Sword Art Online fan F2P MMO crowdfunding is baffling

It looks like the Wizarding World Online, aka unofficial Harry Potter MMO, won't be the last of the sketchy projects to try its luck at crowdfunding. With all the demand that exists for a Sword Art Online MMO, it is finally happening – someone launched a campaign at Indiegogo asking for $5,000,000 (we're not kidding here) to “create full scale Sword Art Online MMORPG”.

The info on the Indiegogo page is slim and extremely vague, and one of the updates goes to the point of saying that the pitchers do not own the rights to the game and that “the money will also go towards acquiring the rights to make such a game.” Sounds like something super-easy, I guess. It also adds that the money is going into “start up costs. such as computers, desk's, location fees,  payment for employees as well as software.” So, pretty much, everything except clothing.

One thing to be wary of is that this is a campaign of flexible funding, meaning that even if it doesn't reach its goal – which, let's be perfectly reasonable here, will never happen -, the authors will still get the money contributed so far. Currently, with three days almost gone, the campaign stands at a proud $5.

It's not just the idea of someone, somewhere, without any proven experience is asking for such a crazy amount of money from naive fans by using a very popular franchise to try and lend it some credibility; worse still is that this thing is becoming increasingly common and there's not a prototype in sight, a small tech demo, something that could validate the whole concept and show that this is actually a true project, with people who know what they're doing. In this specific case anyway, the Sword Art Online MMORPG plan without the license is just one more hint that this will finish, sooner or later, just like the Harry Potter MMORPG did.

So, what baffles us is how this kind of campaigns are still being accepted by Indiegogo and Kickstarter without any sort of previous validation.