Someone needs to come forward and explain what happened with the Buy Big scandal. As someone who was directly involved in its development, I feel a responsibility to be that person. I’m choosing to remain anonymous because I don’t feel that I was directly to blame for what happened, and I’d like to be able to show my face again in the game design world. Going forward, I would like to contribute something of value to my field.
Basically, here’s what happened. We had this incredible algorithm that was set to change the future of augmented reality gaming. All these real estate companies were lining up to buy it from us for use in virtual property inspection apps, but we decided to go out on a limb and use it to make a game instead, as was the original intention. Still, it’s true what some journalists have been saying: we did set out to make as much money from players as possible, in an effort to hit a ridiculously high target. That target was based on what we could have made by selling the algorithm to a company in the property sector.
As we began to profit, we moved into swankier premises and all our costs ballooned. I remember looking for a conveyancer near Brighton for the office move and not being able to find one who wanted to be associated with our company. It was like they knew we were up to something – probably because of all the attention we’d gotten in their professional arena. Anyway, we had to keep inventing craftier ways to extract money from players in order to stay afloat. That became more pressing after our financial advisor embezzled us during the purchase of our HQ premises, partly due to our not having a good property conveyancer. Looking back, that’s when things really took a dark turn.
It was like, if people are going to swindle us, then who are we not do a bit of swindling ourselves? We started seeing ourselves a sort of Robin Hood enterprise, stealing from our customers to give to… well, ourselves. It remains to be seen what the law makes of what we’ve done, which is another reason I need to remain anonymous.