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Bolognesus wrote:Worse than the ice age mammals KS? That's a stretch.

Moses Bad wrote:Prodos is really competing hard for the price of the worst run KS ever.
Of the ones actually producing something, to rule out the ones who simply ran with the money.

He already excluded the campaigns that are outright crimes.

 warboss wrote:

Bolognesus wrote:Worse than the ice age mammals KS? That's a stretch.

Moses Bad wrote:Prodos is really competing hard for the price of the worst run KS ever.
Of the ones actually producing something, to rule out the ones who simply ran with the money.

He already excluded the campaigns that are outright crimes.

That Gigantopithicus was a crime even if the project WAS legit.

The what now?

 Alex C wrote:

 warboss wrote:

Bolognesus wrote:Worse than the ice age mammals KS? That's a stretch.

Moses Bad wrote:Prodos is really competing hard for the price of the worst run KS ever.
Of the ones actually producing something, to rule out the ones who simply ran with the money.

He already excluded the campaigns that are outright crimes.

That Gigantopithicus was a crime even if the project WAS legit.

And yet it's still at a more advanced stage towards eventual production that Wave 2 of the Robotech KS... But yes, those sculpts were assaults on the eyes.

That thing looks like the hatechild between the Blob and a Wookie.

 warboss wrote:

Bolognesus wrote:Worse than the ice age mammals KS? That's a stretch.

Moses Bad wrote:Prodos is really competing hard for the price of the worst run KS ever.
Of the ones actually producing something, to rule out the ones who simply ran with the money.

He already excluded the campaigns that are outright crimes.

He excluded the ones that ran with the money (egg mech suits etc). These guys produced... Something...
I agree they ought to be shot in the nuts* for what they produced if there's a God at all, but then again I can't honestly say that distinguishes them from Prodos all that much anymore, IMO

*actual nut shooting not advised, atomic wedgies greatly reduce comparative paperwork-load

For all I know, they never received anything from that ... thing.
Geez, that thing is going to hunt my dreams.

Other KS that ran with the money could be way more than anybody can care to count.
I wonder how long KS will be around the day they are forced to provide some form of insurance for the "investors".
Let's be honest, it's an often made claim, KS isn't pre-order, it's investing.

Two things that counter that thought: companies like Mantic and CMON
and
As an investor, I'd be in for the profits. In KS it's just for the rewards.

BTW, did I ever mention T5? The guy's roughly a year late, still nobody complaining.
Why, you ask, Prodos?
Because he is (or at least we get the feeling he is) honest to us and communicating.
But what do we know, we only live in a cesspool of hate, right? As long as you have your happy go lucky humpty dumpty fanboys, you be happy Prodos.

Talk is cheap. It's great we're all getting these "free" tiles. Meanwhile many of us still don't have our boxsets, which have now been changed mid stream. and I'm still befuddled how a company that cant afford to ship the backers their wave 1 pledges can suddenly afford to break this into 3 waves of shipping. Plus freebies. Ya right.

So it looks like they are already planning the next scam um i mean kickstarter.

haha - those pics amuse me. They tried to claim those pictures as evidence that they make models for "lots" of other companies. Now in fairness they do, they're making the resins for River Horse's Terminator game for example, and I don't think many if any of us would be critical of the quality of their minis, if there's one thing Prodos do well, it's that. But the true story of that picture is somewhat different. While technically Hysterical Games is a separate company, it's actually owned and run by one of the Prodos staff.

SO anyways, I digress. I had some thought about the latest revelations from Jarek, namely these "free" predator ship tiles he talked about sending to all backers.

We know that the initial run of printing for boxed games were done with all components on the same thickness card. This card appears (from reports I've read) to be thicker than even the tile card used in the latest boxes - ie they haven't just reduced the card thickness of the doors and tokens (which are significantly thinner) but also the tiles themselves - not by much, but by a little - maybe 0.5mm (guessing). This would make some sense - the box itself is significantly shallower, so given that the original deeper box was full, it would not be enough to reduce the thickness of the tokens sheet and remove one other sheet - everything else must be slightly thinner to fit into the new box.

Now let's assume that Prodos always intended retail boxes to contain the thicker cardstock that the initial KS boxes have, and these changes have been forced upon them (by Fox, or economics of shipping such heavy boxes, or cost of manufacturing - doesn't really matter)

We know it costs a huge amount to do print runs. They often have to be done in minimum numbers. 5000 seems to have been the number banded about in the project.

So they printed 5000 sets of tiles, tokens etc. My guess is they also printed 5000 sets of the predator ship tiles at the same time, because it was cheaper for them to do so then than go back and do it later (time already booked with printers, cardstock ordered etc). They have those tile sheets in their warehouse. Note - it's more than possible they didn't ever get signoff on these items from Fox prior to the print run - we know they made all the figures for the boxsets mutli-part
and then had to scrap them and start again (no doubt because Fox wanted minimum numbers of parts for the boxed game) so why not have jumped the gun on the pred tiles as well?

So now they have shipped a quantity of those 5000 KS spec boxes to backers and a (greater) number of them to retail much to our annoyance, but I think we understand why that was necessary.

Then they've changed the spec of the cardstock in the boxed game - because Fox/costs/weight/whatever, and this means they can't fullfil the KS shipment because that initial stock is all gone. They could (assuming Fox would let them, but why wouldn't they?) do a second print run of the KS spec cardstock, but that would be another 5000 units and maybe they only need 1000 or so. They'd be left with 4000 units that they couldn't sell because they've changed the spec - it would be dead stock. In other words basic economics and the unplanned switch to thinner card for retail prevents them from doing the right thing.

and meanwhile they've made the predator tiles. Even if Fox now authorise those, they won't authorise them on the old thicker cardstock simply because they'll want all the retail stuff to match going forward. Jarek also says that the Pred tiles won't ever go to retail, so maybe Fox have already said no. They have 5000 units of predator tiles sat there which they can't sell, so they'll give them to backers as a "freebie" Of course since they are also shipping thinner card to backers, some backers will end up with a missmatch between old and new tiles anyway.

That's what I think is happening here. The second they decided to ship KS stuff to retail they doomed themselves. They may not have predicted that there would need to be a change in cardstock quality moving forward, but that decision doomed them.

and now there's no way out.

Last week's update, delayed to "the beginning of this week" will be very interesting when it comes.

I very seriously doubt Fox said "Hey, that card stock is too thick and of way too high a quality, you need to use a thinner stock".

oh I agree, just covering all the bases for why/who might have wanted it changed. They might possibly have wanted the weight of the set to come down, especially if heavier means higher retail price in the long run.

but yeah, it's almost certainly a Prodos economics decision I should think. The point is it doesn't matter much why they've changed it, just that that decision is the root of the current issue (and the reason why the have a bunch of predator tiles to give away)

Taken your estimation with print runs is correct it just shows once more the incompetence of Prodos.
How hard can it be to put asside all the boxes you need to fulfill and ship the rest to retailers and sell off and printing more then?
Ain't hard, Prodos blew it, made angry people angrier, gak hit the fan.

 Moses Bad wrote:
Taken your estimation with print runs is correct it just shows once more the incompetence of Prodos.
How hard can it be to put asside all the boxes you need to fulfill and ship the rest to retailers and sell off and printing more then?
Ain't hard, Prodos blew it, made angry people angrier, gak hit the fan.

Very hard if you've spent all the income from the kickstarter (and more) on development and redevelopment (including remaking 115000 models because you were stupid enough to make them in 7 parts before Fox had signed them off, and Fox wanted single or at least very few parts for their 'marketed to man in street' board game) and your incompetence has lead to the project overrunning by over a year, depriving you of huge amounts of income and impacting on your workforce by tying up resources.

They had to sell KS units to retail because they couldn't even afford the shipping of KS units to backers - they've admitted that. If that is true, then with Fox on their backs to do a retail launch, they didn't have either the time or money to mothball our sets and do a retail thin card print run.

They should have split up the funds at the start of the project into different pots, but failed to do so and over time they've massively overspent. Meanwhile, for whatever reason, their other income streams are not bringing in the income needed to prop AvP up and get it off the ground. They've basically balls the project management up from minute 1 and kept digging (and spending) in the hope that it would all come good in the end. It might yet, but boy have they upset a large chunk of their customer base and that has to be massively damaging in such a small industry.

If they were smart, they probably could have found a way to circumvent the fox approval process on the already produced minis and ship all that to backers. After all, those aren't licensed retail products, they're thank you gifts to their investors.

If they were smart, they never would have put themselves into the position where lying to backers could have been seen as a good choice for them to make. If they were smart, they would not have expended resources producing items which were not yet approved. If they were smart they would have managed their finances in such a way that could have afforded to ship backers what the backers bought and paid for.

well, yes, that too.

chaos0xomega wrote:
If they were smart, they probably could have found a way to circumvent the fox approval process on the already produced minis and ship all that to backers. After all, those aren't licensed retail products, they're thank you gifts to their investors.

That doesn't really work, given that those "gifts" were paid for by backers.

Also, you're not an investor. Nor would you want to be. Unless you want to be financially part of the gakshow that this is turning out to be.

EDIT: Double Post.

I always see an investor has someone who has a financial (ownership) stake with bottom line P&L.

While there are grey areas, backers are preorder customers, and I can't wait to see this covered by stronger judicial statement of applicable consumer law.

Per kickstarters own terms of use, etc. it is *not* a preorder system (and in fact many kickstarters outside of the gaming world offer what I can only describe as meta-rewards. If the kickstarter is to fund a sculpture, for example, then the reward would be something like, having your name on a plaque for example).

When you open your webstore and sell the exact same pledge packages at the exact same prices as you had available during your KS campaign, it becomes very fething difficult to claim it was not a pre-order when offered during the KS campaign...

I'd argue that the second you close down your KS page (whether by error and refusing to bring it back up) or by design, you essentially remove yourself from the protections that KS offers, you've ceased to be a company taking in financial pledges of help to create a product with the possible chance that you'll send those pledgers some cool stuff at some point, and you've moved into the realm of either taking people's money with the promise of goods, or out right theft.

I don't believe their intention has ever been the latter, so as far as I'm concerned, we've all pre-ordered product. End of.

In any event, anybody who got in on the pledge manager outside of the KS environment, and there are many, is a customer who has placed a pre-order.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Per kickstarters own terms of use, etc. it is *not* a preorder system (and in fact many kickstarters outside of the gaming world offer what I can only describe as meta-rewards. If the kickstarter is to fund a sculpture, for example, then the reward would be something like, having your name on a plaque for example).

I can write "Trespassers shot on sight", but that won't hold up in any court of law.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Per kickstarters own terms of use, etc. it is *not* a preorder system (and in fact many kickstarters outside of the gaming world offer what I can only describe as meta-rewards. If the kickstarter is to fund a sculpture, for example, then the reward would be something like, having your name on a plaque for example).

You're both right and wrong. Sure, that's what kickstarter intends their creators to do. Rewards should be your name in lights or inside the cover of the book, or simply the warm-and-fuzzies of knowing you helped in some way, but we all know that is not how kickstarter is being used, certainly not in the gaming industry, and probably not in many other sectors as well. It's gone from a "We're tiny but we have this great idea, please help if you can" platform to being a presales advertising and marketing platform.

At some point, if it hasn't happened already, there will be a class action lawsuit against a creator who made promises and then reneged on them, the creator will try to hide behind KS terms of use, and they'll lose very very badly indeed in court because a judge will see through it and understand that they did indeed make offer of goods in return for funds, which by any sensible measure, is a sales contract no matter what kickstarter try to call it.

The FTC already went after TDTCTAC, and the Washington AG fined the Altius $55k for their KS being a fraud. These are sales contracts, and no legalese will change that.

The only reason that most failed KS don't get sued is because the defendant is "Judgement Proof" (i.e. bankrupt, with no assets for a court to seize).

OTOH, Prodos and Palladium (hypotehtical examples), do have assets and other IP that can be forcibly seized and liquidated at auction to satisfy a legal judgement.

Lawsuits like this one:
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/22/why-this-jilted-kickstarter-backer-decided-to-sue-why-he-was-right/

and


http://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-makes-crowdfunded-company-pay-shady-deal

I'm sure there will be more. And backers seem to be winning...

Prodos clearly selling pledge packages outside of KS would likely give the impression Prodos saw this as a pre-order function.

biggusdoggus wrote:
While technically Hysterical Games is a separate company, it's actually owned and run by one of the Prodos staff..

Source?

http://www.endole.co.uk/company/09325541/hysterical-games-ltd

Rob Alderman co owns Hysterical Games, he's the majority shareholder

 DaveC wrote:
http://www.endole.co.uk/company/09325541/hysterical-games-ltd

Rob Alderman co owns Hysterical Games, he's the majority shareholder

Thank you!