Failed $73,000 Kickstarter Offers Refunds (Sort Of)

In October of last year, the director of the video game Kickstarter Midora, which had raised $73,470 but run out of money, wrote in a backer update that he was looking for outside investments.

Shockingly, he didn’t find any buyers—hard to imagine why investors wouldn’t want to latch onto a Kickstarter with no money—so now Midora’s director, William “Mhyre” Ledent, says he’s offering refunds. Sort of.

“I first have to pay back close relatives and other parties that helped me way before the kickstarter,” Ledent wrote in an update last night. “Then, I will have to stabilize my own situation. I can’t offer refunds as soon as I earn money from a new job. I will need to save up money to create my own insurance, to be able to cover unexpected situations, emergencies.”

Ledent continued: “However, once that’s done, I don’t have many options and I won’t be able to offer refunds to certain people. Some people have pledged quite a bit of money on this Kickstarter and I can’t exactly repay them in full. Not at first. There is also the problem of how money will be transferred, and for this only one option is available to me: PayPal. This will certainly make some of you upset but, as someone who currently lives in Europe, I don’t have many other options.”

Backers will be able to start requesting refunds this summer, Ledent said. That’s when he’ll be able to afford them. “With the decision of offering refunds, Midora certainly becomes a distant dream,” he wrote. “However, I am not giving up on it at all. My goal is to get back on this project as soon as possible, using money I will hopefully make on other projects.”

Credit to Ledent: At least he’s keeping backers updated, unlike, say, Michael Wong, who raised over $30,000 for a video game and then disappeared without a trace. But this is a sad situation all around.

“I am hoping some or most of you will not ask for a refund, at least not yet, in order to help me find some sort of balance,” Ledent wrote. “The less refunds, the sooner you can expect me to go back to Midora and bring you the game we all believed in from the start.”

You can reach the author of this post at [email protected] or on Twitter at @jasonschreier