We’re used to games being kickstarted and funds being completely wasted on totally different businesses. Unfortunately, it seems that System Shock Remaster project is in the same range of the other Kickstarter-based frauds.
Kickstarter has become synonymous with frauds when it comes to funded video games. The norm is that, right after the money is collected, it gets wasted on totally different businesses and the project disappears for about one or two years before getting canceled or revamped.
Unfortunately, it looks like that System Shock Remaster supposedly in the making at Night Dive Studios is no more, or better – is no more in the form we were promised it to be.
The $1.3 million coming from the backers do not exist anymore as they’ve been used by the developer and publisher to work on completely different things (like, buying old games licenses for re-publishing or doing cheap remasters).
In the statement from Nightdive, CEO Stephen Kick wrote, “I have put the team on a hiatus while we reassess our path so that we can return to our vision. We are taking a break, but not ending the project. System Shock is going to be completed and all of our promises fulfilled.”
Director of business development Larry Kuperman offered further details in an interview with Polygon, stating that “mistakes were made” particularly when it came to adding new things to the game and not just sticking to the original vision of building a ‘simple’ remaster.
This new System Shock was pitched to several publishers, which showed reluctance to offer more funds and publishing because its old-fashioned mechanics were not up to today’s standards in terms of monetization and profitability.
Things that were confirmed in the note we mentioned above by CEO Kick. “Maybe we lost our focus,” he wrote. “The vision began to change. We moved from a Remaster to a completely new game. We … strayed from the core concepts of the original title. As the budget grew, we began a long series of conversations with potential publishing partners. The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great.”
The promise now is to use the funds coming from other titles in the Night Dive portfolio to fuel a new remaster, said to be closer to the original vision of the game and the remaster as it was pitched on Kickstarter. We’ll see if this can actually happen “in 18-24 months” as Kuperman said or it will be yet another failure.
