MMO players aren’t the only people who get scammed by games that sound too good to be true. Kotaku has a piece up this week about a company named Drakore Studios, which apparently was never a properly going concern. The publication interviews multiple “employees” to paint a clear picture of a part con-man, part wishful-thinker who hired two dozen remote employees to work on a game he didn’t even have the rights to, with money from investors he didn’t have.
That game, Zeal, is an MMOARPG we’ve covered previously, and just to be clear, its actual dev studio, Lycanic, is not tainted by the drama, nor is its other MMO, AetherBound; the owners of the game were clearly victims too, as they were promised that the con-man-wishful-thinker would be buying out their company.
Drakore Studios, however, was never even a registered company and it certainly won’t be doing any buying-out paying any of the people it hired, as a skeptical employee who got the scoop from an investor eventually put together that they were all being deceived and locked down the “company” accounts to tell everyone the bad news. And nope, none of them is getting paid. The whole thing seems to have been for nothing.
Zeal, for its part, ended its pre-alpha in May, with plans to incorporate feedback before coming back online, so at least it emerged relatively unscathed from the mess.
