Areal’s two open letters blame different parties for Kickstarter failure

A reminder of previous deceptions.

In case you remained in any doubt just how duplicitous the people behind the failed Areal Kickstarter project were, here’s more evidence. After Kickstarter shut their effort down for being more than a little dubious, Ukraine-based West Games published an open letter to backers blaming “constant hostility from Russian Kickstarter accounts.”

At least, that’s what the English language version said.

Russian gaming site Riot Pixels has noticed that there was another version of the “open” letter circulated, this time in Russian. It wouldn’t do to blame Russians in the Russian language version though, so it’s the good old Americans who get the blame instead.

You can read a somewhat poorly translated version of this via Google translate over here (the final quotation box is the translation from the Russian language letter.)

A better translation has been provided by the user Megazver at the SomethingAwful forums: “We came to the American crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and told them we were the developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but the Americans didn’t believe us and time was wasted on trying to supply proof. Now we’ve got our own site and started to accept payments there. A huge thanks to you all for your help! It was a huge surprise that it’s precisely the players from Russia that are supporting us the most right now. We didn’t expect that.”

Yes, how unexpected! Especially as West Games were blaming those pesky Russians in the English version of the statement.

West Games is now attempting to raise money for Areal through their own, unregulated site. I’m not going to link to it, because you shouldn’t give them any money.