Behind the Purse Strings of "Free the Games"

It's been over a year now since the indie games console OUYA went from Kickstarter darling to its dubious place today as the first inexpensive Android-based games console. The company itself made over eight million dollars on their Kickstarter, and were able to leverage their success to convince venture capitalists to part with $15 million of their own money. This infusion of cash, while not enough to save the troubled little box, is enough to keep it on life support for the next several months. Of that money, OUYA set aside one million dollars for their "Free the Games" fund which offers to match funds that game developers raise from Kickstarter if certain conditions are met. This announcement was met with some skepticism given the difficulty most OUYA Kickstarter games have getting funded in the first place, never mind reaching the considerable goal of $50,000.

In less than three weeks, two Kickstarter projects have met those goals. The first is Gridiron Thunder, whose ambitious goal of $75,000 dollars was broken in only a couple weeks, by 126 backers, and only 112 of those backers have registered for the program's reward tier, and almost all of them at the low-donation level, meaning the significant volume of cash to back this product was put up by people who don't want to be identified or rewarded for their role in it.  We're talking thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, even. So what happened, here? The most likely conclusion is that the bulk of the project is self-funded by the developers or their friends so they can get a free $75,000 check from OUYA. A simple bit of social engineering if you have the capital to put up - after all, who would say no to a free seventy five grand?

The second project to reach its funding, a point-and-click style adventure game, Elementary my Dear Holmes, also saw a sudden infusion of cash over the past couple days which pushed it to its $50,000 goal. More interesting are the profiles of these recent backers.  A few examples are below:

I'll spare the jokes about how nice it is that the Mona Lisa, Thomas Jefferson, and a pack of candy have taken a sudden interest in the future of the OUYA. These accounts were all created on or about the same time, and have just been sitting dormant. Not pictured are Harrison Ford, Peter Dinklage, Natalie Portman, and a slew of others. It's the next backer, however, that moves this from petty scam to plain disgusting.

That's nice. A woman who's been missing for two years and is most likely dead, found the time to back "Elementary, my Dear Homes" exclusively for the OUYA. About halfway through August 27th, these fake pledge accounts were noticed by enough people that the creator of the Kickstarter began to take some heat. A pledge comments on the situation (as reposted on Something Awful):  

And that's not even half the list. Not even a third. After Victory Square Games, the company behind Elementary, my Dear Holmes, started getting heat from this, suddenly these backers began to assume other identities. For example, our missing woman, and the only Kickstarter contributor from Palm Coast, Florida became Zoyi Alex.

And our friend Jefferson Taylor, from Johnson, Vermont, became Jefferson Tremonti.

Someone spent a lot of time and effort creating multiple Kickstarter accounts specifically for this purpose.  A man on the inside of the company? Perhaps. An unpaid intern for OUYA? Maybe. The most obvious culprit would be the game designers themselves, because who wouldn't want tens of thousands of dollars for doing virtually nothing. The other possible explanation is this is a move by OUYA itself in an attempt to make their program look successful, and hopefully encourage more developers to take a stab at it themselves. After all, it's only venture capital money - it's not OUYA's. For OUYA's part, they've been dutifully ignoring any inquiries on the situation:

Today Mike Suszek of Joystiq wrote about these first two games to successfully meet their goals for matching funds, while completely ignoring the bigger story at hand. Inquiries from readers about the validity of the funding were rebuffed initially, but Joystiq finally updated their original story claiming that they were looking into the matter.

Megan Farokhmanesh, writing for Polygon, follows up with their own announcement of OUYA's "Free the Games" program's first apparent successes with a 141-word piece. No question of where the money came from, or any other important questions that aren't difficult to find out. The only people interested in getting to the bottom of this are those writing in the comment section of her article, as seen to the right.

This is just another example of the spittoon that is modern video game journalism. One thing's for sure; this story is going to get far more interesting.