Eteeski lost over a year of work and much more due to legal problems.

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.

Best of luck, @eteeski

 

Out of sheer morbid curiosity, what are the legal issues?

On this industry it's normally IP violations, and I have no sympathy for people who fall afoul of IP law.

 

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.

I can smell bullshit..............

 

It's quite complicated for me to explain, but Eteeski explained it in the video somewhere.

 

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.

 

Cinnamon Nicole?

 

I think that is the intended purpose otherwise there would be no more spend spend spend.

 

woah going to steer clear of that.

 

Wow, this is real sad. Now i wanna see what jim sterling thinks of this

 

Okay, so the guy has my sympathy. Seems to be a common enough story, nieve guys getting taken for a ride.

But there is no way I'm going to donate to a guy who let his last set of donations get stolen.

 

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.

 

Yeah, not very responsible, either way.

 

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.

 

If what he says it's true I'd be willing to bet money that he took issue with the money being spent on strippers. Just a gut feeling.

 

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.

 

It is sad, isn't it? This guy gave back to the community with tutorials that helped young people get into game design. This is the second person I have seen embroiled in a Kickstarter drama, a very similar story. I imagine there are dozens out there.

This guy, just like the others, will find it difficult to raise money now and his name will be smeared on every "sensationalism" game forum out there. Since the company's name was based on his name, it seems doubly worse.

Kickstarter can launch a game but it can also cause people who are not ready for it to really fall hard. It is one reason I have stayed away from it. I see so many people come here and have big dreams...and then they mention Kickstarter.

I wonder how much legal mess will be involved here if the backers sue the trio. Worst thing is that small amount of money probably wasn't enough to launch their game anyway.

 

One primary factor that would encourage me to want to help him is how active he is on these forums assisting others with their problems as they attempt to learn Unity. One good example of this sort of activity is @jhocking. Yes, he may heavily promote his book but he still shows up to assist others.

Contrast this to @eteeski who was last seen in September. If he is creating a series of tutorials teaching game development shouldn't he at least be on these forums to assist people with questions they may have with those tutorials?

 

Isn't that how life works, though? You can have nicest, sweetest person ever, then one die they die horribly in some idiotic/bizzare accident or have their entire life destroyed for no reason whatsoever. And it probably happens around the globe few hundred times per day.

I still don't understand why he didn't sue. Then again I never even heard of the dude to begin with. So either he doesn't even know that he can sue, or in reality there was entirely different issue. Or maybe it was something else.

 

Those business partners sound like bad people.

You try to be a good person in life and then WHAM! Statistics happen.

Agreed.

 

tangent: I cringed at how he pronounced "boolean" when I watched one of his videos before :/

 

I may have misread but I'm not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying he (this @eteeski fellow) does spend his time on these forums helping people or that he does not and he should be doing that?

I agree with your point that if someone is making a series of tutorials on game development it would be great for them to also spend some time on these forums to get feedback and help people get the most out of the tutorials.

From what you wrote it sounds like @jhocking is one who is going the extra mile.

It might just be me. In my perspective there are a lot of people out there who need help. I'd almost guarantee that every town people in this forum live in have people that can use help. Whether from natural disasters, stupid decisions, injuries from accidents or whatever. This is why I struggle with things like this online. The family that lost their house to a fire a few weeks ago in a town 15 miles away I gladly helped those folks. I am not opposed to helping people at all. Just there are only so many I can personally help and there are a huge number of folks needing help.

 

This one. It isn't like he would have to spend a great deal of time doing so either as there are plenty of others assisting, but it is definitely interesting to me that someone is making something intended for Unity users and hasn't been seen in months.

 

Wouldn't people having problems with his youtube tutorials post these in the youtube comment section and wouldn't he answer them there? Also I don't think providing free tutorials comes with the obligation to offer support beyond that.

In the video he says nothing about asking anyone for donations or help. He just says he got screwed over hard. The OP brought the whole donation thing up on his own as far as I can see.

Trusting your "closest friends", as he called his associates, doesn't strike me as grossly negligent. To be honest, I can't understand any hostility towards him, and I'm sensing quite a bit of that in this thread. Obviously along the way he hasn't thought of 100% of all eventualities and could have covered his ass better in hindsight. But he said he's been friends with those guys for 11 years, I don't think one can blame him for putting a little trust in people you know that long.

 

How much are you able to actually put in a YouTube comment?

Right. I knew that when I made the post. It still doesn't change my opinion on whether I would help him or not.

 

I don't know. I think roughly as long as my last post maybe? The longest I could find with a brief search was this:

Spoiler

He did answer a few questions in the comment sections as far as I can tell. But I only briefly checked a few random videos. The one above went unanswered.

 

As they say, going into business with your closest friends is a great way to lose your friends.

It sounds like some buddies got together and decided to make games, they all contributed to the games, Kickstarter earned them a little money, and a couple of them spent some of the money.

When you start a company, even with your closest friends, or maybe more importantly with your closest friends, you still should have paperwork, signed contracts, signed partnerships, etc. Money should be recorded and put into a bank account. Some measures should be taken to make this into a real business, especially if you are going to take other people's money and promise them something in return.

I am not sure anyone feels hostility here...I think it is more a lesson to be learned. These guys look young, not all of us are young. We may have learned that lesson the hard way ourselves, or maybe we learned it the easy way but saw many who failed due to mistakes along the way.

The only criticism I have of this particular situation is that this guy felt the need to post a video telling of the sordid details. LOL Instead, a simple..sorry guys, but have to shut down my videos due company/business issues. Why the world today has to tell us everything is beyond me. Seems to me that could just invite legal trouble.

Also..we have only seen one side of the story. While I feel for this guy, I kind of wonder what the rest of the story might be...there always is one, you know. To not think that is...naive...which is what caused this situation in the first place.

Honestly, this is a tragic sad incident..more so because it impacts others, including my son who was following the videos and is sad he can't continue to do so.

 

There are people who are generally sorta reliable and are nice to hang out with, but absolutely have no skill at handling money-related stuff. Haven't you met those?

So, "trusting closest friends" might not be a good idea, unless you're absolutely sure those friends are also good at business.

 

This is solid advice. The more public this issue goes, the more every bodies reputation gets tarnished. And the harder it is to recover gracefully.

It might be a case where there is no such thing as bad publicity. But I expect having a reputation as the guy who lost Kickstarter funds won't help future funding.

Edit: Just watched the video. It's reasonably graceful. I still would reccomend keeping out the reasons for resignation.

 

You have to realize people have already pre ordered this game and have watched it's development for over a year. Simply having the developer say "Sorry guys no more game" would not be appropriate for the situation. Obviously that would generate a lot of hate towards him, and people would be suspicious of them taking the kickstarter money and running. At least this way all of his 36,000 subscribers won't hate him.

 

Maybe the strippers were a legitimate business expense. They might have been QA.

 

I doubt it. The kickstarter was for a series of tutorials that he actually made.

 

I hope he steers away from anything remotely related to simulator games. If not he'd be putting himself in a position to be sued - even if all his new stuff is completely new content.

 

I'm pretty sure the couldn't successfully sue someone for making an "<insert noun here> simulator."

 

Afaik, it doesn't work this way. You can't copyright an idea, only its execution.So, he should be able to make a clone of original game.

 

Exactly, he could make an Ant Simulator if he really wanted to, and so long as he does not use any assets and scripts from the original one, he will be safe.

 

There is still a risk of being sued. Sure he is not likely to loose. But it's still hell to go through a suit.

 

Couldn't they make a case that he might be using knowledge/code involved in the development of Ant Simulator?

 

This was my point - they could sue based on reuse of assets/scripts created during the original development of ant simulator - even if they were from scratch.
Better to just pick another completely different concept/genre.
I've read about this happening before to other people.

 

You'll need a lawyer for that one.

I don't see how that is going to work though. Not all code is copyrighteable, and they would need some sort of proof.

 

If this is true, and everyone here's first thoughts are "I would never help him out." or "Why bail him out? He shouldn't be asking for help." then I find that quite disturbing.

If the community he gives back to abandons him, then what incentives are there for anyone else to give to that community? If everyone is out for themselves like some disturbing comments here insinuate, then why should anyone ever write any tutorials for anyone?

It's sad.

Actually, you can.

Things have changed... for the worse. (This happened in 2012).

Then again, anything is possible in the US court system. A judge can rule whatever the hell they want, and you can do nothing about it. In fact, a corporate giant like Disney could sue you for absolutely no reason, and destroy your business before you even get to court. It's corrupt. It sucks. But just ask VideoGameAttorney on /r/gamedev.

 

This is one of the overall problems with KS, it puts a lot of other people´s money into the hands of people who really only know how to market a KS, without having the background business experience. When you go to the bank for a loan, even if you go for an angel investor, they are going to vet you hard, they are going to check out all the legalities and structure of your business arrangement.

Also, this freaking stupid concept of forming legal entities with people just because they played games with you, or because ´they seemed nice on forums´.. it is like little kids playing in a grown up world. You are forming a legal entity.!

This is just another in a long series of someone ´learning a basic lesson´, but it costing other people a lot of money. Seriously, he had the name recognition, he had the fans, why would even even allow access to the money to the others.

 

Why would he even bother with them at all? The website lists the first as a "Director of Finance" and the second as a "Director of Operations". That sounds like a fancy way to describe employees who don't actually do anything.

There is a significant difference between "giving back" and "being paid to give back".

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eteeski/ultimate-gamedev-tutorials-make-your-first-video-g

 

In the world - real world - everybody IS out for themselves. In case of trouble, the reasonable idea is to expect other people to kick you down instead of helping you.

Someone who writes tutorials should do that because they enjoy the process. If they don't enjoy process, they shouldn't do that. If tutorial writer, say, makes it to patreon, good for them, but expecting anything back from anybody is not the right idea.

 

In many states in order to Incorporate you need at least 3 people on the BoD, in some states it may even be 5. Just from my opinion, he looks like he just grabbed two friends to meet the requirement and then gave them fancy titles. Also if you want to open a corporate bank account, usually they will require you to have at least 2 people from the BOD signing the paperwork. Which all is silly because for what he is doing, he just could have formed a sole proprietorship and not had to deal with anyone else and still got some of the legal protection.

Yeah, I have a problem with this whole ´ giving back´ argument too. He did a KS to get money to do the tutorials. There are plenty of guys out there ( Brackys, Bergzurg, Inscope, SpeedTutor, Quill18Creates are my favorites) who all do an incredible job and only take nickle and dime contributions.

 

For the record, I'd never heard of the guy before this thread. Most of the people that have commented that watch him are pretty sympathetic.

I dunno. I thought the director of finance is responsible for ensuring strippers get paid on time. The director of operations needs to ensure there is a good supply of beer.