I’ve been a subscriber to EteeskiTutorials for almost a year now. He’s helped me and thousands of others learn game development. Yesterday I went on his website http://www.eteeski.com/ and saw that everything on his website, including his projects, tutorials, etc was gone. I knew something was wrong. Today he uploaded this on his youtube channel:
… This is just horrible. Reminds me of a similar problem that happened to the Elysian Shadows team [Short article] [Longer article]. I think that as a community we owe it to Eteeski to help him out. Maybe if anyone has a large following base, they could do a livestream to raise money? Or if anyone is a lawyer they help resolve Eteeski’s legal problems? The very least we could do is sign the petition that some made. Hope this can get sorted out.
It’s all questionable including that YouTube recording. Seems like a perfect way to bypass/loophole KickStarter and spend spend spend without needing to work for it.
His business partners embezzled the funding from Kickstarter and their other income sources. During the process of cutting ties he stated they threatened to sue him if he tried to continue forward with development of Ant Simulator and anything else under the LLC he had formed with them.
My son just noticed this and he is sad because he learned a lot from Eteeski.
On the other hand, this guy worked with his friends, trusted them with money, even though the company was his and used a version of his own name. Sounds to me like maybe they were not ready to do a Kickstarter.
While I feel for the guy, I am not sure it is helping him at all by coming here to ask Unity developers to raise money for him. He might have been better off asking for donations for his videos rather than going to Kickstarter.
I feel for him and hope he can recover and make his videos again.
Hmm…why was he worried they would sue him when they were the ones who committed the crime? That is odd.
It would have been better for him to stay with his company, and sue his friends.
Now, it looks like he is just running away, and not wanting to deal with it all.
At least if he had stayed, he could have forced his “buddies” to leave, and figure out a way to repay the $4k Kickstarter money.
It appears to be a complex issue with not a lot of details public. I’m not sure asking for donations to aid in a conflict that arose from how money was spent from a Kickstarter is a wise idea.
I guess there are two unconnected legal issues. Embezzling the funds was a f*cked up thing to do, but depending on how their internal contracts and/or how an LLC works (I really don’t know) it might not even have been illegal. Clearly morally wrong, but not necessarily illegal.
Now taking someone else’s intellectual property and releasing a game based on that without their consent and without owning the proper rights, that is clearly illegal. Being a d*ck doesn’t waive your rights to your own intellectual property, so if they would sue him, I think they would win. It’s messed up.
To me it looks like he really has no choice here, has been burned through no fault of his own and I don’t sense anything insincere in his voice. Actually I know stories from guys that I studied with, that played out almost the exact same way. It’s mind boggling, but some people just can not be trusted with money at all. Sadly you usually only know that in hindsight.
I’d guess that the company he established and worked with owns all rights to ant simulator - code and everything. So to continue working alone he would either need to reimplement the whole thing from scratch or “steal” the codebase/assets. And in that case they would have a reason to sue.
If they formed the company then I don’t quite understand why he didn’t sue his business partners. AFAIK, that’s the whole point of establishing a company in the first place - if development funds belong to the company, misusing those funds is embezzlement.
With a lack of detailed information, we have no way to know whether it was really embezzlement or whether he just perceived it as such because he didn’t agree on the expenditures or they were poor decisions by his partners.
As a partner in the company, if his partners really did commit a crime by embezzling the money, he should have pursued legal remedies and sued them, binding the rights to the game within the lawsuit so he could continue working on it and support the customers who are getting hosed otherwise.
Spot on. For me it’s not that he let them get stolen, but how he handled it after the fact. It doesn’t appear that he sough proper legal remedies which makes the whole story sound suspect, but if it really was a case of embezzlement then he is proving to not yet be business savvy enough to be responsible with other peoples’ funds.
Kind of seems like a lot of drama. People deal with problems everyday in their days. The difference is most of them (us) just deal with it on our own the best we can and don’t attempt to ask random folks on the Internet to bail us out.
Not trying to be an ass. Just saying there are masses of people out there who get themselves into big problems. One has to consider why this particular one should be helped over one of the masses of other folks who are going through hard times. And sometimes through less fault of their own.
Exactly, my point being that he may also be exaggerating the issue just because there was a disagreement, so it’s just as likely they spent the money on some advertising campaign he didn’t like rather than strippers and blow.
