Million

How could a game with a name as fluffy as PuffPals: Island Skies ever do anything wrong? How could a company called Fluffnest be anything other than the cuddliest love-bunnies on the internet? It’s too implausible to even consider. Except… Launched on Kickstarter in April 2022, PuffPals: Island Skies promised to bring the experience of a game like Animal Crossing to the PC, with the very modest goal of just $75,000. But people were excited, the project got a lot of buzz, and in the end it raised an incredible $2.6 million (kinda). Today, the website for the game is gone, backer refunds are being ignored, and multiple lawsuits against the company behind the project have been lodged.

Two people, David Pentland and artist usLily, started Fluffnest—also via Kickstarter—in 2020. As superbly documented by Mujin on YouTube (thanks PCG) it became an instant success, created gorgeous plushies that developed a large fanbase, with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, and a drop-based store that meant each plush was only available for a limited time. In 2022, the pair began the project to create a game set in the world of their plushies, an Animal Crossing-like cozy game with all the fishing, farming and friendship that cozy gamers crave.

That $75,000 figure may seem like a warning sign from the start. It’s not enough to develop the loading screens, let alone a game. But over the years, that’s kinda how Kickstarter’s become. Projects don’t receive any funds at all if their target isn’t met, so if you put your actual forecast costs, say $5 million, you’ll almost definitely not raise and it not get a penny. So developer’s come in very low, ensuring that they get something, with stretch goals in place to encourage more pledges that could actually deliver the game. And that’s obviously a disastrous model, meaning games that need $5m might raise $100,000 and keep, and then clearly can’t deliver, resulting in abandoned projects and furious backers. It happens all the time.

But in the case of PuffPals, it seemed to work. $75,000 became $2.56 million, more than double their top stretch goal figure. As Mujin reveals, however, a lot of that figure was extremely fudged: You could back the project for $20 to get the game on release, but afterward there were “add-ons,” where you could pay another $40 or so to get a plush toy too, and those plushies were ones that had sold out and were highly sought after by collectors. The money still counted toward the Kickstarter total, but a significant portion of it was going toward the toy and its shipping. Which is to say, that $2.6m figure was by far not what they had to spend on the game.

The project then began to follow the failing Kickstarter playbook to the letter. Updates started to slow down, promises would be forgotten or explained away, and wild excuses would be given for why communication had been bad, all always accompanied by new promises that all these things would improve. You’ll always get the six month silence, followed by the “Sorry we’ve been so quiet, we’ve been working so hard!” update accompanied by scant few gifs and a bunch of concept art to “prove” it. And then, of course, a promised alpha build will get delayed and delayed, each missed milestone accompanied by an excuse that contradicts the last. Next you get the heartfelt apologies and promises to improve communication, along with a boast that the build is just moments away, before another stretch of silence ending in claims that the build, due years before, is “on track.” It’s all so painfully common.

© Kickstarter / Kotaku

But the PuffPals debacle took it all to a new level, by seemingly not only messing their Kickstarter backers around, but customers of their main business too. During the waits, Reddit sleuths spotted that PuffPals trademarks had expired a year ago, and that the game was seemingly being entirely created by outsourcing company Room 8, while the plushies side of the business started having its own major troubles, customers not receiving shipments, claiming they had been overcharged, and delivery prices being almost tripled. It then became apparent the company was being sued for failure to pay back business loans.

Then things got even worse. Fluffnest was going out of business. Blaming rising shipping costs, the company declared it was coming to an end. And yet even here, in this statement, it said, “Island Skies production is secured and will not be affected.” Which, given it hadn’t given any substantial proof of life in years, and it had already been revealed that the entire game was being created by outsourced companies, was quite the claim.

The last update to appear on PuffPals appeared May 21 this year, which was an extraordinary screed of excuses and blame laid at the feet of the company they’d paid (and then not paid) to develop the game. And, of course, every word of it contradicts the promises made in previous posts, even as recently as a month earlier.

Today, the game’s pre-order page is an Expired Domains landing page, the Kickstarter has been abandoned for four months, and people who worked on the game have reported going unpaid. And obviously no one is getting refunds—but it’s important to remember that Kickstarter backing doesn’t guarantee a delivered project, so that’s always murky ground.

Various lawsuits reported by Mujin show judgments being made against Fluffnest, ordering the company to repay owed money totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the company hired to actually make the game, Room 8, is now suing Fluffnest and David Pentland for $1.9 million.

While the various litigations drag through the courts, it’s impossible to know how a super-cute cozy game became such a multi-million dollar disaster. Was this begun in good faith, before collapsing around their ears? Was it a deliberate scam? Was Alpha 2 ever actually a thing that existed? We don’t know, and given court dates stretch as far away as summer 2027, we likely won’t know for a very long time. Either way, it’s astonishingly unlikely anyone will get any of their money back, whether a backer or a developer hired on the project, or even a bank providing one of the many loans. Meanwhile, people will just have to play one of the other 72,482 cozy village life games on PC instead.

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