Gaming charity Child's Play asked the organiser of the Retake Mass Effect campaign to stop accepting donations because some of those that pledged thought they were helping fund development of a new ending to Mass Effect 3.
This morning we reported that the campaign organiser had closed the donation drive - which raised almost $80,000 - because Child's Play had expressed reservations about being seen as a supporter of calls for BioWare to revise Mass Effect 3's ending. According to Penny Arcade, the gaming website which runs Child's Play, its concerns ran much deeper than that.
In a post on Penny Arcade, Jerry "Tycho" Holkins explains that Child's Play project manager Jamie Dillion "has been buried under mail about this situation. Apparently some of the people giving to the cause seemed to think that they were paying for a new ending to Mass Effect.
"She's been asked what the goal is, and how much they need to raise in order to get the ending produced. We've also been contacted by PayPal due to a high number of people asking for their donations back.
"This is in addition to readers who simply couldn't understand how this was connected to Child's Play's mission. We were dealing with a lot of very confused people, more every day, and that told us we had a problem."
It's compelled the charity to draft a new policy - "Child's Play cannot be a tool to draw attention to a cause; Child's Play must be the cause" - to avoid similar things happening in future.
Happily for the slow of wit who thought they were giving a poor indie studio a leg up to help it make a better game, BioWare founder Dr Ray Muzyka has confirmed the the Mass Effect team is "hard at work on a number of game content initiatives" that he believes will address fan dissatisfaction. Development will be funded through the studio's own, and publisher EA's, considerable financial means.

http://www.edge-online.com/news/mass...ing-new-ending