A while ago, Clannad_Man started a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of making a Key-related documentary.  Read the 2 links below for the full story.

Here and here

To sum it up, people became suspicious of the Kickstarter campaign when Clannad_Man had achieved almost 50% of his monetary goal. Someone went and posted on the President of Key/Visual Art’s Twitter, asking his opinion, and at that point, Clannad_Man suspended the Kickstarter campaign.

Upon closer inspection, their suspicions were not unfounded. We did not take a good look at his campaign at the time.  We should have, especially as he was throwing our name around with it.  We decided to start an internal investigation to clear up what happened. Here are some of our conclusions:

• It is against the ToS of KS to offer the rewards that were being offered, rewards must come from the project itself.
• Clannad_Man needs to provide more details about the budget and itinerary of the trip to prove it’s not a scam, even if they are preliminary.
• The way the project sold itself, there was definitely potential for people to misunderstand that key endorsed this work, when they did not.
• The company that Clannad_Man was going to use has not yet been formed, was going to be incorporated by him, and would have employed 2 professional videographers.  Clannad_Man notes the company itself would not take any money, and they would be passed through the professional videographers.  The omission of this information is unacceptable, no matter what the intentions were.

We also don’t want to take credit for, or have anyone else take credit for work people have done.  We believe that ‘lead three projects’  is a significant misrepresentation of what he worked on.  This has affected both him and us.

Clannad_Man in his time with Doki has done some good work with us.  That, however, does not excuse any of the issues at hand.

We want to clarify what Clannad_Man worked on at Doki.

• Tomoyo After – Clannad_Man organized and ran the team that constituted Doki’s contribution to the project.  (This project was picked up from Baka-Tsuki.)
• Clannad – Clannad_Man and the Doki team worked with Polarem on Clannad for about two months prior to him retiring.  Polarem is also retired at this point.  The project is right now in my hands.  (This project was picked up from Baka-Tsuki)
• Little Busters – Clannad_Man helped set up and plan our collaboration, and was the liaison between Doki and Fluffy.  I had taken over the VN department by the time it was finalized, though he continued to act as a liaison.

Clannad_Man retired from active Doki operations about a year ago now.

This kickstarter initiative was Clannad_Man’s, not Doki’s.  We did not review his kickstarter before it was posted.  After it was posted, we should have clarified sooner what exactly Clannad_Man worked on at Doki so there would be no misunderstandings.  Our failure to do so is on us.  We allowed him to use our name, and allowed him to tarnish the names of others with it.  We should have investigated sooner.  We will not tolerate our name being used in this manner again.

With that said:

• For LB, we continue to collaborate with Fluffy, providing translation support.  Phlebas and Rive were and continue to be our main points of contact with Fluffy.
• For Clannad, we want to make sure we still have permission to build upon the work done by Velocity7, Baka-Tsuki and the other major contributors.  If not, we will turn our changes over back to BT, and they can resume the project from there.  We will then decide if we want to proceed from scratch or not.
• For Clannad, after a discussion with Velocity7, we will continue our work on the Baka-Tsuki base.

Finally, I’ve attached IRC chat logs below where you can find the contents of our internal investigation.  As the current head of Doki’s VN department, I spoke with Clannad_Man directly to figure out what was going on.  To be honest, I’m not sure what to believe myself at this time.  Either way, the misrepresentations are unacceptable.  You are free to draw your own conclusions from what was said.

Investigation chat log

Edit: To be absolutely clear on the VN projects: Doki has not released a patch for Little Busters or Clannad, and thus should not be credited for those releases until we do.

Also, investigation chat log link replaced. only changes were made for readability: removed timestamps and was spell checked.