Court is the obvious way to handle it, but I see nothing wrong with going public to warn other people, or shame the company into paying up. The company is still apparently doing business. This goes a bit beyond not being able to pay your vendors, and depending on how exactly it went down, what Woodshed did could be outright illegal.
It seems like the point of the post is to publicize what happened, and make sure other people are aware of the dangers of working with this agency:
> If we don’t tell people what happened, it could happen to someone else.
> We are cutting our losses and doing what we can on a legal front, but we need to warn the community.
The legal system moves slowly; this appears to be their way of holding them accountable for their actions, and for helping others avoid their fate.
I mean there's a reason why the "court of public opinion" isn't the best way to resolve issues...
edit: well, looks like Woodshead Agency protected their twitter account so you can't see the tweet now. That's not great.
And if they have a good explanation, why have they been blocking people on twitter for asking for it?
To play devil's advocate, they need to be able to respond to the accusation well. They can't just jot something down and fire it off, right? They're starting off in a defensive position, and need to address the accusation in away that paints them as the good guys (which they might be).
https://medium.com/@jeff_52578/how-a-failed-kickstarter-camp...
It's implicitly an "international" transaction, so why would rectifying the problem be considered unfairly burdensome when they entered into the relationship.
Then there's the issue of finding a lawyer who won't start off by asking 'and what is a kickstarter?' which is harder than you might expect. Also, I just thought, Kickstarter might have some kind of standing in this which might also require the case to occur in a US court. Not sure about that.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rdacalos/upstart-the-bo...
Looks like $35k. No one would risk destroying their reputation over that small sum. I wonder what the other side of the story is?
Abuse is pretty common in gamedev, but this would be flagrant.
You really underestimate how bad some people's finances are right now in places like Michigan.
People have killed for far less...If they were in a bad enough financial position, they could have thought that they would borrow their client's money to pay immediate bills, and pay the account back with future client earnings. It happens quite frequently in the legal world--it's the number one reason lawyers get disbarred in CA after drug use.
If the other partners were not aware this was occurring until now, that might be a more benevolent explanation of why the agency has gone dark.
People risk a lifetime in jail over $35k, on a regular basis.