The Greed Monger saga never freakin’ ends. But hey, at least we’re getting some twists and turns for the Kickstarter money that got pissed away.
MMORPG gamers will recall that the game raised over $100,000 back in 2012 to build what the developers said would be a “crafting-focused sandbox MMORPG.” Within three years, the project imploded as devs abandoned it over a lack of funding and attempts to revive the game failed. Earlier this year, the original founder, Jason Appleton, resurfaced and vowed to reimburse Kickstarter backers with his newfound cryptocurrency fortune, capping it off with a bizarre account of the drama that blames incompetent devs, trolls, and the press for the failure of the game. But as we’ve been chronicling over the course of 2018, many Kickstarter backers denied receiving those refunds, prompting Appleton to, on numerous occasions, lash out at angry backers and the press and blame PayPal and the crypto market.
That brings us up to this week, when James Proctor posted a new blog post. Proctor was the lead programmer who quit in 2015 after Appleton signed the game over to him and Joel Hager but then popped back up in 2016 claiming that the game was back in production.
The official site now has a countdown to October 12th and a “prototype v0.1” release, and Proctor says he’s “evaluating the feasibility of picking this project back up” now that “Kickstarter refunds [are] taking place.”
“The first step will be a Prototype which will be released in the months ahead. The Prototype will have a single player mode and allow players to host a smaller scale multiplayer game with up to 200 players based on the specs of the server they run it on. Once the prototype is complete then I’ll have to see if the response is enough to warrant the full development of the game. I’ve been going back over Greed Monger’s Design Document. With the KickStarter funds being returned it gives us a chance to chart a course toward the future. Take a good hard look at what we were planning on doing with Greed Monger and get the game back to a stripped down version that can be launched to Early Access in a timely fashion. Also by figuring out what we want Greed Monger to be at it’s core we are able to spend some time on getting those Core Elements just right with out being bogged down by a bunch of filler features that serves no purpose to what we are trying to make GM into.”
Get caught up on the whole sorry saga:
