Darkhaven‘s Kickstarter campaign has spiraled into chaos after it emerged that part of its funding was made up of fraudulent pledges. Making matters worse, the game now shares its name with an older project that already vanished after taking in more than half a million dollars.

The name Darkhaven may not mean much at first glance, but for Diablo fans, especially those who still love the classic style of action RPGs, it has quickly become associated with uncertainty. The game, led by Diablo 2 lead artist Phil Shenk, was announced earlier this year as a project in development seeking support through Kickstarter. But the crowdfunding campaign soon became tangled up in fraudulent donations, while accusations resurfaced around a previous game using the same name, one that disappeared after raising nearly $650,000. Altogether, the situation has started casting serious doubt over the project’s future.

According to Moon Beast Productions, the studio led by Phil Shenk, at least $65,000 of the current Kickstarter campaign is made up of fraudulent pledges that will never actually be collected, even though the platform still lists them as legitimate backing. This is not some minor inconvenience. It has left the studio in a deeply awkward position, because the platform has effectively presented them with two choices: accept that the money is gone and continue with the remaining legitimate funds, or cancel the campaign, refund everyone, and relaunch later in the hope that the same thing does not happen again.

Despite that setback, Moon Beast insists that development on the RPG is continuing. Shenk has repeated that the team’s main goal remains delivering “the best possible experience” for players, and that the studio is still committed to seeing the project through. At least for now, the financial impact of those fake pledges does not appear to pose an immediate existential threat to Darkhaven‘s development. Even so, the situation has clearly rattled the wider group of backers, who are now split over whether the campaign should continue in its current state or be restarted from scratch.

Years ago, another Darkhaven “lost” more than half a million dollars

And as mentioned above, that is not the only problem surrounding Darkhaven this week. Years ago, another project using exactly the same name, developed by Hidden Achievement, raised more than $640,000 on Kickstarter with the promise of becoming a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre. The problem is that what started as a crowdfunding success story eventually turned into something much darker after years passed with no meaningful updates and no visible progress.

Since October 2023, there has been total silence from the team led by Michael Monks, who had been virtually unknown in the industry before launching that campaign. The disappearance of the official website, the complete inactivity on social media, and the lack of responses to users who had trusted the project all raised serious alarm bells, leading many backers to conclude that they had been scammed. Some users tried to recover their money through their banks, but most of those requests were rejected because too much time had passed since the original contributions.

Now that Shenk’s Darkhaven is also running into trouble, many observers have naturally drawn parallels, even though there is no narrative or conceptual connection between the two projects. That still has not stopped people from wondering whether this game will ever actually see the light of day, or whether it is heading toward another public fiasco. For the moment, Moon Beast Productions has not yet decided what to do with its current Kickstarter. As the team put it: “We’ll take a few more days to consider the best course of action.”

Source: GameStar