Tag Archives: Crowdfunding

Electronic Entertainment, Features of Failure

Yogventures is today’s failure

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It’s Wednesday boys, girls, toasters, assault helicopters and other, time for another failed crowdfunded nonsense product and/or service. And today’s utter failure is Yogventure, a masterstroke of failure, as it never actually released into anything resembling the promised product.

I ought to know, I funded the stupid kickstarter and I regret it to this day.

The concept originated from a Youtube group know as the Yogscast, who made their fame from a series of Minecraft adventures, mostly scripted with various storylines about wizard and cookies and what not, high production values, decent fun for the time.

The idea behind Yogventure was essentially a Minecraft clone, with a heavy focus on multiplayer and modding, i.e. creating maps and gameplay elements tailormade for whatever purposes your specific players needed.

They managed to get over half a million US dollars out of it, with 13,647 backers essentially preordering the game, they even had a prototype to show off.

Let’s list the promises:

  • Just like Minecraft
  • Not blocks though
  • Multiplayer-focus
  • Has characters from our Award-winning YouTube series.
  • Crafting
  • Easy to mod

There we go. Fortunately, there are no real stretch-goals, thank fuck for that at least.

So, what happened? Well, they outsourced the entire development to some other studio, rather than making it themselves, which turned out to be brave. As in the whole thing just vanished into bankruptcy and wasted money.

Apparently the developer they’d basically outsourced the actual work to, hired an artist to do assets, without a contractual obligation to actual do it and paid the artist in advance? Which sounds utterly bonkers to me, you’d have to be completely fucking stupid to anything like that.

Although there’s been at least seven other kickstarters that have failed due to contractual shenanigans, so perhaps it wasn’t that odd.

The single potentially fraudulent thing the Yogscast crew really did, was that to claim that they had a prototype during the kickstarter, turns out if was a Unity engine hackjob put together just for the crowdfunding campaign, probably not fraud, definitely unethical as fuck.

The lesson? Don’t trust anyone.

Electronic Entertainment, Features of Failure

The Ouya is Today’s Failure

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The Ouya is Today’s Failure, because every Wednesday is going to be failed crowdfunding projects, because otherwise we’d never learn anything.

The Ouya was a micro-console, I say was, you can’t get the misbegotten thing anymore, for which all of humanity ought to be immeasurably grateful, it was a silly thing. Annouced in 2012 as a “revolutionary” home video console by Julie Uhrman, described as an industry veteran by many, she wasn’t an industry veteran when we’re talking about a console, she would be one talking pure business development, but that didn’t translate over.

HELLO! MY NAME IS JULIE UHRMAN! I AM VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT THINGS!

They used kickstarter and did get over eight and half million US dollars, not bad for the former Vice President of Digital Distribution of IGN (Note, IGN doesn’t actually do proper digital distribution, IGN is a website for basically paid reviews), at the time the fifth largest sum kickstarted, even on that platform it has been eclipsed, all the way down to nine, including all platforms Ouya isn’t even close to the 200 million US$ and more StarCitizen has raised.

Still, not to shabby, combined it with various venture capital, they actually managed to release the product, that’s right, for my fellow engineers out there, they released a “Minimum Viable Product”.

Fucking hell, this was massively popular? Why?

It was a smartphone in a box, literally, the blasted thing used Andriod and had an Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset to handle the lifting, wont call it heavy, it can run mobile apps, that isn’t heavy lifting even at the worst of times.

And guess what, the design of the ugly little shitbox? YVES BEHAR, the primogenitor of the damned himself returns to sprinkle failure all over the venture, the Ouya had issues with overheating and STANDING UP, mostly due to issues with the case.

The controller? The buttons would get stuck all the time, the touch pad in the center, designed to handle mobile games touch controls, didn’t work properly in the earlier versions and it felt cheap. Then again, what did people expect from a device costing 99 US$.

HATE
Hate.

April 2013 they began delivering the pre-ordered Ouyas, June it was put up for sale, October they announced a redesign in 2014, it went up in the end of January 2014, double the storage and a new controller, hot damn.

Now, as with virtually all consoles released since like 1995, Ouya didn’t make any money on the consoles, nobody does, except Sony on the first PlayStation but they basically made the whole thing in-house from whatever random crap they had around, the money comes from licensing and software sales.

But the Ouya was terminally stupid, you could replace the entire thing with a HDMI cable and a laptop, then add in various casting devices and the Raspberry Pi being better in almost every way.

In 2015, Alibaba for some forsaken reason, throw ten million dollars at the sinking ship, guess what? The whole mess was sold to Razer in July of the same year, frankly, Alibaba probably didn’t even notice the cash was gone.

Razer only purchased the software and developer relations elements, the rest was left to rot in the sun, they used this technical staff to support their own micro-console and what do you know, it was discontinued in 2016.

And how does this sordid tale end? Total shutdown of everything in June this very year, rendering a default Ouya an even more useless hunk of junk.

Julie Uhrman now works as Head of Media, for Playboy.

The lessons learned are that micro-consoles are silly.

Sources:

https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/playboy-julie-uhrman-president-media-1202936333/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya

The OUYA: Bullshit marketing and idiots

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieuhrman/

Electronic Entertainment, Star Citizen

Star Citizens and Transparency

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One of the biggest complaints of Star Citizens, is the total lack of transparancy, as a backer, I have no clue, not even a single clue at all, about what Cloud Imperium Games have been spending money on.

All am hearing is something about mocap studioes, bizare really, who the hell still uses FMVs in Video Games? Other than EA Los Angeles for Command and Conquer, and that’s only because it’s tradition. It’s in-engine cutscenes these days lads, much cooler to watch, no loading screens either.

For all we know, Star Citizens burned 100 million US$ on Motion Capture equipment, a CryEngine license and big celebrities for some shitty storyline.

That’s it, that’s all we know, other than the laughable “Alpha”, which CIG now problaim is a “substantial” chunch of the promised game, despite the Alpha being limited to 16 people per server, has issues with the frames per second when someone shots at something in the other corner of the solar system and doesn’t have functional aiming.

That’s right, using CryEngine, an engine literally build for First Person Shooting, CIG has somehow managed to break the aim of the guns.

Impressive isn’t it? And due to the total lack of transparency, we have no idea what’s going on, why they relocate studioes, why is Sandi Gardiner, a failed Z-list actress even remotely involved with any of this?

Compared to Frontier, a publically traded company, where we can all just go to the “investor” section, and download a copy of their Financial report, and tada, all the transparency you could ever want.

I can’t imagine this kind of nonsense can carry on for much longer, and not just for StarCitizens, for Kickstarter and Crowd-funding in general.

At some point, some large-scale Crowdfuncing fails completely, and the politicians in Europe notices, and EU politcs have a tendency to be less “Sucking the teat of Wall Street” and more “Wait, we’re fucking Socialists/Populists, FUCK YOU, we need to get reelected”, so Consumer Rights will punch through at some point.

All we need is the failure.