What’s Going on With The Fine Young Capitalists?

What’s Going on With The Fine Young Capitalists?

By Julie Morley

At Cliqist we tend to pay attention strictly to the facts circulating around a crowdfunded project and we never have an interest in reporting the personal drama surrounding developers or projects. However, with The Fine Young Capitalists, a lot has happened in the past week that’s worth discussing.

The Fine Young Capitalists is a indie game development project that intends to raise awareness about discrimination in certain industries (gaming, manga/anime) and starts various informational projects to make a change. Currently they have two projects organized, raising awareness about women in the gaming industry and the lack of black characters in manga and anime. Their gaming project focuses on getting more girls interested in games and game design while bringing people together for charity.

Girls from all over the world submitted game ideas and the top five were narrowed down. These girls were matched with concept artists to refine their idea and an IndieGogo campaign was organized to raise money for the development. People online would vote for which game they wanted to see developed and any profits raised from said game would be donated to a charity of the people’s choosing.

The Fine Young Capitalists are trying to spread information about the gaming industry, get more people involved in it, and help out charities.

Unfortunately, TFYC has been dealing with conflict after conflict the entire time this project has been up. Ideas have been stolen. They have been ridiculed and harassed. 4chan’s video game board has brought a bunch of support for the TFYC project and is considered to be main source of backing on the IndieGogo campaign. Unfortunately, the list of trouble seems to keep extending day by day for the TFYC project.

Sunday morning, their IndieGoGo page was tampered with and possibly taken down. There is speculation surrounding the event with plenty of theories going around as to was responsible. However, as of this evening the campaign appears to be back up and running as normal again; for how long is anyone’s guess though.

Based on an update just released to the Fine Young Capitalists IndieGogo campaign page, someone gained access to their account, deleted all of the campaign information, and replaced it with bogus info. While no money was lost; it’s undoubtedly a setback for a campaign with an ambitious $65,000 funding goal, and just over a month to get there. The specter of continued problems, setbacks, and controversy is a very real one; especially since the individual(s) responsible hasn’t been identified, though /v/ and Reddit have many theories. Only time will tell if the mystery is solved, but in the meantime the folks at The Fine Young Capitalists have a lot of work to do to get back on track by raising awareness for the campaign, expanding their backers beyond the current /v/ group, and ensuring people associate their IndieGogo campaign for what they’re trying to accomplish, rather than the drama filled sideshow.

[facebook][tweet][Google][pinterest][follow id=”Cliqist” size=”large” count=”true” ] [author image=”http://cliqist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/julie.jpg” ]Julie Morley is a freelance writer and comic artist from Spring, Texas. She attended the Academy of Art University for two years, studying Animation and Illustration. Whilst here, she learned about writing comic scripts, storyboards, and general storytelling.  Since leaving college, she has been working on personal comic projects, stories, and illustrations. She aspires to release a self published comic within two years. For the majority of her life, she has been playing console games, typically being third-person shooters and sandboxes. Her favorite game of existence is Dark Cloud II (Dark Chronicle) and her favorite Indie game is Gone Home.[/author]