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That would seem to confirm my suspicion that Mythic was effectively operating the equivalent of a Kickstarter ponzi scheme, where money from backers for a project was used to fund the delivery of a previous project rather than the one the backers paid for.

There's been not much news of DD wave 2, but maybe it'll actually get shipped. Last bit of news was in December slating the delivery of wave 2 for summer/fall of this year.

I feel like Mythic needs to be sued though, if only to force a shift in the way this industry operates. The idea behind kickstarter isn't the worst in the world but there's a consistent lack of control in production and delivery that feels like it can be blamed entirely on the lack of consequences for bad habits and practices.

That sucks for the backers of their various projects. As a disgruntled Robotech Tactics backer myself (my first and only crowdfunder backed for more than $1.00 USD), I sympathize.

Didn't Mythic also raise money for a MonPoc remake? Did that get delivered in part or full?

We are still waiting on MonPoc 3 full pledges worth.
Devastating for how excited people where here for it.

Apple fox wrote:
We are still waiting on MonPoc 3 full pledges worth.
Devastating for how excited people where here for it.

Apologies but that can be read both ways in that you're waiting to get the last part to get a "full" pledge and that you're waiting for the "full" pledge meaning that nothing has been delivered. I don't know if they split it into waves after the fact during earlier troubles to try and dig themselves out of their grave.

 warboss wrote:

Apple fox wrote:
We are still waiting on MonPoc 3 full pledges worth.
Devastating for how excited people where here for it.

Apologies but that can be read both ways in that you're waiting to get the last part to get a "full" pledge and that you're waiting for the "full" pledge meaning that nothing has been delivered. I don't know if they split it into waves after the fact during earlier troubles to try and dig themselves out of their grave.

Nothing has been delivered. The last update was the March 31, 2023 "We're going to work through our projects one at a time" message.

You can add Restoration Games and Road to Infamy as KS board game companies to the white list.
Both have always delivered exactly what they promised, and almost always on time. Dark Tower was a year late but so well worth it.

The writing was on the wall with Mythic during their Joan of Arc original campaign.

JoA is the entire reason that Monolith now owns the Mythic Battles IP, as Mythic sold it immediately after JoA concluded.
I had an all in pledge, and promptly had it refunded. I followed them for some time, pledging $1 to many of their projects due some morbid curiosity, as I watched the train wreck in slow motion.
I tried to warn backers but was consistently shot down for pointing out the obvious, and the white knights would always defend Mythic and their practices.
It took a few years, but I for one am not at all surprised by the collapse of Mythic.

The huge red flag for me was the sale of the Mythic Battles IP so soon after JoA funded, and I knew that if they had to do that so quickly, their future didn’t look promising.

The massive delays on every project was a second red flag, as that inevitably drives up the cost of each project as time goes on.

Then launching campaigns back to back with such short windows for production, and every single one delayed, I’m surprised not many caught on to the Ponzi scheme right away.

I assume they started out optimistic but the size and blot of every project kept pulling back the curtain more to the fact that Mythic wasn’t really a game studio. They were a slick marketing studio that could put together a shiny looking pitch for a board game to collect funding with.
They clearly couldn’t design or develop things along the accelerated timelines they put in front of themselves, but man they could put together a slick marketing campaign.

It’s too bad so many gamers got burned. But toss Mythic into the bucket with Soda Pope/Ninja Division, MegaCon Games, and many others. Crowdfunding is no longer what it used to be, and the risks are only getting larger as prices keep rising.

 solkan wrote:

Nothing has been delivered. The last update was the March 31, 2023 "We're going to work through our projects one at a time" message.

Sadly with this announcement, it looks like work probably stopped a while back and that they weren't able to save MonPoc. I'm guessing it's licensed by them as opposed to their own creation and that transfering it to a competitor like CMON might be tricky contractually. That's entirely conjecture on my part though.


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 Kalamadea wrote:
I am very, VERY glad that I got so soured by the Joan of Arc 1.5 KS that I refused to ever deal with Mythic again. Looking over their current kickstarters there's a LOT of games that either may not ship. Best case is the money from selling the Hel and Anastyr projects is being used to finalise and ship Siege 6, MonPoc and Darkest Dungeon wave 2

Fortunately for Mythic, the current KS terms and conditions only require them to post an excuse to absolve themselves of any responsibility! They are of course entirely able to come back and launch further campaigns regardless of their prior failure(s) to deliver since KS gets their cut right off the top.

 Kalamadea wrote:
It's very strange, Prodos was a crapshow and I avoided any and all of the Archon kickstarters for a long time, but everything from Archon has been on time and better than expected from all accounts. I've only done D&L 3 but got a giant box of well made plastic on-time. All of their styrene kits made for other companies have been excellent, including the Mantic kits I've gotten and a few Starfinder RPG minis. I don't know if they got rid of the bad employees in the changeover or if they took the change in name as a new chance to do things right, but so far everything I've seen and gotten from Archon puts them pretty high on my list.

As someone who helped out (as in "outted" not helped their company) Archon as Prodos -- and, nope, same "bad" employees -- I found some other IP-game companies whose IP holders basically them over. It's to the point where I see an IP as a yellow-flag, since you aren't told how much of the approval process the IP holder controls. Frex, with Paramount and Aliens vs. Predator, they had a suit approve the artwork, but the suits changed and didn't respond to Prodos, causing delays and raising costs. Of course, that doesn't excuse Archon's later behavior with LOAD, where the person they supposedly hired to write the rules plagiarized CMON's "Rum and Bones" rulebook. (IMO, If you hire someone who plagiarizes someone else's work, you're still responsible b/c you hired them) and their appropriation of Space Crusade, a name of a GW boardgame (with darn good miniatures, I'll add), featuring midriff-revealing maidens in Terminator armor (or something -- I was too busy looking at the midriff).

Search on BoardGameGeek for the various Archon boardgames. I have plenty of boardgames (especially dice-chuckers), so haven't been backing their (or other KS) boardgames or looking close at their boardgame KS. I do know that they had problems with one of the printing of one of their games in China. Otherwise, the hard plastic is done in-house, so has some protection against China and shipping problems.(And if the flimsy but serviceable boxes are lower risk than boardgame boxes, gimme the flimsy packaging!)

What else... When researching Gamezone I found another Spanish company that was ripping off IP. Except they knew where the money was and was ripping off family games, not a niche one. They eventually started making their own games and went "legit". While in the first D&L campaign, Archon ripped off another creator with its animal familiars, Archon / Prodos / Whoever seems to be doing their own ideas, almost to the extent where backers didn't want them to (and I'm not seeing a shred of Deuslair in their Caves promotions).

Back to Mythic. One of the reasons I try not to pledge for more than the base game (and pledge the $1 unless there's a bribe) is that I'm risking less money. I've yet to go all-in (although will buy the entire set when it comes to miniatures-only KS). Besides reducing risk, the base pledge is usually the better price point. Of course the other reasons is that I have such a backlog of boardgames and miniatures and keep buying from MM and Amazon. Just got the Darkest Dungeon deal from MM a few days ago...

Archon has been absolutely amazing since they cleaned up their act (the rebrand, basically) and there is 0% chance they drop the ball again since they've become a cornerstone of the industry, casting sprues for Wizkids, Conquest and Mantic - but I can't fault anyone who got burned for not wanting to touch them again.

Damn shame about this Mythic business, especially MonPoc, which is an S tier ruleset and really needs a financially accessible sales model.

 Bioptic wrote:
So yes, my reading of this is: "Mythic have taken your money, and you have no means to reclaim it other than legal action".

Isn't that the danger with kickstarters in general though?

Kickstarter even says so itself: It’s important to keep in mind that backing is not buying, and rewards are not guaranteed.

Which is one reason why I'm avoiding kickstarters in general(I also don't like to pay and then wait long. Another reason).

Back enough projects, sooner or later you'll lose your money and don't get anything back.

tneva82 wrote:
Back enough projects, sooner or later you'll lose your money and don't get anything back.

Exactly that. And, with Covid, *every* KS project that made mini's or cardboard in China got hit, particularly boardgames, and at the same time. I think I lost at least four projects that way. "Glad" to see the reduction in KS projects nowadays.

The Red Sea is China's trade route with EU, and where China gets its oil. While China has a navy, it's evidently unable to protect ships in the ME.

Archon makes plastics in-house. CMON has offices closer to China, dunno if that helps shipping problems. Retail (eg. Reaper) can draw on retail sales to offset unexpected costs. Small creators casting in metal, resin, and SioCast have some protection against China, although China supplies the raw materials. Digital content, of course, doesn't rely on shipping.

THIS is exactly why KS died on the vine for games support.

No Accountability.

 Grot 6 wrote:
THIS is exactly why KS died on the vine for games support.

No Accountability.

Are you referring to post-release game support? Or total games funding in 2023 versus previous years? I fully agree on the no accountability part but am curious as to the metrics you're using in the first part of the post.

 Grot 6 wrote:
THIS is exactly why KS died on the vine for games support. No Accountability.

But that's always been the case.

Again, the problem is more with unpredictable shipping costs, which means all those soft plastic "Made in China" boardgames that didn't have an alternative source of funding (typically retail sales) didn't even try to run a KS.

Meanwhile, I've been seeing more .stl KS. KS is just as un-accountable with these KS, yet they're growing, no doubt because they have a lower barrier to entry than casting miniatures.

Still, if you said that KS would pull even in more money if backers could, say, get refunds (eg. from KS), then I'd agree. The usual problem is that once you mess around with an economic model (eg. guarantee refunds) then something undesirable often happens (eg. more risky projects on KS) leading to more issues (eg. KS now has to vet for high-risk projects).

EDIT: Found more stuff about China and the Red Sea. Short answer: "It's complicated."
The Diplomat. : https://thediplomat.com/2024/01/chinas-response-to-the-houthi-attacks-in-the-red-sea/
Oilprice: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Whats-At-Stake-for-China-As-Houthis-Attack-the-Red-Sea.html

 ced1106 wrote:
While China has a navy, it's evidently unable to protect ships in the ME.

The PLAN (China's navy) is mostly short-range ships that can't wander too far away from their home base. China does have a naval base in Djibouti, at the mouth of the Red Sea. But the kinds of ships available to them likely limits what can be deployed in that region.

I'd say more, but it would be speculation, and probably start to wander into stuff that might start arguments.

China's oil comes from the Persian Gulf (on the other side of Saudi Arabia), and not the Red Sea.

Any company that runs multiple campaigns and gets the majority of their income from crowdfunding is just a couple of failed campaigns away from disaster. Mythic were delivering fine, until they weren't.
Once a company isn't just working on one project at a time, once it has a significant number of employees, developing multiple games, crowdfunding money just goes to keeping the company going, and you're always dependant on the next campaign being a success to pay the wages for the next 9 months.

Interview with the co-founder of Mythic where he talks about the recent debacles including MonPoc. Not much news and certainly not good news but at least a potentially expiring license won't affect the situation according to him.

https://boardgamewire.com/index.php/2024/01/31/death-threats-doxxing-and-ip-deals-mythic-games-co-founder-on-the-fallout-from-its-cmon-deal-and-where-it-all-went-wrong-for-the-company/

Interesting what was said.

We talked to CMON and Monolith (among others), who were interested from the beginning, but initially only wanted to acquire IP for projects that had been delivered

Around the time Mythic were talking to Monolith they had just bought Orc Quest which had also not delivered. So that clearly wasn't the flag Monolith was concerned about. Granted Orc Quest was 90%+ done and about read to go to print when they ran out of funds but Hel was in a similar state if you go by the interview.

Monolith wanted Soloman Kane boardgame rights and this was clearly the way to get it as they have the RPG rights to the same character and have already stated the minis will be reprinted for the RPG. Not sure what the appeal of Reich Busters is/was. Maybe Fredick just liked the idea of a Weird WW2 game or maybe Mythic didn't want to hand over Solomon Kane rights without more money exchanging hands.

As for CMoN they said that

ready for publication in their current state and would require substantial effort to complete

While Leo stated Hel was done but would require a lot of extra money to print. It was a text heavy game, less then Solomon Kane but pretty high so I suspect that CMoN saw the price and decided the game needs to be trimmed/reworked to actually be profitable.

Anastyr they got, I'd speculate, because Paolo works for them now and CMoN were the original producer of Anastyr Resins a long time ago. It does not surprise me that game was no where near being finished.