The latter was the case with Evil Dead 2. After raising a staggering amount of money, the project and the funds were managed so badly by Space Goat Productions that it has destroyed their established comic book publishing business.
Something similar has happened before with the Doom that came Atlantic City team squandering the funds they raised in an aborted attempt to set-up a board game company, rather than focusing on creating the promised product. In that case where even the designer couldn’t obtain the rights to his creation, Cryptozoic eventually took over production and, although they received none of the funding, altruistically gifted copies to all the original backers.
If you read Jasco’s news release you’ll see that their plan aims to raise new funds to develop their own game using these assets from the previous game, and some of them look really good to be fair, and for each copy made for a new backer they will create one for a backer of the previous campaign.
As one of the backers I’m now in a quandary. If Jasco’s campaign is successful I will receive a copy…. however, do I need to back it to make it succeed? The fear is that the vast majority of people who want an ED2 game were backers last time and it’s been two years of pain to get to this point. Will there be enough willing to go for a second dip combined with enough new blood to make this work? Only time will tell.