Introduction to Scam
In this game, you can do anything. That should have been the first red flag. Identity, in 2015, released its first hype trailer, showing off an MMORPG live simulator promising anything: you could become whoever you wanted, and go wherever you wanted, with everything being player-owned, from houses to shops. Things like art galleries, where everything within them would be painted and made by players, could be bought and purchased by other players. Whether you wanted to manufacture drugs, smuggle them into the world, or even become part of the cops to take them down, this was a living and breathing environment that promised everything.
I've often experienced this with pretty much every game: if they promise you the world and if it sounds too good to be true, most of the time, it is. The case of Identity was supposedly in development for seven years since its 2015 hype release trailer. It got a lot of traction, as you can imagine, but there was one problem. You see, they didn't have the money, and for this kind of scale, that should have been an instant alarm bell. Promising a massive open-world MMORPG but not having the money to fund it? Where are they going to get this from? Did they even have the experience?
Well, the team behind Identity decided to start a Kickstarter, a crowdfunding campaign to get this title made, where they raised 1.5 million dollars. This was not something small scale; there was a massive community behind it, and a 1.5 million dollar Kickstarter showed that there was hype building up, that there were real people that wanted to see the title. Yet, while 1.5 million sounds like a lot for a massive open-world MMORPG, things that usually cost hundreds of millions, it was still looking on the low side, and that should have been another red flag. Identity was released on Steam in November of 2019. Was it everything that was supposed to be promised? Well, no, not exactly.
The result was an incredibly limited and bare-bones title, with customization promised to make the character of your dreams, and then it ended up having just a few options of hair color and weight. You're supposed to be able to live another life, but there are no jobs, there are no activities, and there is nothing to do but walk around a placeholder town center. This is not just bare-bones; this is a non-existent scam. The UI looked like the most basic placeholder Unreal Engine stuff; there were horrific bugs, the graphics were terrible, and people would be walking around falling through the floor, with constant crashing. The first area this town square was the only part that was ever open to the public; the rest of the game, you know, the entire world that was promised, never came. Thus, Identity was labeled just a glorified chat room.
Yet, that would be fine if it was just developers that didn't quite accomplish what they wanted to, but the fact that they took 1.5 million dollars from the community? Well, that's where the issues started to come in. People calling it a scam or abandoned, YouTubers making so many videos that this game crashed within the first few days, and the Steam Reviews? Well, it was soon taken down, perhaps being one of the worst day-one launch disasters that we've seen in the last decade for MMORPGs.
Yet, despite all of this, there had to be a catalyst, there had to be something that triggered the downfall. Was it truly innocent developers that were just weighing over their heads, or was there something more malicious going on? Starter had many holes in it from the beginning, at least the campaign that Identity was trying to run. Two people pledged five thousand dollars, and with that, they were given the promise that they'd get to visit and tour the offices where Identity was being made; they'd get to spend half the day even playing the game with the team. I'm assuming that's why they decided to waste so much of their hard-earned cash. Yet later, it was revealed the team behind Identity consisted of two people, and this office that could be toured as part of a reward for donating five thousand dollars never even existed. It was two people in their bedrooms, working remotely.
They even asked for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to start and managed to get that within 30 days, but there were even smaller red flags within this Kickstarter, the initial one that Identity put out had a little point that said 150k still wasn't enough, but they were just making it as a proof of concept to get investors. So what happened to these investors? As the pieces started to fall into place, it became very clear that these were two friends who wanted to make an overly optimistic title that didn't have the experience or the money, and they were just imagining that some investors would come out of nowhere as soon as the community started pledging, and when it didn't, they panicked. They released an unfinished trash game that had bugs in it, that never really worked and didn't have any of the content that was promised, and thousands of people lost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for this.
Colclusion
Yet despite this, despite me somewhat defending them, saying it was just people over their heads, the number of mistakes that were made started to become more malicious. They opened up pre-orders, as they called it, passports, so people could get into the game early, but they knew the game wasn't ready. They knew the game probably would never even exist, yet they kept releasing trailers and screenshots to sell these pre-order bonuses. It turned out that all the trailers and all the screenshots within them were just asset packs; they didn't make anything themselves.
They were just things that they'd purchased in the past and compiled together to try and pretend that they had a working game to sell pre-orders to something that was never really meant to be. And I think this is the lesson that people have learned now: the MMORPG genre is one that's played with stories like this.
You have the big successes, but you also have so many smaller indie companies that think that they can recreate the massive scale titles that we've seen from World of Warcraft, so on and so forth, but without hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of people backing it, it's never gonna work, yet they still attempt it, and they still take money off people that just want to play a good game. So what's the moral of the story? Well, I don't, don't give money to two random people on the internet.
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