The game dev studio, Abrakam (the guys behind Faeria), are making a new game called Roguebook. And according to their latest Kickstarter update, they apparently failed to pay a contractor on time and then “woke up” one day to find out that the contractor has been going around complaining about them to influencers, who have begun to rally against Abrakam.
I didn’t know anything about this until Abrakam emailed me (and other backers) this lengthy game update, trying to assure me that Roguebook is not a scam:
“Unpayed Contractor” situation
As we’ve mentioned a few times now in our Discord and here, we’re well aware of the current situation going on recently involving a contractor we brought on to help us in development of our Paypal webpage for Kickstarter.
Anyway, we’ve already made a few things clear that we will repeat now:
Roguebook is not a scam. We are not stopping production on Roguebook. We are actively working on Roguebook. These one-sided videos are full of incorrect facts and misleading content. The misinformation these videos provide is extremely damaging to us which is why we are still in the process of legal action and why our official response has been regrettably slow.
This situation was made public via a YouTube video from someone we have had no connection with and had made no detectable effort to contact us - despite what they say on their video. We are usually very easy to get in touch with and we are almost always available to message in our Discord if nothing else. We also have multiple public email addresses and routinely monitored support and contact forms yet we have yet to find where this person has tried messaging us to get our side of the story. You’d hope they would have tried a little harder to make their presence known, considering the gravity of the situation. We simply awoke on a Monday to a YouTube video that claimed we never responded.
We’d like to make another important thing clear: The contractor in question whose payments were delayed is a regrettable situation, and that is on us. We take full responsibility for that delay and are sincerely sorry if that could have caused troubles for him. That said, we also found it professionally unacceptable with the path they took in contacting a YouTube personality who quickly makes a one-sided video with unverified information from one party.
Regardless, payment has been sent to the contractor and we’re ready to move on from this controversy.
We thank those of you who have remained skeptical of the situation and have waited for more facts to come to light.
Thanks for reading this, and sorry about the ugly scenario. We’ll try and do better next time, but we’re only human. In the meantime, we’re working on card games.
I guess one of the influencers in question is a Youtube guy named SidAlpha, whose fame includes 92k Youtube subscribers. And while I’m not sure how long this feud has been going on, SidAlpha does appear to have a couple videos on this issue, like so:
It took far too long, with long stretches of complete silence, and far too few updates for Faeria to get out the door; but once it did they’ve done a fine job supporting it. So while I’m not worried that I’ll get what’s coming to me as a backer, I’m not surprised to see their next project mired in drama like this.