Guess that explains their willingness to do this.
Very comprehensive report from Citi on the structure of the games business. The numbers are the most interesting thing, but as a bit of red meat I thought I’d toss this out there:
In my head this is subtitled “Predictions for the future of gaming from the heart of the silicon valley dystopia”.
30% is not as standard as people think. Humble store is openly not 30% as I recall. And some stores which people think are 30% for everyone are in fact… not that for everyone. YMMV IANAL.
I found your most recent article…clarifying. Thank you.
(https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2019/07/03/how-to-10x-your-indie-game-development-process/)
Developers of the Hand of Fate series are done. Here’s the link to the video in their announcement:
It doesn’t really sound like “scammed”, but more like a colossal business failure.
Well, a ponzi scheme is only a scam if you run out of new people to take money from.
Lycanic hopes that in the end, the experience with Drakore will turn out well for Zeal . “At the end of the day, this is not a loss for us. This is a win for us,” said Dinçer. “We know tons of people who want to work with us and not ask for money from us until the time the game starts making money.”
…
The game dev studio, Abrakam (the guys behind Faeria), are making a new game called Roguebook. And according to their latest Kickstarter update, they apparently failed to pay a contractor on time and then “woke up” one day to find out that the contractor has been going around complaining about them to influencers, who have begun to rally against Abrakam.
I didn’t know anything about this until Abrakam emailed me (and other backers) this lengthy game update, trying to assure me that Roguebook is not a scam:
“Unpayed Contractor” situation
As we’ve mentioned a few times now in our Discord and here, we’re well aware of the current situation going on recently involving a contractor we brought on to help us in development of our Paypal webpage for Kickstarter.
Anyway, we’ve already made a few things clear that we will repeat now:
Roguebook is not a scam. We are not stopping production on Roguebook. We are actively working on Roguebook. These one-sided videos are full of incorrect facts and misleading content. The misinformation these videos provide is extremely damaging to us which is why we are still in the process of legal action and why our official response has been regrettably slow.
This situation was made public via a YouTube video from someone we have had no connection with and had made no detectable effort to contact us - despite what they say on their video. We are usually very easy to get in touch with and we are almost always available to message in our Discord if nothing else. We also have multiple public email addresses and routinely monitored support and contact forms yet we have yet to find where this person has tried messaging us to get our side of the story. You’d hope they would have tried a little harder to make their presence known, considering the gravity of the situation. We simply awoke on a Monday to a YouTube video that claimed we never responded.
We’d like to make another important thing clear: The contractor in question whose payments were delayed is a regrettable situation, and that is on us. We take full responsibility for that delay and are sincerely sorry if that could have caused troubles for him. That said, we also found it professionally unacceptable with the path they took in contacting a YouTube personality who quickly makes a one-sided video with unverified information from one party.
Regardless, payment has been sent to the contractor and we’re ready to move on from this controversy.
We thank those of you who have remained skeptical of the situation and have waited for more facts to come to light.
Thanks for reading this, and sorry about the ugly scenario. We’ll try and do better next time, but we’re only human. In the meantime, we’re working on card games.
I guess one of the influencers in question is a Youtube guy named SidAlpha, whose fame includes 92k Youtube subscribers. And while I’m not sure how long this feud has been going on, SidAlpha does appear to have a couple videos on this issue, like so:
It took far too long, with long stretches of complete silence, and far too few updates for Faeria to get out the door; but once it did they’ve done a fine job supporting it. So while I’m not worried that I’ll get what’s coming to me as a backer, I’m not surprised to see their next project mired in drama like this.
So why do they need to make “their presence known” if they know there is a contractor that needs to be paid. Since they sent the payment, which was likely overdue, maybe they shouldn’t pursue “legal action.” Sounds like someone didn’t get paid, which was true, and they complained about it. Lesson, make sure you pay people for their work.
Maybe putting this Bioware news in this particular thread is just a tad premature, but, maybe not. Maybe not.
Here’s a recent series of Tweets from Anthem’s (now former) Lead Producer:
Good riddance.
Ruined loot 2.0 at SWTOR from which they’re only recovering now and didn’t bother to finish designing any progression or crafting system when he fiddled with Anthem.
I can’t wait to see what franchise he next gets to drive straight into a brick wall.
I came across this article in all place Politico. A plea for improving the work environment of game developers.
200,000,000+ games is actually a lot of games. It’s nearly half as large as my backlog.
I think that’s almost as many games as WildTangent put out back in the day.