Headline RePLAY – 5.1.12

Today on Headline RePLAY: An alleged Kickstarter scam, Nintendo is stretched thin and Diablo III introduces global play.

When Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventures project on Kickstarter amassed over $3.3 million in donations, the crowdfunding site exploded into prominence—news of fraud was all but inevitable. Today Kickstarter donors allege that the Mythic: The Story of Gods and Men project by Little Monster Productions to be a scam.

Mythic was supposed to be an action/strategy RPG from a studio that claimed to be run by former Activision and Blizzard employees. The project had a funding target of $80,000, but only raised $5,000 before it was cancelled.

Kickstarter donors allege that the project’s concept art to be stolen, images of the studio were from another company and its donation rewards were plagiarized from another Kickstarter project called The Banner Saga.

Once the claims hit the web, Little Monster Productions cancelled its funding on Kickstarter, closed its Facebook page, website and all but disappeared from the internet.

Since the $80,000 goal wasn’t reached, no money was lost by donors.

|Source: Develop

Even Nintendo has limits to what it can handle. Nintendo concedes that it can’t promise an “overwhelmingly rich” lineup for the Wii U while preparing the upcoming console for launch and software development for the 3DS.

“There is always a limit to our internal resources,” Nintendo global president Satoru Iwata admitted to investors in Japan last week.  “The company now has to develop software for the Nintendo 3DS, has to prepare for the Wii U launch and has to finalize the hardware functionalities. With these circumstances in mind, if I said that an overwhelmingly rich [Wii U] software lineup would be prepared from day one, it would be too much of a promise to make.”

Iwata noted that despite the pressure and demand Nintendo would be able to “make several proposals” about games for the Wii U launch window that could become blockbuster ‘evergreen titles’ like New Super Mario Bros. or Wii Fit.

“We have learned the lesson that we have to make that kind of preparation for the Wii U, or the Wii U will not gain enough momentum to expand its sales. We would like to share additional information at the E3 show in June this year.”

|Source: IGN

As Diablo III’s May 15th release looms closer, Blizzard has released new information on its ‘global play’ feature, which allows demon-slayers to take their crusade worldwide.  

At launch there will be three game regions available: The Americas, Europe and Asia. Each player is assigned a “home” game region based on the owner’s home address that is registered on their Battle.net account, but players will have the option to freely switch between regions through the in-game options menu.

There are restrictions, however: real-money auction houses are only available on the player’s “home” game region and characters, items and friends lists are nontransferable across regions.

A complete FAQ can be found via the source link below.

|Source: Blizzard