Utvikler Eteeski er i hardt vær om dagen, og det er fortsatt uklart hvordan de har havnet i denne situasjonen. Vi har gravd etter svar, men det ser for øyeblikket ut til at det er ord mot ord. Spillet Ant Simulator er uansett kansellert.
I en video på Youtube sier lead coder Eric Tereshinski at hans medarbeidere (og venner gjennom ti år) har brukt "the overwhelming majority of our Kickstarter money and the Ant Simulator investment money on liquor, restaurants, bars and even strippers".
Tereshinski sier videre at han har vært nødt til å fjerne alt om spillet fra Youtube (deriblant Ultimate Game Dev-serien som ble finansiert via Kickstarter), og at han ikke kan fullføre spillet uten å bli saksøkt av sine tidligere forretningspartnere.
"My ex-business partners said if you release Ant Simulator without us, we will sue you. A year and a half ago, I signed an LLC agreement with them. I trusted them and they had been my friends for 11 years. That means that resigning, and therefore cancelling the development of Ant Simulator, is really the only option available to me right now."
Som vanlig med slike krangler, så finnes det også her en annen side av saken. Det er Tyler Monce og Devon Staley som blir uthengt, men de forteller en ganske annen historie.
"It's completely false", sier Monce om anklagene i et intervju med Game Informer.
"I don't know why he's painting that picture, but the reality is that anything that was spent in a bar or restaurant was very reasonable in nature when you look at any business, including video game companies. It was part of our operating budget, it's not anything that was excessive. It was all reported to the IRS. The picture he's painting about that is 100 percent bull****."
Monce mener at samarbeidet kollapset fullstendig i fjor. Han fortsetter:
"He took control of everything. He took control of not only all the company's physical property, our bank accounts, our social media accounts, our website (which he changed to just our faces for some unknown reason), that was all him.
This all started to take place right after the game started to get really popular late in the summer. My personal theory is that he wanted to take it all for himself and cut us out of it. We made it clear that we weren't going to let him do that, because we had a moral and legal right not to."
Devon Staley, forhenværende director of operations hos Eteeski, sier at det finnes flere parter involvert i utviklingen, og disse har fått betalt for jobben de har gjort.
"We had a lot of contractors. Nine or ten people who worked on this game. Models, Rigging, our environmental art, and our human art, were all done through contractors. We paid all those contractors, as well. He's making this claim that we spent all this money on expensive entertainment, and that's completely false. We paid all these people who worked for us."
Når Tereshinski snakker med Polygon om saken, hevder han at de to tidligere kollegaene skal ha skaffet seg en utviklerenhet av Playstation 4 på uærlig vis, noe Monce benekter:
"We had everything ready to go. All we needed from Eric was a playable demo. He was not able to deliver a playable demo. I spent a month right after GDC getting ready for that. That's a big part of where our financial resources went to. All the infrastructure was in place and all we needed was a playable demo.
It looks fantastic, because of all the great modelers and artists and stuff. But gameplay itself was taking a lot of time to get off. If you show it in a YouTube video, it looks fantastic. But if you play the game, there's only three or four minutes of actual gameplay before you run out of things to do."
Det gjenstår å se hva sannheten egentlig er, og det er vanskelig å se for seg et scenario hvor dette spillet blir laget. Monce oppsummerer saken fra sine side og sier:
"I think he wanted to create this outlandish story, grab headlines, and make us look terrible. So far, it's working for him."
Tereshinski kontrer med denne:
"The problem is these guys clearly demonstrated to me I should have no part of them. The clearest thing was I should get as far from these guys as possible."
Vi mistenker at siste ord i denne saken ikke er sagt.