Yogscast's Kickstarter-funded game cancelled ($570k raised)

@random45: Probably around the time the lead's wife said: "I want a divorce." Or the moment you start pulling five figures out of your own pocket and putting it into the game.

I really hope that guy can pick up the pieces and come out of this unbroken albeit scarred. While I can't claim to know anything about him beyond what he's chosen to post, he comes off as genuine and dismayed that he couldn't make the game he envisioned. If he worked at a AAA studio, the worst that could be expected is the loss of a job (which is a massive life altering disruption, don't get me wrong, but...), not bleeding his savings on the development and ruining his marriage.

That's what bothers me the most. While people may get burned for copy of a game, he's got to unfuck a lot of his life, if possible. In a way, despite the tone deaf nature of Lewis' post, the Yogscast is doing all they can for the guy, giving him a social way out and not, y'know, suing the (now defunct) company for fraud, if only to show future partners that they won't get played (as played as a fairly involved partner could be, whatever that's worth, but appearances can be everything) like this again. Instead of saying "this disaster is purely the fault of this asshole and his five man company" like a faceless cooperation might, they're at least acknowledging the hard work that just didn't amount to anything.

But I'm not a huge fan and didn't back the thing anyway, so I should probably stop defending them, I guess. :/

I am aware of Yogscast but I don't really care for them (I'm not big into minecraft and what not). This is kind of gross, though. Their backers should be outraged. It's one thing to fail, but this comes off incredibly egotistical.

"Although we're under no obligation to do anything, instead we're going to do our best to make this right, and make you really glad you backed the project!"

Even though you paid us for something we never actually intended to fulfill anything you wanted. We're not obligated to know what we're doing with your money.

What an awful thing to say- even if true.

Yogscast should have never been behind this to begin with and the developer should be disgraced. Their fans should be outraged.

That being said it doesn't make things like Kickstarter less in my eyes. Just the people involved in this particular project.

Never really saw the appeal for the game in the first place. Now I'm glad I never threw my money at it. I love the Yogscast and their video content, but this sort of felt amateurish at best. Hell, people are allowed to make mistakes.

Maybe people will be a lot more wary next time they think about backing a game. Maybe do a little research and don't throw your money at the first endorsed product you see. After reviewing the details about the lack of experience the developer had, the expansive agenda for development of the game, and the dreamy outlook for it, it's almost the consumers fault as well.

Maybe the world will show Yogscast they need to stick to their guns next time and file a class-action lawsuit. Who knows.

The biggest problem I have with the whole thing is that Yogscast was perfectly happy and willing to pretend it was their game when they were trying to get funding for the game and trying to entice fans to buy it by writing the entire Kickstarter pitch and make a video with pre-alpha gameplay trying to get their fans to buy it. Now that the thing has exploded, they are distancing themselves from the project. They aren't doing anything to help the guy, they are leaving him holding the bag and trying to protect their brand name. This isn't a case of Yogscast licensing their name to a game company that sought them out, it sounds like from the Kickstarter pitch that it was their idea and they happened to hire out the company to make the game they wanted. Saying that its nice they don't bury him for something THEY caused is really cold comfort.

@mirado: I wouldn't give Yogs too much credit for not being complete dicks. They still try to spin this in a good way, and went along with taking people's money on a project that was completely unrealistic from the start. We'll also have to see how much money Yogs took up front for licensing out their name, if that's something we'll ever know (I don't exactly trust a potential "spreadsheet" made by the dev...).

As for people's comments about hoping people are smarter about their money in the future. Thing is, a lot of the people who donate to this stuff donates because they trust the personalities behind the game, even if they're not the devs. And a lot of the backers are kids. They don't know much about game developing, but just read bullet points like "open world sandbox" and "it's like Minecraft!" and think it sounds awesome. That's why Kickstarter should do at least some due diligence on projects before they let them into their service. Right now Kickstarter takes a cut of whatever money is raised, but do virtually no quality control of the project and just say that it's not up to them because all transactions are "between the consumer and the creator of the project." Fact is that they're giving them a big platform by letting them go on Kickstarter to try to raise money, and because of that they should feel if not legally, then at least morally obliged to do some quality control here. You could argue that it's in their interest too; too many projects like this one will not be good for Kickstarter as a platform.

That blog detailing why it was going to fail is fascinating. I wonder if Kickstarter has someone with that sort of knowledge on staff to predict potential failures, or if they just guess.

I also occurs to me that there was already a Yogscast videogame.

Called Minecraft.

@shaunage: Kickstarter says up front that they aren't in the business of investigating the likelihood of a project's success/failure (from their FAQ section on accountability) -

Kickstarter does not guarantee projects or investigate a creator's ability to complete their project. On Kickstarter, backers (you!) ultimately decide the validity and worthiness of a project by whether they decide to fund it.

[...]

If a creator has no demonstrable experience in doing something like their project or doesn't share key information, backers should take that into consideration. Does the creator include links to any websites that show work related to the project, or past projects? Does the creator appear in the video? Have they connected via Facebook?

Oh, internet.

Meanwhile (I'm not sure whether someone has mentioned this or not), please pay us money to use your content to generate our own youtube revenue:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Yogscast/comments/2afpqz/an_open_letter_about_yogdiscovery/

"So for example if a game had an extra 10,000 sales in the week after their video, they would see a small percentage of those extra sales."

Jesus Christ, the balls on these guys.

10/10 would read again.

"YogDiscovery is our way of encouraging our creators pumping out Youtube videos to showcase fantastic mediocre indie games that they love are getting paid top dollar for so that everyone benefits."

@crysack: Yeah. It's really bad timing and in poor taste to reveal that Yogdiscovery program at the same time as the failure of their endorsed Kickstarter. The successful funding of the Kickstarter makes it pretty clear that these guys know how to leverage their celebrity to get their fans to open up their wallets, and now they're putting the power of that celebrity up for sale.

The worst part is that it's done in a way that feels exploitative to both the game developer and their viewers.

@amyggen: I'm just a bit shocked by the reactions people are having; it's as if they didn't realize how risky Kickstarter is. The kids thing doesn't hold; you need a credit card to back anything, so that rules out young kids unless they go through their parents, in which case the parent should figure out exactly what their kid is spending money on, as they should do every other time.

The viability/quality control thing doesn't work either; projects on Kickstarter are so diverse that you'd need a team of experts in every field, and you'd have to develop objective metrics for subjective goals. How do you measure how likely a dance company is to succeed? Or a guy that wants to make hot sauce? Even if you look at the Yogventures pitch, nothing screams failure to a layman beyond the six man team, and they could have easily paired back features once they realized how big the game would be, so you can't even hold the "we plan to do this" part of page as a good metric to go on.

@president_barackbar

Saying they caused the game to tank is a little farfetched. The company that they hired obviously thought they could, at least initially, deliver. Why would you accept the job if you figured that your chances of making a successful game were low? And with they way people are making them out to be such monsters, I'm more surprised they didn't go for the lawsuit coup de gras.

Honestly, if you take the one "we aren't obligated to do anything" line out of that press release, it reads perfectly fine. And hell, overall, they are at least promising to do FAR more than some failures every did; how about the notorious Kickstarter failure, The Doom That Came to Atlantic City? $122k raised (with a goal of just $35k) for a board game that paid for everything but: the developer moved to a new city and quit his job, started up a company with the funds (which was never a goal in the initial pitch), his partners never saw a cent, and then he claimed that the money was all gone and people were going to get nothing. It took a full year, but the original two guys (not affiliated with the aforementioned scumbag) who designed the game were able to get a third party to at least deliver the damn game to backers, and it finally came out in April this year.

We'll have to see if the Yogscast actually holds to what they say, but if backers actually get codes for a similar (and, frankly, better) game, the physical rewards they were promised (apparently fulfillment for anything physical not related to the complete game has begun), and if they partner up with these new people to put Yogscast stuff in that other game, I can't see how backers can be too upset. Yeah, they're distancing themselves from the mess and who knows if they took a cut from the initial funds (more likely, they were going to take a good chunk of the sales), and it isn't going to be the game that was promised...but they aren't running like bandits in the night, at least, and that other game was never going to happen. Something tells me the backlash and loss of reputation from this and the YogDiscovery mess wipes out any potential gains they had from it all.

My sympathies to the dev though, managing a project of this scope can't be easy, specially without proper experience, not saying they have no fault in the matter, only saying that the worse culprits here in my opinion are the people that backed this shit.

Also this yogcast, or whatever, way of dealing with this is just brilliant "we are under no obligation", like hell you aren't, you fucking signed on this thing haven't you? I just love how they're taking the "yeah we have absolutely 100% no fault whatsoever in this but we are so awesome that we will TRY and do something for you guys" approach, I had never heard of this fuckers before but I already hate them.

Man their new paid content thing sounds gross, couldn't they just use Patreon for something similar to that? I don't know how they thought it was a good time to announce something like that.

These assholes need some PR training. Here's a thought, change the scope of the game so it IS something a small dev team can accomplish. Regardless, their fans blindly paid them and will blindly accept this outcome as well I'm sure.

I knew from the second this Kickstarter got announced it wouldn't end any other way. How so many people were willing to throw their money at a bunch of unfunny YouTube hacks to take their zero development experience and make a Minecraft clone with it is beyond me.

@mirado: It just rubs me the wrong way when they were so happy to promote and act like they were the ones in charge of the game when it was initially announced, but now that the game is no more they are doing everything in their power to make sure people know that it was Winterkewl's game.

I don't think they will lose that many subscribers or people who like them to be honest, 80% of their fan base is kids, and kids don't know any better. You can't figure about this unless you are a backer, or someone who keeps in touch with video game news, and kids don't keep up with news. Like @citizencoffeecake says.

Accountability, or lack thereof, seems to be the single greatest problem with the entire industry.

The kickstarter seemed really scummy and ill advised from the start.

I mean, I can understand someone who is passionate about a certain kind of game, wanting to make that kind of game. I'm sure everyone here has had ideas they wanted to see in games they love.

And if you are the Yogscast, you potentially have the clout and capital to do that for yourselves.

The problem comes when they start making "and you can play as Lewis" and jaffacakes and shit a core feature of your game. It just comes off as shitty and pandering

Hmm, I'd really like to see that. Especially after reading this great blog:

Realistic expectations folks. If it's your first time making a game, maybe make something a whole lot simpler. All of this happening in the shadow of their whole "pay us to cover your game" thing with that other game is a real bad look for these guys.

Well put.

@president_barackbar: Oh sure, on that I think we both agree. They've utilized their status to take ownership of the game when it was convenient, and distanced themselves when it became a mess. That's a bit underhanded if a good business decision, and I wish they were more transparent about both their level of involvement (it seems from the dev's comments that they held veto power over various builds of the game, and would not promote it until they felt it satisfactory, leading to the "pre-order business model" collapsing) and the status of the game towards the end of its life. A simple "The game is encountering difficulties and we are exploring secondary options in order to fulfill what our original pitch promised" probably could have solved a lot of this mess, even if it ended up like it did anyway.

@mb That's easily the saddest part of the whole blog, just how optimistic the dev appeared, at least on the surface, and in light of an obviously more experienced developer laying down the law on how fucking hard it would be for them to make anything close to what they were promising.

If anyone wants to link the most recent episode of The Point here (I am stuck on my phone for the time being), Danny does a great job of ripping these guys apart.

Yeah that was a great episode from Danny. Link here.

So Winterkrewl just posted this update on Kickstarter:

@Gnubberen: Well that sounds awful.

After reading that Kickstarter-update... Fuck these Yogscast people so hard.

@Gnubberen: The Yoscast yanking the $50k to fulfill physical rewards seems ok; there's no way the five(?) man Winterkewl team could handle shipping any goods while developing a game. Now, that $100k which was supposed to go to a developer is fucking shady as all hell; on what grounds do they know how to "help hire the main programmer"? Wouldn't an actual programmer, say the guy who runs Winterkewl, for instance, know a bit more about what would make a person qualified? That seems like they knew this was a sinking ship and decided to loot all the valuables before it sunk into the sea.

Plus, it only seems to further illisturate how fucked this was from the start; spending nearly half your budget on artists is a terrible fucking idea if you have no one to actually implement their designs in game form. Also, fuck whoever that guy was that worked for two weeks and kept all $35k; yeah, he legally could, but that's just greed of the highest order.

And my track record of never expecting anything out of Kickstarter projects continues unbroken. Paying artists lump sum before they actually begin work is madness. Half-start, half-delivery is the only safe compromise, and I'd want 10 years of expertise before I ever agreed to let someone be paid on good faith. 35,000 is not a retainer fee.

no one and I mean NO ONE has gotten rich from this effort or is even better off then when we started,

This is incorrect. Amazon and Kickstarter jointly pocketed $152,665. That is where people's money went.

We had no way to force that person to pay back any of the funds and it was a bitter lesson to learn. Always get every possible scenario in writing or you will have no legal recourse.

It's interesting that this statement echos how many backers feel.

@brackynews said:

Kentucky Route Zero

FTL

Shovel Knight

Tesla Effect

Risk of Rain

Just to name a few.

Man I feel real bad for the developer. I mean sure if I were a backer I'd be irritated that I lost my $50, but that guy's life got ruined from the whole experience.

@sethphotopoulos: Don't forget Divinity and the first act of Broken Age!

@sethphotopoulos: Just because those were successful ones doesn't mean every Kickstarter game is going to be the next indie game craze.

According to Kickstarter.com (https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats) the success rate of Kickstarters filed under the "Games" category is %35.49.

I would much rather just buy those games, if they are successful, when they come on steam, instead of giving my money to someone not knowing they can deliver.

@brackynews's point is valid, nonetheless.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it got "ruined" - evidently he had a full time job during the entire time this game was being developed, and the Yog game was just a side project. He said he got divorced, but who knows what the reasons for that really were.

It seems like a bunch of excuses to me. He's trying to get people to feel sorry for him to draw attention away from the fact that he squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars of Kickstarter money and has nothing to show for it other than thousands of pissed off backers.

@mb: The fact that he still has that job is a little scary to me. I wonder if this will stick to him going forward. I can sort of imagine him sitting down for an interview or something and the interviewer just being like "hey, you're that guy who wasted hundreds of thousands of your own customer's money and failed to deliver, right? NEXT!"

@sbaitso: At the very least future employers are going to Google his name to see what pops up, and this will probably be the top result for many years to come.

He said never and I was just saying that there are successful kickstarters.

Or they'll consider it ~2 years of leadership experience. "Failing upwards" is a very real concept when it comes to managerial and leadership roles.

I am a dwarf, and I'm digging a grave. Diggy diggy grave, diggy diggy grave...

Has the crew stated any opinion on the matter? I would be curious, specifically Patrick, on what they think about this.

I think they talked about it on the latest Bombin' The A.M.

I assume it'll be a topic on the next giant bombcast.

A lot of their fanbase seems to be giving the most grief to the artist who walked away with $35k without doing work, ironically, rather than pointing the blame toward the developers or the Yogscast. It's like they're suggesting they'd do something totally different if they were in the artist's shoes. Yeah, you'd definitely return the $35k that you were legally entitled to, without doing an ounce of work, because the other people involved were absolute morons.

No, most of them would have probably taken the money and run, too.

There isn't even a single post about this whole thing on the front page of the Yogscast subreddit.

I am genuinely taken aback by how little their fanbase seems to care about this.

That artist got a gig at LucasArts and wasn't allowed to do any work on anything else, but where in the hell did that money go?

It seems that he was flat out given the money without any contract being signed, even virtually, so he could sit on it.

And the mods on that reddit do what they do - keep the sheep happily grazing.

I could've said "not" if you get frustrated by hyperbole. ;) And yes I'm well aware Shovel Knight beat the odds, I remember hearing about it long time ago from EpicNameBro.

Polecat made my summary point more factually that I would have, thanks. I would've simply posted http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule, in that successful video game Kickstarters would seem to be the exception. That reinforces having great expectations is setting up for disappointment. Remember the Pitfall developer trying one? Are people super-happy with Broken Age? It's interesting...

And let me be clear, I'm mainly being critical of the middlemen taking a percentage. For all the failed KS that do not complete, one assumes that the processing fees of the successful ones make up for it. Does that make a $150k premium a fair amount to withhold from a struggling creator? I'm not sure.

Also I'm pleased to buy Shovel Knight now instead of when it was cheaper because they still actually need to make a profit now, and I know what I'm getting. Generally I will give any KS I want to support $5 or so, rarely even enough for the lowest reward tier. I gave it a fair try early on, I just try to expect nothing in return.

So... we're all cool with this, right? I mean, par for the course. You can't abide by Kickstarter's terms and be pissed off about this. 500k is a very small amount of money to make a videogame, Kickstarter provides no guarantees that the product will be delivered, the onus is on the backer to verify the odds of survival of the project before investing and Kickstarter presents itself as a platform for subsidizing projects, not for purchases or pre-purchases.

I mean, this is literally the second best option Kickstarter considers when enabling a project on their system. One is project delivers, two is project does not deliver for legitimate reasons, everybody parts ways. So yeah, this is as expected, right? Anybody still not seeing this as expected?

OK, I'm being disingenuous here. Kickstarter is frequently used as a payment advance/preorder platform for projects with no funding, and that's utter bullshit. There should be a rule on KS preventing the end result of a project from being a backer reward. I'm not joking if you're supporting a project out of interest, the cost of the resulting item should not be rolled into the patronage effort. If you want to overfund a videogame ahead of the cost of purchase, then by all means, be my guest, crowdfund away. If you're being roped into paying full price for a game that doesn't exist ahead of time with no guarantee of a refund or a delivery... yeah, somebody at some point is going to have to regulate that crap.

There are rules for investors and rules for salesmen. Kickstarter avoids both and operates in a vacuum while making money hand over fist for providing an advertising platform for literally everybody else to risk their cash. I'm not cool with that.