TitanReach’s lead developer has been accused of using crowd funding to fund his own pocket, invest in cryptocurrency and even buy himself a Tesla.
TitanReach’s Lead developer and co-founder of Square Root studios “unravel” allegedly used investment funds for his own gain and is now MIA.
TitanReach was a “Runescape-style” MMO that ultimately fell short of its $430,000 Kickstarter goal. Square Root Studios, undeterred, chose a “month-to-month” crowdfunding strategy, and the game’s community continued to show interest over the course of numerous Early Access revisions.
The lead developer of the game “unravel” announced on the game’s discord in August 2021 that development would be terminated because the $200 000 raised was insufficient to continue the game’s development.
until an “angel” investor invested a large sum of money to the developer with “no strings attached”, it was at this time that “Unravel” took to discord to announce that development would resume as the game was being fully funded.
This is when it all fell apart according to KiraTV who is an independent critic on Youtube. KiraTV had been corresponding with the developers and covered the game extensively on his channel, therefore, having the inside scoop on the whole matter.
You can watch his in-depth video exposing the truth about the whole situation in this tell-all video:
With pictures of Discord discussions as major proof, KiraTV claims TitanReach’s angel investor pulled out after Unravel misused cash for a failed $150,000 cryptocurrency investment and purchased a Tesla for his own personal use.
KiraTV further claims that TitanReach’s mystery investor is South African cryptocurrency entrepreneur Andre Cronje and that Unravel tried to bribe him into not looking into why Cronje withdrew his financing.
Andre’ Cronje seems to be the innocent party in all of this and his only mistake was being too trusting with his finances, and although he deals with cryptocurrency himself never forced or obliged “unravel” to go into cryptocurrency at all.
Cronje and KiraTV concluded that letting Unravel “go peacefully into the night” would be the wisest course of action after conversing with him, however, Cronje would kindly clear the developer’s debt. Unravel appeared to agree, announced the game’s end, and that was the end of it.
At the end of KiraTV’s video, he explains that he had no hard feelings toward “Unravel” and that he was simply a man that had a temptation put in front of him and ended up making the wrong choices and that he will be paying for these decisions for a long time to come.
It certainly demonstrates (once again) why we should be wary of crowdfunding a game from an unknown developer, particularly one as ambitious and costly as an MMO.