Yesterday brought one of the stranger stories I've remarked upon: a video by Ant Simulator lead dev Eric Tereshinski emerged cancelling the game, resigning his position and alleging that his business partners "spent the overwhelming majority of both our Kickstarter money and the Ant Simulator investment money on liquor, restaurants, bars and even strippers." Unsurprisingly, the partners in question have sought to defend themselves.
"The picture he’s painting about that is 100 percent bullshit," ETeeski LLC's director of finance Tyler Monce said in an interview with Game Informer. "I don’t know why he’s painting that picture, but the reality is that anything that was spent in a bar or restaurant was very reasonable in nature when you look at any business, including video game companies. It was part of our operating budget, it’s not anything that was excessive. It was all reported to the IRS."
In contrast to Tereshinski's claims that the budget was frittered away, Monce and director of operations Devon Staley allege that Tereshinski transferred ETeeski money, from which its contractors were paid, to his own account. Speaking to Polygon, meanwhile, Tereshinski has clarified that his departure from the company was "not a problem of being out of money" and that the most that could have been lost was a few thousand.
Accusations over the company's attempts to obtain a PlayStation devkit are similarly muddy. Tereshinski claims that Monce failed to submit Ant Simulator to Sony, instead inventing that Sony wanted additional polish on the game to speed Tereshinski's work. Monce, on the other hand, says Tereshinski failed to supply a playable demo at all.
Legal action is, apparently, pending, and it's the one way we're going to get facts out of this peculiar and acrimonious exchange. But whoever ends up having the truth of the matter, I'd say it's curtains for Ant Simulator.
