One upside of this debacle is I discovered Ian & Pat (the NES Punk)’s podcast.
Intellivision has posted an updated EDGAR disclosure that still doesn’t explain their lie that J Allard still worked for them as claimed in an investor pitch video in March 2021: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001658966/000121390021015823/filename1.htm
The pitch video again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_Ozk3ncCr0
“J served as the company’s Global Managing Director, but was never an employee of Intellivision.”
“Mr. Allard did not play a material role in Amico product development, but his insights were monumental to the Intellivision Entertainment team.”
…which is it gonna be?
Not from the EDGAR disclosure but also in the same vein as you knowing a kid whose dad works for Nintendo and he totally knows about the Super Nintendo 2 coming out:
“Myself and the original designer Rupert worked together a lot on the new design and I incorporated a lot of things that I learned from Shigeru Miyamoto over the years. I’ve known Miyamoto-san for over 30 years and worked with him for around three years on the Metroid Prime games. He’s a good friend and has even been to a few of my Video Games Live shows in the past. I’ve even had the great Koji Kondo perform in my shows as well! Let’s just say that whenever I’m around Miyamoto-san, I’m always asking a lot of game design questions. You may as well learn from the best!”
“the Company” here is Fig rather than Intellivision, in case people don’t click through…
Right, it’s kind of a stretch to claim that by extension. I’ll tidy/clarify it in the quote.
Actually, sorry, I think I’m wrong there. The quote is a quote from the form for Amico. So while “The company” is defined in the correspondence as Fig, in the quote I think it’s referring to Amico. That seems to be backed up by the form itself.
I suppose the distinction being drawn here is that a director, potentially even a managing director, is not technically an employee, though it would be very unusual in the latter case (outside of partnerships I suppose).
The update is filed by Fig but the embedded “the company” I cited above refers to Intellivision. A cursory search shows Fig and Republic never had Allard on board for anything. Still, it appears that Intellivision is caught lying again.
Oh Allard? Who’s that? He’s just some nobody.
“The Company does not believe that any additional disclosure regarding Mr. Allard would be important to a reasonable investor making an investment decision in respect of FGS – Amico.”
Actually, it’s all very confusing (not surprising given the way Fig shares work). This document, which is where Allard is described as “the company’s” GMD, seems to use “the Company” for Fig. But it’s not capitalised in reference to Allard, so seems to actually be Intellivision in that instance.
Tommy: We’re almost passing a FCC test.
(nothing in FCC database)
Playmega, Playdate, A500 Mini all have tests recorded last year, as would be normal for supply chain delayed by pandemic.
Regarding Fig And Republic, I’m not even sure if they have access to the 11M raised or if it’s contingent on those “triggers” – one of which I imagine is actual physical release of their console which has allowed people to withdraw money still. It’s gone down by $1.4M and a few dozen investors since their official crowdfunding date closed in April.
There’s nothing illegal or unethical with the rent from the offices going into the pockets of the CFO or COO is there?
How shady or scammy/scummy is this when they likely knew about delays (duh, 1 year into the pandemic at Feb-March 2021) at the time they filmed this and they were hamming it up for the pitch video to expect a payout “as soon as the end of this year!” - Only have to sell 25 million units to make 10X your return–more than the Wii U! Nick Richards has admitted recently that the breakeven numbers threshold has been raised further with the third shipping delays. “EASY 10X RETURN IF THEY SELL 25,000,000* UNITS!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrOjitZjUPE
*they won’t
With such a ridiculously high cost, why do they need to sell so many units to hit break even?
They don’t care about the investors breaking even. Frontloading the profit (no one has ever done this with consoles–instead most go with the razor blade model and developing a healthy software + accessory aftermarket) has all the hallmarks of pump and dump.
$250USD for a $100 BOM 2016 low end smartphone has them starting with a huge margin that is eroded by unnecessary shit controllers.
The goal was the grift or cutting themselves the paychecks to drag out it as long as they could. If they manage to ship anything, the company will pack up shop shortly after.
When they were caught still hiring for basic hardware functionality jobs last year in 2020, they lied and claimed it was for their robust accessory market. It’s simply coincidence they’ve shown none of their base console interface or functionality (I bet it’s just barely skinned Android) and there are no accessories to be seen in 2021.
This is such a fascinating slow motion car crash. For fun, I hopped over to the Amico subreddit. It’s got like 1.2K subscribers. 90% are there to watch it all burn down. The other 10% is Tommy with lengthy posts and responses, and a few seeming supporters. Tommy likes to talk about how they are so busy and he has no time for X or Y, and yet he’s apparently got time for lengthy responses on a ghost town of a subreddit.
And there’s this whole alt-right vibe among YouTube supporters with low subscriber counts proudly wearing their Amico t-shirts.
And I find it ASTOUNDING that you can pay $20 for a boxed game code in a store, or $10 for the game without the (essentially) empty box. Is there a parallel for that? I’ve certainly bought some physical switch codes as a gift, but I haven’t paid extra for them.
There are two Amico subreddits. The official one is /r/Amico and taken over by Tommy and brigaded by pro-Amico people who have been compensated with t-shirts and crap…which I thought was not condoned by Reddit rules?
Unfortunately, some of the anti-Amico squad have some some right-wing YouTubers as well who also do back-and-forth personal attacks on the equally-greasy pro-Amico cult. Each side’s channels have barely double digit YouTube views.
I’m strictly in the anti-Amico, anti-TT camp but yeah beware some of the other weirdos on this side like “Darius Truxton” etc who all seem to be trying to kickstart video channels.
Yeah. That’s the one I was looking at. I’d say the brigaders aren’t doing a good job of brigading, because the overall bent was pretty negative in the threads I looked at. Might have been looking at the wrong threads.
Haha. Can you imagine waging any sort of war or creating a platform based on this thing?
Clearly if anyone can create a platform for Amico it isn’t the designers of the system.
The platform is stupidly missing a bunch of its best games. People will get bored of the games after 1 hour and wonder why they spent so much, on what amounts to flash games.
Trying to scam for more money this time claiming their back end is “80% ready”
They remembered to not list the fake female marketing VPs and J Allard this time.