Chinese video game developer Studio Siphon stepped forward on June 13 to address a recent crowdfunding campaign for the mysterious Project GT, a 3D anime-styled action racing game. In its recent statement on bilibili, the studio said that the Kickstarter campaign was a scam orchestrated by an external party.
The Kickstarter campaign launched on May 12, and by June it had already reached its initial goal. By the time the campaign ended, it had already been picked up by numerous Japanese media outlets, including Game*Spark, and the upcoming game went viral on social media. A big part of the hype was (obviously) the race cars personified as cute anime girls, which drew comparisons to Umamusume: Pretty Derby. And with the Kickstarter page claiming that the team behind it used to work for major studios like miHoYo, Tencent and NetEase, the project definitely sounded promising.
However, numerous details regarding the campaign, including a suspicious trailer with erroneous AI narration, pointed towards it being possibly fake. This was later confirmed by Studio Siphon, the creators of Project GT, who explained that it was not affiliated in any way with the organizers of the Kickstarter campaign. Apparently, all of the in-development footage shown on the platform was prototype data leaked from an early-stage business plan, and used without the developers’ permission.
The studio has already filed a complaint with Kickstarter, and will be pushing for the project’s page to be removed from the platform (at the time of writing, the page is still accessible). According to Game*Spark, all media outlets covering the Kickstarter news were also asked to take their articles down to avoid confusion.
On a positive note, Studio Siphon confirmed that Project GT itself is not fake, and that development is underway and progressing smoothly. While it might take a bit until the game is officially unveiled, the dev team promised to “continue to focus on refining the game’s quality to live up to players’ expectations.” Further information about the project will be posted exclusively on the studio’s bilibili page.
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