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Check out the Kickstarter thread for more stories of people doing exactly that kind of poo poo over and over.
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Feb 18, 2019 23:13
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The whole 'multiple kickstarters plus in-house funded projects' is certainly a clue.
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Feb 18, 2019 23:13
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Dawgstar posted:The whole 'multiple kickstarters plus in-house funded projects' is certainly a clue. This reminds me of when Ronnie at Mantic Miniatures admitted to using new kickstarters to fund previous ones. Fortunately (?) their company hasn't collapsed yet.
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Feb 18, 2019 23:15
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It's probably dumb poo poo like only looking at exactly how much the project itself costs and not taking into account janitorial staff or keeping the lights on.
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Feb 18, 2019 23:17
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Cat Face Joe posted:It's probably dumb poo poo like only looking at exactly how much the project itself costs and not taking into account janitorial staff or keeping the lights on. They give a few rundowns of the individual projects where they say that those expenses were thought of (but all of this is just what they're choosing to share, so...), so my money's on a few idiots starting a business knowing almost nothing because 'Murica, how hard could running a business be, oh poo poo incredible amounts of debt
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Feb 18, 2019 23:23
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It's a bunch of things: 1) Stretch goals added in the excitement of a project that's funding much faster than expected that weren't fully thought out or cost analyzed. 2) Cost estimates made with the most optimistic rose-tinted assumptions. 3) First-timers not cognizant of all the costs involved in a project (budgeting for printing but not the cost of shipping the stock from the printer to the fulfillment house, for example). 4) The price of shipping (especially international shipping) took a big jump upwards a few years ago that really scrambled the economics of a bunch of KS projects. etc etc FMguru fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Feb 18, 2019 |
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Feb 18, 2019 23:24
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Lost_Heretic posted:This reminds me of when Ronnie at Mantic Miniatures admitted to using new kickstarters to fund previous ones. Fortunately (?) their company hasn't collapsed yet. This isn't a terrible plan -if- you stay ahead of the curve on them. It just happens to fall apart really badly when they do. I mean, this is basically the process the industry used before, only they used to get their money from the banks than the customers when they couldn't sell other products enough to pay for the next. This is pretty much what caused the initial fall of White Wolf and why they cut back harsh and suddenly.
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Feb 18, 2019 23:31
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The Lore Bear posted:This isn't a terrible plan -if- you stay ahead of the curve on them. It just happens to fall apart really badly when they do. I mean, this is basically the process the industry used before, only they used to get their money from the banks than the customers when they couldn't sell other products enough to pay for the next. It's literally a pyramid scheme
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Feb 18, 2019 23:55
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The Lore Bear posted:This isn't a terrible plan -if- you stay ahead of the curve on them. It just happens to fall apart really badly when they do. It's notable because using one kickstarter to pay for another is against the Kickstarter TOS for creators. But Ronnie said they did it anyway and Kickstarter didn't act on it because they don't give a poo poo as long as they get their 10%. (And this was 2012 or 2013 back with Kickstarter actually vetted submissions)
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Feb 18, 2019 23:56
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So, either the entire pre-POD/PDF tabletop industry is a pyramid scheme or you have no idea what words mean. Money has to come from somewhere. Most industries that make things have some level of this "buying thing A pays for making upcoming thing B which will pay for future extensions of thing A". It used to be much less direct than kickstarter, but this is how budgets and finance work. If you're good at it, you can cost things so you don't drive yourself bankrupt with the process, instead costing in some level of support for future projects directly into what you're doing with the profit you make. They clearly did not do this. Lost_Heretic posted:It's notable because using one kickstarter to pay for another is against the Kickstarter TOS for creators. But Ronnie said they did it anyway and Kickstarter didn't act on it because they don't give a poo poo as long as they get their 10%. This, however, is a big problem if you make the market where this isn't allowed. I don't see how they'd ever enforce this, because I doubt they'd tell people what to do with their profits that they budget into their projects. That being said, given the absolutely backwards-rear end margins they've got, it'd be very easy to show that's what they did in this case but it could only really be definitively shown in cases where the budgets failed like this.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:09
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Darwinism posted:It's literally a pyramid scheme Financing on debt is not exactly great long-term business strategy, but it's not a pyramid scheme. Like, words have meaning, and that's not what a pyramid scheme is.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:16
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You (Lore Bear) outlined the precise opposite of their behavior. They're using KS funding for thing B to allow them to actually finish producing thing A, and then using a thing C's KS to make up the shortfall in thing B caused by diverting funds to thing A. The Ponzi scheme, a variant on the pyramid scheme, is one where you pay the proceeds for early investors using the invested funds from later investors, so that as long as you keep taking in new investments, you can pay everyone their proceeds (though the money they actually invested is long gone). That's what's going on here. The more natural process would be to KS A, then use additional proceeds from selling A after the KS (or leftover KS funds from A) to make B cheaper to produce with more profit. That's reinvestment of profits, not a pyramid scheme. It's the other way around. Now, they could pull through - if they ran a B Kickstarter that wildly overestimated costs, so that some of the funding could be quietly shuffled to A. That would be a pretty clever, if somewhat unethical, way of making up for a KS going over budget. But they clearly have gone over budget on each KS, and if they are diverting funds from C to B to A to fulfill their KSers, the problem will only get worse as each KS starts further in the hole. It's a Ponzi scheme with dice. E: the big difference is that, like with a Ponzi scheme, KS revenue is not 'profit' - it's only profit if you have funds left over after the whole thing is done. Spending the funds for actually doing the thing you're supposed to be doing, then collecting more funds with more promised results before the first thing is complete, then using that to provide the first results - that's a Ponzi scheme. That's what Madoff was up to with an investment fund and ludicrously more money and worse effects on people. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Feb 19, 2019 |
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Feb 19, 2019 00:21
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I dunno what kind of scam it legally qualifies for or whatever but it IS a lovely business model that, yea as pointed out functionally requires them to run the successive KS projects using massively inflated numbers just to be sure they can pay the debt AND carry on with the project and all. Or they could not do that and just keep digging the debt hole deeper while praying that they get some massive 100x blowout KS that demolishes the goals and all. So, like, it's either a scam or just a terrible plan, I don't really think the distinction matters THAT much
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Feb 19, 2019 00:26
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It's incorporating juggling chainsaws into juggling knives to get extra change from the crowd to help cover medical expenses of your numerous lacerations while not actually stopping juggling the knives.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:38
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Arivia posted:I used to hang out in a big OSR discord that had a lot of people in it who liked Zak's products. Zak himself popped up in it after the G+ shutdown was announced, and I immediately left. I wonder if he's been banned from there, too. He has been apparently. http://www.bastionland.com/2019/02/mistakes-and-community-expectations.html
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Feb 19, 2019 00:39
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Meinberg posted:Financing on debt is not exactly great long-term business strategy, but it's not a pyramid scheme. Like, words have meaning, and that's not what a pyramid scheme is. This is very much not financing on debt edit: for anyone not clear on the matter, financing debt is when you tell investors that you owe money but you think that if they add THEIR money to yours you will make profits galore and everyone will win! I am struggling to understand how, "We kept running Kickstarters and never told anyone we were horribly mismanaging our money until it was beyond catastrophic," fits under that term Darwinism fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Feb 19, 2019 |
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Feb 19, 2019 00:41
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It's also clear in this case that KS's proposed model has not actually functioned for them: KS presents itself as, well, a kickstart - the funding is supposed to help get production of some product up and running, so you don't make a profit on the KS itself unless it goes over its funding goal, but you can then make profits selling the actual product. Instead, a lot of KS projects are effectively pre-orders of a limited production (especially all these miniatures games!) with the profit margin baked into the KS. It's an interesting shift from what was expected, as far as I can tell. I'm no expert on crowdfunding, though, so I could be wrong about this.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:48
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Joe Slowboat posted:You (Lore Bear) outlined the precise opposite of their behavior. It isn't, because it wasn't the plan. Look at their budgets vs their costs. Part of a ponzi scheme is intent, and no one this ignorant of actual costs could make a ponzi scheme intentionally. Also, if they were running an actual ponzi scheme, you don't go explain the ponzi scheme with data like this unless they want to get extra jail time. If it's a ponzi scheme, you run and hide. Every time some idiot fucks up a kickstarter, people scream "Crime!" like this isn't just complete ignorance of proper costing and financing. These are solvable problems that should be the core of an industry discussion on kickstarter. Every time we assume it's criminal rather than human error, we lose out on the ability to come up with a better way of handling something. Building costs into B to pay for A that is ongoing isn't a crime nor should it be treated like a crime if it gets both products released. It shouldn't be a best practice and this is exhibit 1-A for that, because failure causes problems to get worse. Calling it a crime is absolving them of their actual fuckups.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:49
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The Lore Bear posted:It isn't, because it wasn't the plan. Look at their budgets vs their costs. Part of a ponzi scheme is intent, and no one this ignorant of actual costs could make a ponzi scheme intentionally. Also, if they were running an actual ponzi scheme, you don't go explain the ponzi scheme with data like this unless they want to get extra jail time. If it's a ponzi scheme, you run and hide. You can commit a crime even if you do not intend to commit that crime I'm pretty sure none of these people intended to gently caress up this bad, but they did, and their decisions made their company a scam. They intentionally deceived people to keep going. Whether or not they said from the start, "I wanna do a scam reaaaaal good," is just nuance at this point edit: not like I expect charges or anything, just if there were charges they'd be valid Darwinism fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Feb 19, 2019 |
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Feb 19, 2019 00:54
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The Lore Bear posted:So, either the entire pre-POD/PDF tabletop industry is a pyramid scheme or you have no idea what words mean. This is exactly not how they did this nor how ks works. There are no "profits" in a ks. That's not what it's for. It's a loan for developing a project. All of the financing is frontloaded for the budgeted costs. If they sell it afterwards then what you've described takes place.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:54
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I'm pretty sure some classic Ponzi schemes happened because the investment portfolio wasn't actually producing the promised returns, so the portfolio managers started paying off the returns they promised with the later investment. Regardless, has anyone said this is criminal? Multi-level Marketing is generally called a pyramid scheme but it's not actually illegal. If they openly stated 'our KS for B is going to also help up deliver on A' when they kickstarted B, that would be one thing, but I haven't seen any evidence of that - they're reporting their bad numbers now to explain the layoffs, but I haven't seen any evidence that people crowdfunding B were aware they were also crowdfunding A.
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Feb 19, 2019 01:26
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Darwinism posted:You can commit a crime even if you do not intend to commit that crime Joe Slowboat posted:I'm pretty sure some classic Ponzi schemes happened because the investment portfolio wasn't actually producing the promised returns, so the portfolio managers started paying off the returns they promised with the later investment. Yeah, this is a weird tangent I shouldn't have dug in on. Pyramid schemes are assumed illegal unless they have actual products being sold, and the SEC has been digging into MLM practices to make sure that's still the case so that they can still exist. You also need an intent to defraud if you want to get charges, and if their budgets show any money that's listed as either expected profit, windfall or anything where they pay themselves for their time, it'll be hard to show even with these numbers that they weren't just massively incompetent vs intending to deceive. Pyramid schemes and ponzi schemes are also, generally, focused on the wrong problem. If every mistake is some sort of fraud or scheme rather than incompetence, then why try to fix it? Why come up with better solutions? That's why it matters if you call what killed White Wolf a crime vs a scheme vs bad business. So you can improve the industry, hold people actually accountable in a way that matters because the proof of fraud is digging into the weeds for no benefit. Cat Face Joe posted:This is exactly not how they did this nor how ks works. There are no "profits" in a ks. That's not what it's for. It's a loan for developing a project. All of the financing is frontloaded for the budgeted costs. If they sell it afterwards then what you've described takes place. When you budget an item for creation, you budget in your expected profit margin. In the case of being the creator, this is basically considered paying yourself for the work you yourself are doing. Without this, no one would kickstart anything ever from the creator side if you expect to profit $0 from the sheer mass of work you will put into a kickstarter.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:07
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Well some people would. Those people are crazy.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:12
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There probably aren't a lot of up-front profits in Kickstarter projects but more out of people not budgeting for them than out of a sense of "this isn't what Kickstarter is for." Creators absolutely have put up projects where a chunk of the money goes towards things like living expenses and frankly more creators could stand to do so instead of breaking even at best and then hoping that later sales will actually put something resembling a profit in their pocket.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:14
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To be clear I think it's incredibly reasonable to include a wage for oneself in KS budgeting; for all that it had its own issues the Exalted 3rd Edition KS included a 'pay the writers more' stretch goal and it was widely applauded by the community. I just think that being transparent about what a KS's funds are going towards is good. Also, I'm surprised at the idea that if we compare it to a crime that means there's no reason to fix anything; crimes don't just happen, they exist in a context where crime is both possible and desirable. Similarly, bad KS practices are a result of both the surrounding economic conditions of capitalism and KS' own problems, as well as the occasional bad actor. That it's so easy for KS creators to fall head over heels into defrauding their funders to make ends meet is a condemnation of KS, regardless of whether or not we also think the creators are doing wrong.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:22
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As individuals, the only thing we gain from analysis of a crime is trying to stop crimes from happening again. It basically condemning it as "this is ethically wrong". When you start digging into schemes, you're assuming this wasn't a solvable business problem at some point because you're focusing entirely on the negative results and assigning them some sort of moral value. If it is just rank incompetence, just let it be that. Businesses fail all the time, usually for these exact reasons, sometimes for even dumber ones. No bad actors, just costs scaling out of control and trying to fix problems with what they have on hand. I agree about transparency, even to the point of possibly scaring away potential customers from how much you think the actual writers, artists, etc's time is worth. And I agree that they should have been forced to acknowledge this, but that this isn't a moral failing, and it was not ethically wrong to believe in your project enough to think "we'll dig out way out of this". People have bankrupted themselves and others for much dumber reasons than believing in their product and themselves. I think they had no idea the right way to do any of this, but that their intent was fine. Otherwise, they wouldn't have posted any numbers, because those numbers will follow anything they touch going forward and will likely be used if it did turn out that they defrauded anyone with intent.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:44
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The Lore Bear posted:As individuals, the only thing we gain from analysis of a crime is trying to stop crimes from happening again. It basically condemning it as "this is ethically wrong". When you start digging into schemes, you're assuming this wasn't a solvable business problem at some point because you're focusing entirely on the negative results and assigning them some sort of moral value. If it is just rank incompetence, just let it be that. Businesses fail all the time, usually for these exact reasons, sometimes for even dumber ones. No bad actors, just costs scaling out of control and trying to fix problems with what they have on hand. I... I just don't know what you are trying to say here. Things can only be scams if they were never workable to begin with? You can't be criminal if you're just really dumb? edit: to be clear here, they were bad actors - they started being bad actors, apparently, around the time of their second kickstarter when they started deceiving people about where money was going and I have no idea why you're assuming doe-eyed innocence where they just wanted to do good so much they had to lie and accidentally cause a business to fail, no one's fault really. Like at best it's people in over their heads making really bad, harmful decisions Darwinism fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Feb 19, 2019 |
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Feb 19, 2019 02:50
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I'm confused, The Lore Bear - are you saying that we should be considering what they could have done right, to not fail? Or are you saying we should consider how the KS model produces this kind of failure? Because I think the first one is of limited use; the answer is 'don't try to run a KS that promises huge things when you don't already have that capacity' and it's not news. The second one is much more interesting but also has no opinion on good vs bad actors, since it's concerned with the structure of KS and how it leads to failing projects like this.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:54
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Lost_Heretic posted:Yup. It kind of colors that kickstarter in a new light... you were dealing with gross mismanagement by amateurs and amateur micromanagement by Kevin Siembieda. The only reason they even got Wave 1 out the door was probably because there was enough cash to cover up the clusterfun for a while. Yeah, I pointed this out awhile back. Though Palladium is everybody's favorite kickball, and with good reason, Ninja Division / Soda Pop's incompetence wasn't really a secret during the Kickstarter, it just wasn't well-known aside from industry insiders. It really took two to tango on that, IMO, especially with them walking out mid-project. While people didn't give them the side-eye based on Kevin's ability to burn bridges spectacularly, it made a the resulting disaster go from probable to inevitable.
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Feb 19, 2019 03:16
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Also to be clear I think it's the kind of 'crime' that's never gonna get prosecuted because people trying to force businesses to work to the point of defrauding others is the American Dream
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Feb 19, 2019 03:25
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alg posted:The Yoon-Suin guy wrote a whole bunch of words that seem to say "I'm a piece of poo poo". His statements about his personal opinion re:Zak sure is interesting as someone who has had the dude's testimonial on Yoon-Suins drive-thru page all these years.
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Feb 19, 2019 06:25
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This 40 minute video is a very, very rough one. It hits on a few awful people. Matt McFarland plays a fairly prominent role in the story. As does Mark Truman. But the direct abuser in the story is Devon Oratz, a Shadowrun writer. He was a GamerGater. He also brutalized his partner. So. Super triggery stuff. Know that going in. https://twitter.com/shaneyruadh/status/1097373208196583424
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Feb 19, 2019 06:39
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Darwinism posted:I... I just don't know what you are trying to say here. Things can only be scams if they were never workable to begin with? You can't be criminal if you're just really dumb? They also put up a post on Kickstarter explaining how to ask for refunds, and returned people's money who asked for it, including mine. They also had done at least one Kickstarter before Legends which was successful, and the original SDE which I think was self-funded was successful, and they had a couple other self-funded expansions released at that point. To the extent that they failed to plan for unforeseen circumstances, sure they hosed up, and they're owning the costs of that failure now. I don't think they consciously set out to fleece nerds.
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Feb 19, 2019 07:00
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If you want to see a mismanaged kickstarter, look for saga worldbuilder
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Feb 19, 2019 07:47
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One of the things Ninja mentioned on that KS update, but which nobody has focused on in this thread, is that a big reason for their cost overruns was a series of re-design decisions made after-the-fact based on claimed high standards for product quality. I think those are probably by far the most critical unforced errors in these kickstarters, for a couple of reasons. First, you have ample opportunity during kickstarter design and fulfillment to evaluate the quality of your manufacturers and the design of your products. After collecting a per-unit pre-order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is too goddamn late to be making major redesign decisions. Here's some of their redesign decisions. For Super Dungeon: quote:The 2nd Edition product which was intended to be a single boxed game with only incremental changes would need to be broken out into three distinct products: Super Dungeon Explore, Super Dungeon Arcade, Super Dungeon Pet Parade. Starfinder Masterclass: quote:The masterclass project is highly technical, using a proprietary manufacturing technology from our manufacturing partners. Difficulties and delays in getting a quality product and re-engineering of sculpting to meet these demands delayed the initial waves of releases. As they point out with their pie charts, they incurred significant overhead costs on their projects. That means paying staff salaries. The cost of re-designing a product is more than just the actual hours spent doing re-design, and the delay to backers: it's the additional business overhead inherent in every single day your business operates doing things that were supposed to already be done, instead of new things that will bring new revenue. Problems like these are more understandable for first-time kickstarters from individuals, who have less capability to develop prototypes, evaluate manufacturers, and playtest games in advance of a kickstarter. But Ninja Division does not have those excuses. They had the money and staff on hand to do those things right to begin with. I think it's most telling with Super Dungeon. If they sold the game as a single boxed game, then loving ship a single boxed game. It's what your customers said they wanted. When you have a fixed budget, a commitment to a shipping date, and your company's existence is on the line, sometimes you have to sacrifice quality. You do the best you can, inform customers of the quality they can expect (because you designed and prototyped before the kickstarter, and then you ship it. Save the creative re-write for when you don't owe thousands of backers hundreds of thousands of dollars of product. As for the whole "pyramid scheme" comparison, it's just not important. When a company runs a kickstarter, inherent in the premise is that they are requesting money to kickstart a product; if they do not raise enough money to kickstart that project, then the project has failed. It makes sense for the company to then seek to sustain and fulfill the project anyway, by seeking additional revenues: but there are avenues to do that, including commercial lending, launching and selling additional products, etc. It's dishonest to run another project, asking for funds to kickstart that second project, when you intend to use those funds for something else. That dishonesty may be fraudulent. It does not matter whether it is or is not analogous to some other forms of fraud. The timing doesn't particularly matter either: you could take funds from a concurrent or previous kickstarter dishonestly too, if you failed to fulfill promises made there. The key thing is that you are asking for money under false pretenses, which is both unethical and in most cases illegal. "Please fund our 2nd kickstarter to keep our business solvent and help us fill prior obligations, plus we'll send you a thing" would be honest; I don't know if it would succeed, it would depend on the goodwill you still have with the customers, but it would be a reasonable option for a company finding itself unable to fulfill its product pre-orders or refund the money for those pre-orders.
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Feb 19, 2019 08:16
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MachineIV posted:This 40 minute video is a very, very rough one. It hits on a few awful people. Matt McFarland plays a fairly prominent role in the story. As does Mark Truman. loving hell. Written testimonies don't really end up making me feel much, even if I agree with what I'm reading and believe them. Just kind of how I am emotionally. But this? gently caress. Maybe more of them should be done in a vlog format. Because that was absolutely crushing, and I'd imagine someone would have to be downright villainous to not be able to at least connect with them emotionally.
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Feb 19, 2019 08:24
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Kurieg posted:I'm going to try and convince my friends to play dungeon world, and also pray that Mearls gets loving fired. An IRL social group entirely unrelated to RPing decided to form a subgroup and play elfgames. The default absolutely would have been 5e, but I volunteered to GM, setup the Doodle invites, etc, and now we're playing 13th Age. As a friend said, it's all about the person who actually has the will/free time to pull it all together. That can suck, but 1) they aren't playing 5e now, and 2) D&D alternatives are pretty easy to GM, even if you've never done it before, so try it!
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Feb 19, 2019 08:37
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Yeah I keep trying to watch that because it'll make me a more informed human being. And then just like watching youtube videos of raccoons or something and drinking whiskey cause my soul just can't get through it. Seems like a good video but loving hell is that hard to watch.
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Feb 19, 2019 08:41
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Arthil posted:Written testimonies don't really end up making me feel much, even if I agree with what I'm reading and believe them. Just kind of how I am emotionally. But this? gently caress. Xiahou Dun posted:Yeah I keep trying to watch that because it'll make me a more informed human being. Same on both counts. Reading's different from watching/listening and I do enough of the latter IRL to be able to watch heavy stuff like that in my spare time. Can someone who has watched it please briefly summarise? I get it if nobody wants to.
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Feb 19, 2019 08:54
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Arthil posted:loving hell. Tried, and I can't watch it. It's been that kind of week. Bloody hell.
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Feb 19, 2019 09:41
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