Kickstarter Game 'The Stomping Land' Might Be Going Extinct

There are times when a gamer’s worst nightmare becomes reality, and for those who donated to the Kickstarter funding for The Stomping Land, it looks like their nightmare is all too real. The game promised to be a dinosaur survival simulator where you hunt down dinosaurs for food and try to survive in a prehistoric wasteland and had been taking a long time to develop. All anyone had for information on the game was by interacting on the forums.

A first build of the game was published on Early Access on May 30th 2014 and is available for purchase on steam – not that one would recommend anyone buying it since all work has been stopped. There’s no point in purchasing a game that’s going to be in beta indefinitely. The creator has stopped responding to e-mails and the art lead has quit. The in game model designer, Vlad Konstantinov states on the forums:

"More than a month has passed since the day when I received the last reply from Fundora. I've sent him five messages and haven't got any single reply."

Konstantinov has since stopped working on the project and moved onto other things.

The Stomping Land raised over  $114,000 from 4,400 Kickstarter backers, making much more than the $20,000 budget that was requested. A disgruntled user sent a message about what happened to Kickstarter and they responded to him with this according to his forum post:

“Travis here with Kickstarter support--thanks for updating me about this situation, and I’m sorry to hear that this has not been a better experience for you and other backers of The Stomping Land project. I do see that we've reached out to this creator in the past to remind them of their obligations, as well as our expectations regarding communication. I'm sorry they haven't yet responded to you and other members of their backer community.

If you feel as though this creator has not made a good faith effort to complete their project as promised, we’d appreciate if you could share some feedback about your experience using our Project Feedback Form.

We expect all members of the Kickstarter community to act with honesty and openness. When we find that people are abusing the system or the trust of others, we do not hesitate to suspend their account or restrict certain account privileges, like launching another project. We have a dedicated Integrity Team that monitors our system and reviews reports that we receive from our community. While we can’t speak to the nature of specific projects that have been approved or declined, we’re constantly working on improving our vetting process for creators and we are grateful for the feedback that folks like you provide.

Best, 
Travis”

Which was not something he wanted to hear after sinking $90 into the project.

People had faith in this project, enough to fund it above and beyond what was asked and it is unfortunate that the fans who supported this project and those who worked on this project are being treated this way. If anything this story is a cautionary tale to be careful about the projects you sink your money into because they won’t all come out the way you want them to. More will be added to this story as it develops.

Angelina Bonilla, NoobFeed (@Twitter)