Sea of Stars, a game that came out earlier this year, had a pretty funny cameo with a YouTuber, Jirard Khalil (The Completionist), where they changed his name to Jirard the Constructionist.
This cameo was just meant as a tribute to Jirard since, according to him, he was close to the developers as well as one of the Kickstarter backers.
Unfortunately, as we’d learned from Yooka-Laylee and A Hat in Time, sometimes a YouTuber cameo will go wrong almost immediately after your game launches, also unfortunately, this same situation now applies to Sea of Stars after Jirard found himself in the middle of some massive controversy regarding his IndieLand charity event.
The Completionist Controversy
Over the past five years, IndieLand has been going on every year, showcasing new indie games and sometimes previews of upcoming ones by known developers, like Penny’s Big Breakaway, this year.
All of this has been under the guise of raising funds for Dementia support, research, and prevention due to Jirard’s mother passing away from the condition.
However, despite this motivation that would make most anyone wish they could do as much as possible to help people with this condition, an investigation by Karl Jobst and Mutahar (SomeOrdinaryGamers) showed that the Open Hand Foundation that IndieLand was benefitting had collected over $655,000 in revenue, but never did anything with it.
This inaction and withholding of funds that could have been donated across the nine years that the Open Hand Foundation has been active have instead been sitting in a bank account, causing approximately $269,671.81 to be lost due to inflation and expenses.
Jirard, when questioned about this, said he was looking for the right charity despite claiming it would have been donated immediately on livestreams.
This controversy raged about for a while, with more inconsistencies forming in anything Jirard had to say, Mutahar and Karl not letting up, and everyone feeling upset that one of the seemingly most admirable content creators would withhold funds that could have been helping people for a long while. This controversy got the Sea of Stars team’s attention.
They’ve pushed out a patch to the game’s PC version, which is soon to hit consoles, and the primary purpose is to replace Jirard’s character entirely with a new one named Bob.
He doesn’t have a portrait, has a rather generic design, and is functionally identical to Jirard’s character in terms of gameplay, so he works as a total replacement.
Jirard’s presence being completely cut from the game denotes a stark public stance from Sabotage Studio that they won’t tolerate behavior like this and will take action like this even though it costs them development time to push out a patch like this.
Funnily enough, both Jirard and Bob are among the top pages on the Sea of Stars Wiki due to these events, despite this being a tiny side-character cameo.
Further Reading
If you want to read more on Sea of Stars or other great indie games, stick around for more.
The Completionist Shows First Gameplay of Penny’s Big Breakaway
Sea of Stars Review – Eclipses Everything That’s Come Before
Sea of Stars Hardest Bosses Ranked
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