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Ant Simulator devs call accusations that they squandered the game’s budget “100 percent BS”
Last weekend, Eric Tereshinski, the lead programmer on indie virtual reality game Ant Simulator, posted an inflammatory video to YouTube where he accused his business partners of blowing the game’s budget on “liquor, restaurants, bars, and even strippers,” but now those business partners have come forward saying that Tereshinski’s claims are entirely false, and that all of their expenditures were legitimate.
“It’s completely false,” Tyler Monce, who is listed on the studio’s website as director of finance, told GameInformer. “I don’t know why he’s painting that picture, but the reality is that anything that was spent in a bar or restaurant was very reasonable in nature when you look at any business, including video game companies. It was part of our operating budget, it’s not anything that was excessive. It was all reported to the IRS. The picture he’s painting about that is 100 percent bull****.”
Monce claimed that Tereshinski had full access to the company’s financial information, so there was no way that Monce or director of operations Devon Staley could have stolen funds from the game budget without his knowledge.
While Tereshinski’s accusatory video was posted only a few days ago, Monce said that the programmer had effectively severed ties with the rest of company in November 2015.
“He took control of everything,” Monce said. “He took control of not only all the company’s physical property, our bank accounts, our social media accounts, our website (which he changed to just our faces for some unknown reason), that was all him. This all started to take place right after the game started to get really popular late in the summer. My personal theory is that he wanted to take it all for himself and cut us out of it. We made it clear that we weren’t going to let him do that, because we had a moral and legal right not to.”
Of course, as with Tereshinski’s original accusations, we have no way of knowing which side of the story is true, but Monce and Staley said that they may be pursuing legal action against Tereshinski, which will hopefully help shed some light on what really happened within the studio.
You can read Monce and Staley’s full interview on GameInformer.
Image courtesy of ETeeski LLC
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