Safe Zone is a zombie survival game that was successfully funded in July 2011. It raised north of $6,000, and promised to be Oregon Trail game but with zombies. The original release date was Fall 2011, but now five years on, there’s no end in sight.
Cliqist editor and professional rugby philosophizer Marcus Estrada last wrote about Safe Zone almost a year ago in May 2015. He chastised the team for constantly going dark with their updates and not delivering on promises. Developer Blind Eye games did release several updates after that article however, but again stopped all communication in September 2015.
Until April 2016, that is. They finally returned to Kickstarter to make the announcement that Safe Zone would be going on hiatus. 2016 marked five years of development on the game, and after all that time – and $6,000 – Blind Eye has nothing to show for it.
The April update is simply titled Hiatus, and is backer only. We reached out to Blind Eye Games for comment, but they did not respond. Judging from only handful of comments that go back to mid-2015, it would seem backers are either frustrated with the game’s lack of progress and the developer’s communication, or have forgotten about the project entirely.
There haven’t been any general comments since the update was posted April 16th, so either the discussion of refunds and even possible legal action has moved there, or the update itself addresses those issues. Look on the developer’s website or various social media accounts won’t give you much info, as the last post on all of those sites was also in September 2015.
Looking at this as an outside observer, it would appear Blind Eye Games has taken the money and run. Despite the string of updates in 2015, each of them link you to the developer’s website where you’ll find only a brief few paragraphs and one picture each. Very little – if any – progress seems to have been made since the Kickstarter was funded in July 2011.
This is the last image of the game made public.
We’re not about to call this project a scam by any means. You’ll find more info about the development of Safe Zone on Marcus’s article, but Blind Eye Games ran into financial trouble at one point and several team members left. $6,000 isn’t a lot of money, especially a game like this. It could very well be another case of a startup developer getting in way over their heads and not knowing how to deal with the backlash.
Safe Zone was only put on hiatus, but it may never see the light of day. It’s always a shame when a Kickstarter game fails, especially so when it may have been a scam all along.
