The crowd-sourcing platform Fig, from Loose Tooth Productions, has been somewhat controversial ever since it originally launched back in mid August of this year. One of the big points of contention was the investment opportunities available through the service for those who provide funds to a project. Destructoid has updated their ethics policies to reflect how those investment opportunities could affect their coverage.

Due to the investment side of the crowd-funding angle of Fig, Destructoid’s review editor Chris Carter opted to update the site’s policies [backup] regarding the coverage of games that are being funded through Fig, as well as writers who may have actual investments in a project on the platform.

The original ethics policy was put into place back on September 4th, 2014, shortly after #GamerGate got underway. Over the past year and a half the Destructoid staff have been updating their policies to better reflect the desired ethical changes from the gaming community.

The latest update sees Carter writing…

“If a writer invests in a game, they are barred from writing about it. Similar to disclaimers for ex-staffers, we’ll also provide a note in pertinent news stories that we have an individual who is investing in the game.” “[…] To go a step further, all shift leads (EICs) are forbidden from investing outright, and reviews for these games will be non-scored.”

This makes a lot of sense.

Even more-so than Kickstarter, someone who invests in Fig can actually financially benefit from a project succeeding. Writing about a game at a high-profile website to help boost its success while having direct investment in the project would be a literal and direct journalistic conflict of interest.

As noted in the terms of service for Fig, users must first register as an accredited investor to make any sort of profit from the success of a project…

“Before you can invest in any of the Investment Opportunities on the Site, you must register with the Platform and qualify as an Accredited Investor. Prior to investing, you may be asked to fill out a certification and provide necessary documentation as proof of your income and/or net worth to verify that you are qualified to invest in Investment Opportunities posted on this Site.”

It’s a sure sign of the times that Destructoid felt compelled to update their ethics policy regarding this issue because otherwise it could be a serious ethical violation if a journalist was discovered to have financially invested in a project and began regularly writing about it in hopes of gaining some kind of financial incentive out of having written about a game they have a personal financial stake in.

This wasn’t the only issue that some people had with Fig… more recently Tim Schafer from Double Fine Productions took to Fig to crowd-source Psychonauts 2 and the project has already garnered nearly $2 million out of its $3.3 million goal. So why is it an issue? Well, some feel as if Schafer should have disclosed on the project page that he’s actually an advisor for Fig. Others feel as if it’s not much of a conflict of interest given that it isn’t hidden away that Schafer is an advisor for Fig.

Either way, Destructoid felt as if the platform provided an extra ethical risk that they wanted addressed instead of waiting for a group of anons from 8chan to dig through the financial history of their writers only to discover one big, fat, juicy ethical violation.

Big thanks to Dakota for the news tip.