7 years after hitting it big on Kickstarter, Battalion 1944 developers are offering full refunds for everyone

pcgamer.com:

More than seven years after finding major success on Kickstarter, Battalion 1944 studio Bulkhead Interactive is offering full refunds to backers, regardless of their platform or pledge tier.

Battalion 1944 is a World War 2 multiplayer shooter that aimed to recapture the online glory days of games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty 2. There was clearly interest in such a thing: The Kickstarter campaign launched with an ambitious goal of £100,000 ($129,300) and finished with more than triple that amount: £317,281 ($410,000) in total.

But it did not go smoothly from there. A promising early access launch (despite some unexpected server troubles) in February 2018 eventually gave way to disappointment as promised console releases never happened, communications from Bulkhead dried up—the most recent Kickstarter update, prior to today, was posted in January 2018—and players complained, not without justification, that the game had been abandoned.

Finally, in 2022, Bulkhead seemed to put a fork in it. The studio announced the end of its relationship with Battalion 1944 publisher Square Enix, the re-release of the game on Steam as the free Battalion: Legacy, and the official cancellation of the console editions of the game, which refunds available to anyone who backed them.

That was effectively the end of the matter until today's surprise announcement of an across-the-board refund offer for all Battalion 1944 Kickstarter backers. In an email sent to backers (and helpfully shared in the Kickstarter comments), Bulkhead said people who want their money back will have to respond to a survey within 30 days; after that window is closed, the studio will manually send out refunds to PayPal accounts, a process it expects should be