Proving that the Playstation 4 is indeed an evil machine that drives people to murder and thievery, Secrets of Rætikon has had $2,500 of their Paypal account used by a hacker to order three PS4 consoles.
The developer of the game, Broken Rules, is working with Paypal to recover the money that was lost and put a stop to the spending before all $10, 900 was spent. Chances of learning the identity of the hacker are slim to none.
“This feels like someone breaking into your house and we were super-stressed out for a whole day,” Pichlmair says. “We’re on the last stretch of our crowdfunding campaign and this incident is really taxing …. Gladly there wasn’t too much money on our PayPal account at that point.”
Secrets of Rætikon is an exploration/puzzle game that uses a very stylish and quite beautiful vector graphics style.
The Indiegogo campaign has a $40,000 goal with only three more days to go… so the hack was basically already kicking a talented developer when they’re down. Perhaps the game would have done better on Kickstarter… oh yeah… Kickstarter doesn’t support companies based in Austria.
Paypal is likely to replace the money that was stolen, and the developers will be able to keep the money they’ve raised even if they haven’t hit their goal. So at the very least maybe this incident will get some more eyes on their game and serve as a cautionary tale for those crowdfunding their video game projects.
