Man, this is just marvellous. No seriously, West Games has managed to make all the wrong decisions with Areal’s Kickstarter campaign and things just got even worse for this studio. In order to gain gamers’ trust, West Games hosted a Reddit AMA. Now I don’t know what West Games had in mind, however this AMA event turned into a disaster.
For starters, West Games did not answer all the crucial questions that fans were asking. Not only that, but the team has – more than once – copy/pasted an answer from its FAQ. I mean, what’s the point of hosting a Reddit AMA if you’re going to paste your FAQ?
Moreover, a lot of ‘new’ Reddit accounts were suddenly appearing on this AMA, defending West Games. Now while these accounts could be legit users, it seems really ‘weird’ (to say the least) to see such new members defending a company on this social media all of a sudden.
Oh, and some of West Games’ answers were hilarious to say the least. When asked about a photo or a video featuring all members of the team, West Games had this to say.
“We don’t want to present everyone to the public at the moment. Later we will tell more about the rest of the team and will continue to tell you about the development process, whilst showing our specialists.”
“We have few 3D designers, but we can’t reveal them publicly so far. We also use a help of autsorcing company to manage with the game sound.“
Autsorcing-what? Okay, this is obviously a typo (as West Games obviously meant ‘outsourcing’). But ‘we also use a help autsorcing company to manage with the game sound’? Seriously?
West Games claimed that the first in-game pre-alpha footage of Areal will be released early next week.
All in all, this whole Areal-thing is perhaps this Summer’s most hilarious (gaming-related) thing.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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If this game, uh, I mean scam, gets funded there are going to be a lot of STALKER fans who are going to get burned. Not that I have any sympathy for them at this point if they’ve ignored all the warning signs.
Yeah, I almost want this to get funded. Need a big, high-profile Kickstarter failure or scam to make people wake up and pay attention when they pledge money. Then again, people clearly *are* paying attention or these guys would be at their goal by now.
Still a better company than Ubisoft.
EA is Spying on You by File Snooping with the Origin Client – Official Investigation Begins
Read more: http://wccftech.com/ea-spying-file-snooping-origin-client-investigation/#ixzz37Oz6Kjxx
Should say: “All in all, this whole Areal-thing is perhaps this Summer’s biggest (gaming-related) hoax.” Instead!!
So it smells “Scam”
How sad, an actual stalker game under a different title wont be funded because of trolls telling everyone its a scam… Yet people funded that crappy mmo stalker like game which is nothing but a p2w scam… People support the worst things on kickstarter.
I’m in the Survarium beta and it’s already pretty awesome. And afaik they did not use crowd-funding at all. Also, multiplayer actually fits quite nicely with Stalker if you recall the whole faction system.
I’m afraid you are the troll here dude. The facts about a KS project are clear :
Money = Evidences about a project (Questions answered, visual arts, videos, organisation of the project, of the work…)
No evidences = no money.
Ignorance is no excuse John.
You forgot their hilarious answer about developer kits:
Q: “Have you already bought developer kits? Can you show them to us?”
A: “Those times when you needed special equipment are gone. Now it is enough to conclude an agreement with a platform holder and download developer kits as software. You can get them for yourself! But you can actually only release your product on some particular platform if you can make a decent game.”
Are they out of their mind?