According to Tereshinski, the reason behind this cancellation is that his partners were stealing company money. He accused his fellow developers of taking both Kickstarter money (for an unrelated project) and the Ant Simulator investment money and spending it “on liquor, restaurants, bars, and even strippers.”
In a statement to GameInformer, he had this to say:
Both of Tereshinski’s partners have answered these accusations. One of them, Tyler Monce, responded with this:
Monce argues that embezzlement was pretty much impossible, because Tereshinski had access to all of the financial data. Monce, and the other partner Devon Staley, said that things were going pretty well until November of last year.
They claimed that Mr. Tereshinski “took control of everything.” By that, they mean bank accounts, social media accounts, website, etc. They feared he was going to cut them out since the game had grown popular, especially when he moved the company funds to a personal account.
There is no resolution at this point, as Tyler Monce and Devon Staley are accusing Eric Tereshinski of fabricating the story to grab headlines. Eric has yet to respond to these claims, but we can probably safely assume he’ll accuse them of lying as well. Both sides are crying foul, and it’s impossible to know the truth. We’ll have to keep our ears open to see if this story has any more developments.
