$21,326,021. That is what developer Ozman is asking for their Kickstarter game, Samadhi. But this isn’t just any game, oh no. This is a game adaptation of a fan-written book that is both a sequel and prequel to Shibumi. Not only that, but it will be a sequel to a movie that Leonardo DiCaprio will star in “2017 sometime.” And, as if that wasn’t good enough, the developer says: “We are not going to release the book. Nobody will read it.”
Confused? Well that’s okay, because Ozman follows that up with the helpful: “The company will create an action game with Unreal Engine 4.” Oh.
Other than the exorbitant funding goal (over $21 million I should remind you), there isn’t much to see here. Samadhi will be a first person shooter and there’s something about China and Russia in there as well for good measure. The only “gameplay” on offer is a slow motion trailer that tells us nothing. The rest of the page is full of walls of nonsensical text and screenshots of something. Quite how they’ve got these nearly finished looking screenshots before they’ve even started any work is amazing, really. Why is that, I wonder?
Pure Fantasy
Because these developers don’t exist, not yet anyway. The page reads: “In a few months a group from all over the world with get together to open a gaming software studio in Sydney, Australia.” Don’t worry, Ozman says they have “a guy in Melbourne, Australia. He is the CEO of a tech and business consulting company. He is also a Wing Chun Expert with 24 years of experience.” Oh, this guy must have kicked and punched those screenshots into exist.
Once again, Kickstarter shows just how little they care about quality control these days. We’ve seen shady campaigns get the “Projects We Love” banner, and lately we’re seeing the site becoming the dumping ground for rejected Indiegogo campaigns. Now we have people blatantly committing copyright infringement by writing a sequel/prequel/DiCapruel to a book they don’t have the rights for.
Is Ozman really this clueless, or it this an attempt at a joke? You probably don’t need to hear this from me, but asking for $21 million dollars on Kickstarter is an impossible fever dream. Shenmue 3, a legendary cult game everyone’s been waiting on for a decade, which had the backing of Sony and an E3 Conference reveal was only able to raise about $6.3 million. Are they hoping the name of the original book is going to draw in backers?
Some days you really have to wonder how much longer Kickstarter is going to be around. If the increasingly low quality standards don’t sink them, copyright lawsuits will.
