It does seem that if you’re not careful the Kickstarter/fund raising process can become all about sustaining the process and not about the game itself.
It was a little strange that every update would have some custom created content that you had to pay more for, whether it was some cosmetic item or clothing or something to put in your house. I am not sure whether that was clever marketing to keep the lights on or whether too many resources were being committed to them thus causing the actual core game to remain broken.
Still, not reserving the initial money collected to deliver the physical goods promised was pretty bad no matter how you look at it. They seemed to get behind on money and no matter what they tried, they couldn’t get back ahead to both continue work on the game as they probably wanted and to manufacture the goods promised.
Yeah, I’m pretty disheartened, especially as such a loyal fan over the years. I haven’t even bothered playing the game, or even know how to play it, or how to get my house or other rewards, or to even get my code if I don’t have it (can’t remember, but think I have it) as I was waiting for the physical edition I bought years ago to arrive.
If the guy that runs an Ultima fansite didn’t get his box months after complaining publicly on the site, I don’t hold out a ton of hope for the near future there.
Did you ever get your collector’s box, Desslock?
For some added background on why you haven’t received your box yet, from someone who also has tried to get mine unsuccessfully. After the original round of shipping last summer, some ~20% of people who pledged had not received theirs. This was attributed to a number of reasons by the company, almost all of which were noted as being the fault of the player (i.e., the player put in the wrong address or did not pay for international shipping). All of the boxes were assembled and shipped from France, without shipment tracking - skimping on this probably caused a bunch of problems.
In November 2018, all of the unsuccessfully shipped boxes were mailed to the company’s office in Austin, where hundreds were stacked and promised to be shipped out in “wave 2”. This largely did not happen, because Portalarium is so low on staff (there is no one dedicated to customer support anymore, which is why your support emails have gone into a black hole) that no one could be bothered to spend time shipping things.
Fast forward to early 2019 and Portalarium lost its office as noted above. The technical director of the game (and only remaining officer of the company) is now responsible for shipping, among a whole host of other duties. He now twitch streams most days of the week to try and earn bits from the remaining players. He has a forlorn shelf of boxes in his home office, that are in view of the twitch stream, that are boxes left to ship. You can wave to yours if you want :(. He has promised to work on getting 25-50 of these out each week since February, but that has not happened. The people who have gotten their boxes have been able to do by asking him on the twitch stream and/or donating twitch bits.
So, this company is down to only a few employees, the lead dev is now the person who has to ship things, and he hates doing it. Pretty sad that the only way to get the company to ship your box is to entice them by donating yet more money via twitch, but that is the dire straits Portalarium appears to be in. I don’t think the company meant to do this to people, but they clearly ran out of money and resources - the changing excuses and ignoring of support emails is their way of dodging the plain truth.
Very long story short, unless you want to give more money to essentially bribe the guy shipping, you will likely never get your game box.
Oh, and Lord British is largely totally gone from the game - he congratulates players on twitter for completing the “quests” in the game, and once per month shows up on a twitch stream to try to raise more money from players, but that is it. Quietly has moved on, which probably is not a shock given the lack of success for Shroud of the Avatar.
That’s pretty pathetic. One of their highest obligations should be to send out the boxes to the people who have already paid for them.
It’s a lot of terrible grunt work to package and ship in mass quantities. Normally you just hire minimum-wage kids to do it, but they’re out of money. So you have a former executive left hanging around, and his attitude is a solid “fuck it”. I mean, if it was me, I’d probably do the same thing. Company’s already dead, lost the office space, sunk in deep depression, pallets of boxes piled up behind me, and each one I ship costs me ten bucks… yeah. Fuck it. Time to drink bourbon then jerk off until I fall asleep with a wad of crusty tissues stuck to my crotch.
Stusser wins the internet!
I don’t deny that it’s not fun or that it’s not depressing. But it’s still a thing they should do. Even if he only did 20 or 30 a week on the weekends, that’s better than nothing.
Yes, we should do a lot of things. We should all go to the gym. We should cut down on carbs. We should donate our time to help the homeless.
Clearly this is a sucky situation and they should meet their obligations. All I’m saying is, I emphasize with the guy.
Interesting how all these projects from 90’s/00’s celebrity devs are ending in tears…are there any that are doing well?
Bard’s Tale 4 and Wasteland 2 were successful, and great games. Obsidian was basically Black Isle, and they did great with PoE.
Only talking games in my wheelhouse, CRPGs, I’m sure other genres had successes too.
Fortnite is doing okay.
Don’t recall that being a crowdfunding venture, though.
I couldn’t tell by your post that crowd funding was a limiting factor.
So with that in mind, umm. 🤔
Mok’s post wondering about the success of old school dev projects didn’t mention only crowdfunded ones.
No, sadly I did not, and they haven’t answered their support email account for months. Appreciate the additional insight - I had figured out much of that from the game’s official forums, other than the twitch bit bribe aspect.
It’s all a very sad story. Maybe I’ll just shut them down now.
Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 are perhaps the best examples of crowdfunding working well for the genre, which I’m sure you just forgot in your post.
Indeed, but they aren’t fronted by famous 90s game developers.
Ah - sorry, I didn’t see that in the question initially. I should have trusted you to nail the question, brother!