Successful Kickstarter Ends In Payment Disaster [Update]

A Place for the Unwilling is an adventure game that passed its Kickstarter funding goal earlier today. The celebration was short-lived, however; what followed has been nothing short of a disaster.

As soon as the clock ticked over ending the game’s Kickstarter, and the system began to process people’s credit card payments, something went horribly wrong.

Developers AlPixel Games write:

Once the campaign finished we went to hit the sack and rest, we were super happy about being able to fund the development of “A Place for the Unwilling”. A few hours later we started receiving messages from you, telling us about payment issues.

They weren’t kidding. AlPixel claim that “almost 700 out of the 900 backers had their donations denied. The reason is still unclear, but looks like it’s related to Kickstarter and their payment management system.”

While it seems the team is having some success in getting backers to re-enter their credit card information, with that number of people to contact—and Kickstarter cancelling all payments not made within seven days—AlPixel were worried that there was a risk of the game not actually securing the funds to be developed.

“I must admit that this whole thing was a huge bummer” AlPixel Games’ Luis Díaz tells Kotaku. “We spent two months working non-stop to have the chance to fund our project and we were lucky enough to find people willing to support us, but looks like it was too early to celebrate as we don’t know if we’ll be able to fix the payments. In the worst-case scenario, we could always launch a new campaign, but they do require a lot of time and, for a tiny studio like ours, that would be quite a step back.”

UPDATE: A happy ending! Kickstarter has told Kotaku:

Unfortunately there was a brief technical glitch that caused these payments to fail. Our team is processing the charges now. We’ll make sure the creator receives their funds, and we look forward to playing A Place for the Unwilling.