out not to scale, vision wasn't as clear as everyone thought it was, the market moved unexpectedly partway through development, etc.). Every so often, sure, you get a huge meltdown like the one this video is on, but they're not as common. Conversely, I've also seen the occasional self-centred control freak with only borderline competency achieve absolutely huge, breakout success, although that's also pretty rare. Most people in games on a production level are quite good and work as hard as they probably ought to.
@d.w.6584 Technically it's "making lots of money now" or "make even more money later" because 100k/year is nice but if you pull a Team Cherry or Project Moon you've basically set up for not just your life but your great-great grandson's too.
Kickstarter to Court video in 2026 is a recession indicator
Right nex to the guy teaching us how to make cheap booze at home.
WhatsApp just started ads, that's the recession indicator
@lukahierl9857 Lol, I got that one too.
I swear my BigMac just shrunk right in front of my eyes when this vid dropped.
The real recession will happen when the great noticing becomes the greatest global revolution known to humankind
9:58 to add, its easy to assume 75k would be a KICKstarter fee, not a pay for a fully fledged game but just to start the project off…
19:47 "more lawsuits than than game version updates" pure gold 🤣🤣🤣
The Fluffnest plushies would be on store shelves by now if they just kept up with it.
The plush store actually collapsed due to pandemic cost increases, not just their huge f-up with the game
they actually where on store shelves a few stores bought wholesale stock from them to sell some pretty notable stores too
@valkyriedarquesethose so sad to hear, because it looks like people were more disappointed that they didn't get their plushies instead of the game.
@Paratet Yeah, I've heard the plushies were really good quality. They now sell for tons more on the secondhand market since theres no new ones being made.
I really regret giving mine away. I really didn’t think they’d go out of business 😅
I know I'm saying this now with hindisght being 20/20.... but seriously, the talent and skills required to make pins and plushies don't really translate to coding. Even if they had a reputation before, the jump to a completely different industry should've raised some red flags.
There were red flags but this could have had a good ending. If they just took the deal that Room8 offered.
or even just saying openly that they would be working with an existing studio to handle development and they would do much of the art for it, or whatever.
@morgan0 Yeah that basically matches with the pins and plushie where the manufacturing is probably out sourced.
@MorbidEel which like honestly is fine (if you’re open about it). the skills to design a plushie, convert it into a pattern to be sewn, and sew it well, are not all the same skill set. obviously there are also potential issues with exploitative working conditions but that’s the case for a lot of things.
Tbh omo cat managed to do it, going from apparel to a whole video game OMORI, that did actually come out, so it’s not tooo much of a stretch I guess
I was going through cancer and backed this project while treatment in hopes id have something to look forward to when I finished my treatments. Well... I finished it and I'm thankful to be here. Even with No game , lost my money backing this and have a big heart break but meh. I hope room8 takes the game and makes it better
Seems like their real talent was not drawing cute fluffies, but committing fraud
See that's my thing I can't do the fraud stuff, so I'm still poor
If they were talented at fraud this video would be very different, they suckass at that
They starter with pokemon unnoficial merch, it was obcious from the start
I imagine it all started with David seeing Lily earning some spending cash after the first month and going "How'd you do that? Show me now."
It is literally my dream in life to get funding to work on an indie game full time and all these people achieve my dream and then completely squander it 😭
crazy that they failed to make a farm game with that insane funding
Yeah, I follow a couple youtubers who cover cozy games, and there's plenty of half-decent farming games that were made by like 1-3 people. Of course, this concept looks more ambitious than your average pixel farming sim, but it's not as complicated as making an MMO or something
Right? A game like this has like 2 mechanics and that's it 😭 How incompetent do you have to be to not deliver a cozy game
The easy answer: They weren't game developers. Coming for crowdfunding with no real prototype and just an idea is asking for disaster.
my guess is that they mingled game development funds with plushie order funds and didn't estimate how much they actually had, and then they wasted all the money lol.
Kira didn't go over it, but Fluffnest's other business, plushie selling, was interwoven with the funds in the kickstarter page, as you could get a plushie for backing the game.
that probably made them overestimate the total profit from the Kickstarter; I doubt Kickstarter subtracted the production cost of each plushie, so that was included in their total rather than just the profit on a plushie. they overestimated their possible budget, never had enough money in the first place, and then couldn't fulfil plushie orders for backers. that's when panic mode set in and they just ran ig.
@Juslin7989
they hired actual devs though, which makes me feel this is t entirely the answer. the blame would then lie with Room 8 for taking a contract with a company they knew ""didn't have enough money"". that's why I think the real problem was poor accounting, and someone messed up on calculating the final profit from Kickstarter.
My partner and I are plushie collectors, and we were huge fans of fluffnest's plushies. It was crazy to watch the business implode from a consumer viewpoint
A edited Kira video? What have we done to deserve this blessing my lord?
Every video is edited in some way or another. It could be video, audio, formatting etc. Just because you don't were the edits, doesn't mean they don't exist
@Jay-s6r5b ackchyually ☝🤓
@Jay-s6r5byou don’t understand nuance very well do you? 😅
@Jay-s6r5b You clearly never watched Kira and you seem boring af at parties
@LotusHiraji it's not that deep. the irony in this comment is funny tho
genuinely hate those people, it just makes the actual genuine game devs also look like scammers if theyre asking for donations.
Actual game devs can better target build time and cost based on project scope.
Bit of an aside, but Fluffnest plushes are going for *hundreds* of dollars on Ebay. Like, upwards of $400.
crazy. Just goes to show what an amazing business they had before they ruined it all.
really? Crazy stuff, I own.. 2 of them .. they were gifts from my partner, I love my little frogs, sad that such talent was so greedy in the end, their designs really were super adorbs..
They should just remake those plushies and sell them on eBay for those prices and then fund the game with it and actually pay the developers.
@KiraTV1Turns out sewing together bits of fabric and producing a triple A online game are two different skills. Who knew?
@jonathanlamb7341 i dont think she was actually sewing anything, made designs and placed an order from the cheapest sweat shop in china
NO WAY. NO FREAKIN WAY. At my old company I was asked to work on 3D Models for the puffpals. I think they were trying to re-launch it in 2024. They took my models but I got paid nothing for it. '
Kind of re-enforces the concept of 'you either go long enough to die a hero... or live long enough to become the villain.' They really could've just stayed making cutesy pins and plushies, making steady bank... but they got greedy. What a shame.
If they were smart they would have moved onto apparel, bags, and blind boxes. Easy money. They could have just used the Puffpals brand to start a whole brand like Tokidoki.
Maybe Google the quote from the movie before you totally butcher it huh? 😂
@Bloomkyaaa Oooh, I bet they would've struck the gold if they chose to do blind boxes, their products were just the right kind of cute and marketable
Ambition is a hell of a drug sometimes, ruin a good thing in hopes of a great thing and end up with nada.
They were just using other IPs from the start. They're lucky nobody took them to court
21:12 voice message sounds like a South Park character
We should all take a strong step back and consider how easy it seems to be for people to spin-up a business, get MILLIONS in business loans, get sued, and then straight up "dodge" legal action. No arrests, no warrants, just "don't show up" and "don't pay". These people probably dipped the country this was so easy for them.
It seems like white collar criminals usually get away with little or no consequences more times then not
It's so easy to make cash by exploiting people. Until you realize you aren't built for it. Not that many can steal that much money and sleep easy at night.
Lily Yang is Chinese I think
@potnotch2855 I still think they could've made so much more money just by doing their job correctly. Cozy games were booming back then and they already had a successful plushie company. What a shame...
@potnotch2855 Yeah, it's very easy but most people have morals, I could never understand being able to just steal from people and not care
12:45 😢 this is heartbreaking 💔🥺😔
25:33 oh man what a mess.
Kira makes watching a game collapse into a pleasant experience.
Bro 3/4xA slop games collapsing is a pleasant experience by default and if it's paired with greed it becomes hilarious.
The only videogame kickstarter I've ever backed 😭😭 when the very first closed alpha first came out I was stunned, I am a professional senior programmer and have also been employed by a game studio fulltime to work on games in the past - the quality of basic mechanics such as camera movement and planting crops were worse than the student games I am invited to see, the UI design was awful, the writing shockingly bad (I cannot describe how shocked I was at the writing). You see more solid games come out of 48 hour game jams. The only thing that was good about it was the modelling and art 🤷♀🤷♀ I wrote an ESSAY in their feedback form (only constructive though, not criticising, at that time there was still good faith). I knew then and there that we were either in for a VERY long road of re-starts and iterations or that it would tank, because you NEED strong fundamentals before anything else in game development. I still have access to it on my Steam account haha, but I've archived it so I don't have to look at it everytime I open my Steam games, lol
Well the game was actually made entirely by an art studio, so that tracks.
@Oscar97o So that was before they contracted Room8?
and they were charged over 5 million by the shit game studio to output that garbage alpha
This lends credence to the idea that Room8 screwed them and gave them a poor quality product for their money.
Cozy fraud maxxing
I just spit milk through my nose. Lol
i was one of the alpha backers. they attempted to silence their own fans by adding an NDA to the alpha application that didn’t allow for any internal footage of or conversation about the discord server or alpha gameplay
I remember this Kickstarter. I almost bought into it but didn't really have the spare funds at the time and decided I could wait until it came out in early access. Sort of grateful for that now, though sad at how it all turned out. For every good fundraising campaign there seem to be at least one bad one to spoil the experience.
Switching from Unity to Unreal because it "improves performance and makes development move quicker" is perhaps the wildest statement I've ever read.
21:11 That really scared me a bit
What an interesting rabbit hole. Moral of the story: you can absolutely *not* stick your head in the sand when other people's money is involved.
Oh hey, Kira remembered the password for his main channel
😂
I dont think this is his main channnrl
Now we just have to wait for Jarvis to remember his
FINALLY ANOTHER EPISODE OF KICKSTARTER TO COURT !!!! 🤩
Finally he remembered he had a youtube channel.
He has another channel that he frequently uploads on.
*another RUclips channel.
Bro's been posting on Kira extremely regularly.
finally he remembered he had "main" youtube channel
the 2nd channel barely has any editing and scripting is simpler (if not just improvised on fly), he has jokingly said that the 2nd channel feels more like main channel because he hasn't been active on this one
Yeah, there was a period of about a year where neither channel was active. But at least for the past 2 months my other channel has been 5-7 videos per week. (another today hopefully)
I plan to maintain both, but it's a lot of work for 1 person lmao.
Life happens
These are invaluable videos for upcoming game devs like me. I'm making it a rule that I'm never asking for money until I have a playable Alpha, taking a page from what Digital Extremes is doing with Soulframe.
He found the milk!!!
I sponsored two games on kickstarter. It has been years. They are supposedly still in development, not yet abandoned. I don’t think I will sponsor another one. Too risky.
KIRA’S BACK 🗣️
He never left, for every 1 video he uploads in this channel beo uploads 100 on his second channel. 😂😂
*manic laughter*
The web page of the game ended up being purchased by French RUclipsr Mujin who also made a video.
However, both videos cover different things, so they complement each other very well IMO.
As someone who early on tried to start an online business, stories like this make me thank my stars that I called it quits at a point where I was able to pay off my debts with a couple paychecks from my day job. Which was still hard but I just ripped the bandaid and was done with it. If I'd spent the money from more than one preorder before realizing I couldn't do all the work on my own, I'd have had liens, lawsuits, probably a divorce, and years of wage garnishment after a failed bankruptcy plan (yes you can fail bankruptcy, which seems redundant.)
With 4million dollars I would had used 1 million to pay people to at least create something
Tell me how I just was randomly thinking about this guy after almost a year, could barely remember the channel name, and turns out he just released his first video in months an hour ago.
He has another channel (with semi-scripted content) with regular updates.
KiraTV is back!!
We live in a world of scams.
Woah I supported this game on kickstarter! Honestly after the backer poll went out for which moth outfit I wanted, I pretty much forget about Puffpals until videos like this crop up every few months. I hope the 2027 lawsuit will have good news for everyone who isn't the fluffnest team
I doubt you or the other backers will get much of anything but at least you'll hopefully see the scammers ruined
There is the faint hope, as Kira says, that the studio could get the rights to the game and will finish and release it to recoup their losses.
However, I can't see this happening before 2027 at the earliest and is there is a market for this kind of game anymore?
@SoulBlazer08 The market will probably still be there. Assuming this is a single player and not liveservice game they could even piggyback off of Petit Planet marketing a bit. Sponsor a couple of the Petit Planet CCs and offer something like "if you like Petit Planet but don't like gacha liveservice ...".
@RisingRevengeance A nice little token would be to at least let backers who can prove they backed the project get the limited content we paid for.
Have use pay again for the game, fine. That's not their fault. But it would be a nice token of appreciation and kindness to have the limited content given to us for free.
It'd also be quite a story to tell, the scam we all suffered together.
@hydrangea.blossoms I agree it would be nice. I've just been left in the dust one too many times to have faith for you guys.
Good video. I actually watched a video about this from a different channel, but they left out the part about the first couple kickstarters for pins. Having knowledge that, presumably, the business had already fulfilled previous campaigns made it much easier for the fans to believe the game was possible.
this is the first an only kickstarter i've ever backed, as well as probably the last. thank you for covering this one, i was tempted to request it !
for me it was dead matter hahah, learned my lesson after that one
Same. It being a scam resulting in no game was not on my bingo card, but it definitely will be from now on.
"David is really smart!"
FYI, as a dev, here's what "swapping engine" before release and testing means: all the things we did so far failed and we need an excuse to reset the clock, so we will swap engines.
Came back with milk AND brought some cookies to treat us with!
My guess is that Lily has fled back to China and David is living under a new assumed name. We will probably never hear from them again.
1:36 Pokemon Company licking their chops
Telling someone to sue his shell company because there's no assets there anyway tells me everything I need to know about David.
One thing to remember about seemingly low bars for Kickstarters, especially when it comes to games - both digital _and_ analogue - is what it brings by reaching that small goal, statistically. "Funded in 24 hours!", "More than 500% funded!" etc. and this really affects the algorithm on what Kickstarter will be showing those who visit the website.
Holy shit, I was sooo close to funding this back in the day
29:16
I can't believe that company offered that and they rejected it. You'd jump at the opportunity to get yourself out of the financial and legal hellhole. Wild.
Why $75,000? Because Kickstarter requires you to reach your goal before you can pull any money out. They knew they would blow that goal out of the water and pull out however much they earned immediately.
They should have scaled down their game considering the money they got. They were too ambitious in the first place.
And they need to get and listen to their lawyers. If they had attended that lawsuit from the bank, they may have been able to win it in the first place depending on how much it was. Banks do not follow up as much as you think you would.
Very professional script and narration as always, Kira. Main channel videos are always a treat.
Omg.. David is a huge scammer and has no idea what he is doing and then they offer him a damn good lifeline and a way out of the huge hole he had dug for himself, and he rejects it? What on earth is wrong with that guy.. Hope he ends up in jail to be honest
these are the wolves in sheeps clothing type shi. and i bet they might actually convince themselves theyre good people. its super creepy
I only found your videos like 2 months ago and kickstarter ones are my favourite, this is a great surprise thank you
I can understand this channel can cause you stress but jeeze it's so much better than your other channel
Finally someone is talking about that. I backed them on kickstarter and I was really disappointed when all this came out. And when Lily behaved so weirdly on Discord.
Kickstarter projects genuinely make the subsequent stuff look bad like Day of dragons was clearly a scam now the wings of dawn is suffering for their betrayal.
When your'e planning to launch a kickstarter for your game project, and these are the videos that youtube algorithm suggest you to watch 😶
I donated so much money to Puffpals: Island Skies, I was so excited for it that I even got the pete plushie :,) Never got reimbursed for the donations and only found out about the dumpsterfire that went down a year later
Lowk bought early access of puff pals, played once and forgot of it, surprised i see it now in this vid
i remember when this was announced and i was so excited... maybe room8 will eventually take it back and we will see the game
I've miss this series it's been awhile kira!!
This is genuinely so sad. I remember seeing this project being promoted all over Twitter and being so excited for this game. As an artist, this kind of story of starting a small business is such a dream of mine. The way things happened for her to be able to make a living off her art is just so rare and a lot of luck has to be involved to get the support she did. To then make promises of a game and then commit fraud and essentially scam the people who donated to your game is insane. My thinking is they probably didn’t expect to raise over a million dollars and then once they did they got greedy. Or maybe, they did expect for that to happen and still decided to make every wrong decision possible. I’m not sure what the future holds for this game but I do hope people get their money back or at least some compensation. I also can’t believe she was shouting at people on discord. How embarrassing is that. Also, David is a terrible person straight up.
I think she's just super dumb (but good at art) and he's the confidence trickster that has her hooked line and sinker on his charisma and promises
_Greed... Greed never changes.._
1. I don't think your editing is bad :)
2. I love how David admitted to committing wire fraud. Totally a smart move /sarcasm
The entire scheme makes no sense to me. David and Lily could earn _so much more_ than $1.9 million by making a real game. Then sell all the plushes, merch, hand-drawn art, prints, etc. that the audience is evidently very interested in purchasing. That would be a ton of money, and it would be _their_ money. Bizarre.
Dude i even forget this game :( i was feeling so hype back then when it was going on project...
This was my first and last time donating to a Kickstarter campaign. I learned an expensive lesson. Now that I'm laid off, I often think of you how helpful that money would be.
I didn't expect you to cover this Kickstarter! As a backer of Island Skies I'm genuinely happy for this to be talked about more by bigger creators (the Discord is basically dead besides people doing the !fish command)
for those who still need proof hell is really freezing now, kira posted on the main channel
This makes me so sad. I absolutely ADORED their plushies. I have so many and they're so fucking beautiful and well designed. Now you can never get them again!!!
I’m so sad too! I gave away my favorite strawberry cow (Mabel) plushie and regret it so much. I thought I could just get another one later 😭
Your title needs more commas
I just cant fathom turning down the offer from from Room 8...insane.
Room8 tried to do the right thing for the game, admirable under the circumstances.
Dude I nearly bought into this game because of the plushies. Only reason I didn’t was because I didn’t have the money at the time and then I forgot the name entirely by the time I had money.
its a KitaTV video day - couldnt ask for more!
2:40 "what even is copyright? More like copywrong, heeeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaww"
I’d love to see a breakdown of where the money actually went.
Didn't expect to see this one here... I loved the plushie designs though so sad it went down like this