...but did find Botch's first post ever, so that's something.

Oh it feels like only yesterday...brings a tear to me eye it does. 

Oh, about the Kickstarter - I'm shocked, SHOCKED, at the incredulity on display here.  Where is the unbridled enthusiasm at what is obviously and completely ON THE LEVEL?  I am disappointed in you, Tappers.  Shame!

Botch, you are innocent and good-natured. And we want to keep you that way!

When you've seen all the horrors and darkness we've seen, you become jaded. It's inevitable.

Never lose your wonder at the world, my friend. Never lose it.

The most immediately suspicious thing - and the thing that could also be quite deceptive unless you're a STALKER whore like me who has the whole game memorized - is that practically none of the assets they showed in their videos were their own. Everything was STALKER footage or stuff you can get free with Unity. To the casual observer, it'd be easy to assume that the STALKER footage was Areal, because they didn't bother to call out the difference.

Another eyebrow-raiser was the fact that West Games is based in Ukraine but the entity that would've been getting the Kickstarter lucre was incorporated in Las Vegas. The CEO of West has said this was simply an effort to bypass potential issues with the political landscape in Ukraine, and under normal circumstances I'd overlook it because that makes sense... but on top of the other suspicious stuff, it's, er, suspicious.

I tend to take a dim view of people when it comes to knowledge of the games industry. In my experience everyone in the world is basically my aunt Katie. She's a nice person, but she has no clue at all what goes into making a game. She genuinely believes that making games is no different than playing them; that they spring by magic into their boxes. She certainly has no idea what it costs in terms of money or infrastructure to create a game, and to me that was the biggest red flag with Areal. As Helmut pointed out when he started this thread, $50,000 is is about $35,450,000 less than would be necessary to create a game like Areal - and that's assuming a large team with a stable workflow, not a dozen-person startup. Ironically enough, they might have gotten away with it if they'd asked for a million bucks and been a little less egregious with that video.