Timeline of Failure - The SHOCKING Outcome

the arrival of Kickstarter in the unfulfilled desire for exciting new MMOs combined with unreal engine's capability to make absolutely anything look beautiful was the perfect formula for the introduction of MMO scams into the world today we're going to talk about the five most interesting MMO scams to exist so far we'll talk about how they came to be and perhaps most importantly where they are now was it malice or ignorance that led to millions of dollars disappearing while having nothing to show for it which ones went to jail and which ones got away with it and were we wrong about any of them let's find out first up Chronicles of Illyria this was another fascinating one to follow with a story that's going to start to sound very familiar as we go through this list it all starts on Kickstarter led by a man named Jeremy Walsh was it malice or an aptitude that caused this to play out the way that it did let me know down in the comments what you think it all starts on September 18 2015 the first screenshot was shared on the company's Twitter feed remember what this looks like it's going to be in important because this is not what was delivered then ironically on April 1st 2016 the first gameplay footage is shown in a video titled meet the team again remember what this footage looks like then on May 3rd 2016 soulbound Studios announces its long-awaited Kickstarter campaign asking for just 900 000 US Dollars and promising this aging dying and souls an epic 10-year storyline invites you to experience your character over multiple lifetimes with each life you will develop your character and make your mark in the Chronicles when your character eventually dies their soul will be reincarnated stronger than before and their spirit and Destiny will live on in another character of your making the game being described was on a scale never before seen it was going to have every system and feature that you've ever wanted all rolled into one massive MMORPG or at least that's what they told us and apparently it worked just one month later on June 3rd 2016 they hit their Kickstarter goal with four people going as far as donating ten thousand dollars each so that they would be considered royalty in the game at this point in 2016 soulbound Studios claimed they would have the game in players hands in just over 18 months not finished but at least in a playable state after raising 1 million dollars on Kickstarter Jeremy announced the game would continue to raise money on its own personal website and raise money it did to the tune of over 8 million dollars as the deadline for the game approached in 2017 Jeremy announced that the game isn't going to meet the deadline he had promised due to their inability to attract talented developers the first sign that things really weren't going well fast forward to 2018 when everyone was originally expecting the game to be in a playable state and it was not in fact no one had any proof that there was a playable game at all no member of the public had played a single minute of it later in that year November 2018 with over 6 million in funding secured people were beginning to worry about the future of the game they noticed it had been nearly two years since they saw any new footage of the game surely with millions of dollars and years of work put into the game there must be something impressive to show Almost another year passes by and on September 6 2019 the first gameplay footage since 2017 is released remember when I told you to remember what the original gameplay footage would look like this is what backers thought they were getting no it's what they were told they were getting and this is what they got what's up [Laughter] to say that fans were disappointed would be an understatement of a lifetime the game was now two years past its initial planned delivery date and eight times over budget and this was all they had to show for it this was the result of four years of development and millions of dollars of backer money it's here where most of the bankers soured on the game some going as far as to threaten legal action against soulbound on March 11 2020 the settlers of Elyria event would take place as a pre-pre-alpha event to allow participation in a 45-day test of the game of course this pre-pre-alpha test included massive microtransactions to allow players to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars buying plots of land within this unfinished game if they wanted amazing it was a disaster players were not happy and now with a much more realistic idea of what this game was going to be the funding for the game stopped coming in in an event that was only surprising to the backers with their heads Six Feet Under the sand on March 25th 2020 soulbound announced the studio would be shuddering on April 6 2020 however there wasn't a bow face due to the threat of legal consequences an FAQ appeared on the Coe website stating that the game would very much be released and that they did not mean to imply it was shutting down this was likely for legal reasons as they had promised to deliver a game in exchange for the money they'd collected to Simply state that the game wasn't coming without refunding any of the money could leave them vulnerable to some legal action with angry Bankers undeterred by this promise on August 17 2020 a class action lawsuit was filed to demanding that soulbound refund the money for the game that they failed to deliver soulbound would decline the demands to refund the backers so on February 3rd 2021 the case was legally filed with the court around the same time illeria was posting a couple of videos a month about the progress of the game probably to appear as though they were still working on it so where's the game now two years after all of that and how did the lawsuit end was Justice served was the people's money returned was anyone held accountable for the complete mismanagement of the funds well I wish I could say that the court laid the law down on this man in this practice of taking people's money without the realistic possibility of being able to deliver what was promised I wish the court case had sent a signal to would-be Kickstarter scammers but unfortunately the lawsuit was dismissed and Walsh escaped with everything except for his reputation he's now working on a completely different game in a completely different engine known as kingdoms of Illyria my guess is this game has as much of a chance of turning into a polished finished product as Chronicles of Illyria whatever you do don't give Jeremy Walsh another dime of your money for a game that isn't yet Complete because it's probable he's selling you a bridge to nowhere I'm not saying don't buy his game when it's finished I'm just saying don't buy his game until it's finished which is actually fantastic advice for any of the games on this list today next up we have the day before but first a word from today's sponsor Crasher Nirvana is an amazing martial arts fantasy MMORPG mobile game that was just released in this game you will play as a warrior and experience a vast open world with immersive Graphics there are 7 classes and roles within the game each with specific skills weapons and appearances in the exploration of the vast open world you can fight with monsters and bosses in different maps and scenes to acquire materials to learn martial arts upgrade your weapons and practice your successive attack skills if you get bored with your first character you're free to change your profession not only that you can also turn into a demon a demonized player has a completely different appearance along with more powerful abilities in the process of completing tasks you will encounter a variety of NPCs and constantly delve into the character's storyline the game also features a deep PVP and Guild for skilled system where you can team up with friends to fight together and challenge yourself with more special Side Stories the game also adds an intriguing social system that allows players who prefer interpersonal relationships to quickly make friends find love and get married to other players in game so be sure to check out this unique MMORPG within a gorgeous and mysterious setting log into the game now and get 200 consecutive draws for free it's highly possible for you to get rare drops pets and skins so download it now using the link in the description below and use my code gift 2023 for epic rewards thank you for listening and now let's get back to the video and this is the most recent possible scam to be added to this list and I say possible scam because it's not really confirmed yet this story starts in January of 2021 when a developer known as fantastic drop the trailer for their upcoming title the day before it was announced as an open world survival MMO set in a deadly post pandemic America that has been overrun by flesh hungry infected it caught massive attention the public was incredibly excited for this idea so they announced that on March 31st 2021 they would show everyone some gameplay footage the day before it was set to air on March 30th they ended up delaying the trailer a week due to technical problems the new airing date would be a week later April 6 9 A.M and so on April 6 everyone tuned in and were met with a starting soon screen they would watch this screen for over nine hours until the stream was finally shut down on April 9th 2021 13 minutes of gameplay was finally revealed the 13 minutes of gameplay looked great as far as everyone could tell it would look so great that the game would become the most wishlisted game on Steam over top of games from AAA Studios like Spider-Man stalker 2 and even Bethesda Starfield this caught people's attention fantastic accomplished this without having a great track record to stand on looking back at their history they sold Early Access to their game called wild 8 and then almost immediately abandon it they moved on to a game called Dead dozen which had even more problems it went into Early Access and shut down completely three months later in things kept getting weirder though the trailer looked too good to be true literally developers would even react to the video stating that at the very least this looked like a vertical slice of the game that they had just created for the purposes of marketing it this in-game the day before it is oh my I'm getting very the division vibes from this wow the Shadows are incredible the lighting is just excellent look at no Reflections oh man in an MMO though I'm okay I'm skeptical how can they do that I'm getting a feeling this has all been rendered this is not I think it's more of a vertical Slice on first impression a vertical slice if you don't know is this doesn't mean that the whole game is done and it looks like this this is probably a section that they popped out and we're able we're able to develop and carve out and make certain things look final when they're not that's what happened with Watchdogs uh that's what happened with cyberpunk for a lot of it so we're uh I'm a little skeptical so we're about to get heated over here here's the thing and this is why I think it's pre-banged yeah that's supposed to be another player right can we go back see the way they come in it looks like it's an animated character that's not another player but that means that those can't actually be other players it could be it could very well be they have their own you know AI players it's a move like that they would have to be AI because if it was a real player the animation wouldn't be there when you actually play a game you're kind of jittery this by itself wasn't totally unheard of but with this Studio's history in mind it starts to cast doubt on the viability of the game being delivered as promised things would continue to get weirder when fantastic used to bait and switch tactic on their fans pretending a big new announcement was coming for the day before and then when the announcement arrived it was actually for a completely different game essentially using their clout they had gained for the hype around the day before to advertise and launch another game they were working on called prop Knight people weren't happy about it at all but it was somewhat smoothed over when the studio also provided a launch day of June 21 2022 at that time that meant the game was just over eight months away so people were pretty excited fast forward May 3rd a little over a month before the game scheduled launch date fantastic posted an announcement letting the community know that they would be giving a big update about the game that week and what was the big update they hyped up the big update they got that week was that they were delaying the launch of the game another nine months into March of 2023 the reason for for the delay well there was such massive interest in the game that they wanted to spend more time making sure they got it right honestly for a studio that had never seen this kind of interest to look at its project landing at the top of the steam wishlist and decide hey we better spend the time to get this right well it isn't all that surprising among the changes that would be made they would be switching the game over from ue4 to ue5 this also isn't surprising as we've seen multiple Studios make the same move around the same time so far we have a lot of red flags that could be genuine mistakes or intentional deception but there wasn't anything you could point at and say these guys are definitely acting in bad faith that was until they later posted a video asking for people to work on their game for free as volunteers naturally alarm Bells were really sounding now it was weird that the studio was promising to deliver a game far far beyond anything they'd ever created before a game massive AAA studios are afraid to attempt because of the budget it demands but people were willing to give them the benefit to the doubt until they had a reason not to and for a lot of people this was that reason how are you going to make a game that by its very nature required a triple A budget all while using unpaid volunteers what kind of quality would that provide and what kind of a studio do you have to be to even be willing to publicly ask for such things if things weren't bizarre enough on January 4th 2023 fantastic released another video on their YouTube that was a poorly hidden ad for another product they were developing some kind of office app the whole thing was pretending to be talking about the studio and its development of day before but actually it just felt like you were watching a really weird ad for some product and that's because you were they had now used their attention that they garnered for the day before to launch two other projects that were not the day before and they had also tried to get people to work on their game for free while also delaying the release date of The Game twice the longer the story goes on the more the red flags pile up and people noticed they ended up having to turn off the comments and likes and dislikes on videos to hide the ire of the community on the bright side the game was going to be launching in just three months so Fantastic's chance to vindicate themselves was fast approaching that is until it wasn't on January 24 2023 the most wishlisted game on Steam was removed from Steam in another twist fantastic would go on to say that it was a bug that caused it to be removed from the steam store but then fantastic would later that same day post a separate post that contradicted that saying five days earlier they found out that someone owned the rights to the name the day before unfortunately for fantastic this also was a provable lie as there was evidence that they had received word their trademark for the name had been rejected months prior two different posts with two different lies in the same day from these guys didn't do a lot to maintain and restore the faith of the people excited for the day before with the game not even out yet all the red flags and now a trail of Lies leaking out of the studio things were getting weirder than ever people were getting to worry if this was even a real game at all the only trailer they'd seen seemed to have been at best a vertical slice of the game or at worse entirely pre-rendered but that was all going to be a problem of the past though as fantastic was due to show their Gameplay trailer featuring real gameplay this time then at the last second they canceled stating that they needed to talk to their lawyers about their name being taken before releasing the trailer the bad news didn't stop there the trailer wasn't the only thing to be delayed the game's launch was also going to be delayed again for another 6 months to November of 2023. the internet was now crying scam everyone was beginning to think this game didn't exist in response fantastic would turn around shortly thereafter and drop the Gameplay trailer for the game as expected it didn't look nearly as good as the highly touched up trailer that came before it and to be honest the fact that it looked worse now wasn't surprising and isn't all that uncommon in the industry they tend to show very early on a concept of what they are aiming to make that ends up being far more attractive than what they're actually able to to deliver on down the road we've seen a lot of AAA Studios make this mistake in the past and then get rightfully called out on it by their communities afterwards what was odd about this trailer was that the 10 minutes or so of gameplay showed a massive world that felt far from finished it was devoid of action a lot of walking and not a lot going on particularly for a game that was originally supposed to release a year ago on top of that viewers would also immediately notice that many of the assets in the game were purchased straight off of the Unreal Engine Shop and set into the game nearly untouched and then finally to make things even weirder the trailer even had sections that were an exact copy of other game trailers in fact it wasn't just trailers that were copies of other games even the game's logo was a copy of another game's logo and so was its art this game may still launch but we would have to be ignoring an absolute ton of red flags to say with any level of confidence that the launch will go well if it does end up being a scam it will have been an impressive one as it will be the the first scam mmoto have achieved the status of most wishlisted game on Steam I hope they prove all of the doubters wrong but as right now history would suggest this game will be sold in Early Access before dropping in a state that is completely unfit for release ultimately being abandoned by the developer yet again where is the game today two launch delays later and six months before its newest scheduled release date well on February 16 2023 the developer released a Dev log where they talked about the Journey of the game so far the website is still up but if you click add to wishlist it just takes you to the front page of steam because you can't actually add it to your wish list because the game doesn't exist on Steam anymore this game hasn't stolen anyone's money yet so it's not a scam yet but the developers have been caught lying they've been caught copying other developers work they've promised the moon and they have a history of selling unfinished games and then walking away from them hopefully fantastic keeps delaying their game until it's finished but I wouldn't spend any money on this one until it's proven to be a finished playable product there's just way too many red flags at this point if you want to be kept up to date on how this all unfolds be sure to subscribe and hit that Bell notification button and maybe even like the video and leave a comment if you're enjoying it for the algorithm Gods next up dream world a game described as being the infinite open world MMO where you could sculpt the world and create anything you wanted with a massive catalog of objects in one single world with millions of other players you could explore thousands of unique biomes and fight and tame dream world's incredible creatures this game claimed it would be the last game you ever played this should have been the first red flag because the slogan doesn't even make sense the dream world Kickstarter led by Zachary Kaplan and Garrison belick made a lot of promises that were more or less impossible to fulfill but who are they what is Zachary kaplan's history that allows him to believe he is capable of taking these people's money and delivering on his massive promise while he opened a crowdfund for a speaker you wear on your chest back in 2015 because he claims he was hit by a car not once but twice while running with his earphone on saying this man doesn't need a speaker on his chest he needs to stop running in the freeway eventually he stopped that crowdfun and promised all of his backers they would be able to purchase these speakers in just a few short months that was in 2015 and here we are eight years later and the website is still up with the products still listed as coming soon after that he started a clothing brand and it doesn't seem that panned out for him either and neither of these projects are particularly horrible ideas I won't fall to anyone for trying to be an inventor or an entrepreneur by themselves these ideas are completely fine the problem arises when with those two failed projects behind him he decided he would then use everything he learned about creating wearable speakers and t-shirts and applied that incredibly relevant knowledge to creating a massively multiplayer online game Zachary Kaplan and his partner Garrison Bellic would create a Kickstarter and start hyping up their new game and the fact that it would be able to have millions of people play together and modify the entire world at will to their hearts content fortunately they didn't misleadbackers by saying that they had come up up with the solution to all of the problems that prevented this technology from existing already because that would have been lying to their investors the largest digital world that exists today can only have thousands of people then we came up with a solution that allows us to have millions oh okay well that's not a good sign is it naturally all of this took place where many of these stories take place Kickstarter while other MMOs with 400 million dollar budgets were struggling to achieve a fraction of what dream world was promising these two were going to do it all with a Kickstarter campaign for ten thousand dollars that's right ten thousand dollars and two people to develop something multi-million dollar AAA Studios haven't accomplished with hundreds of developers at their disposal what could go wrong and what I can only describe as the result of people pulling out their wallets while temporarily detached from their brains this Kickstarter would somehow hit its goal and then some earning a total of 64 706 dollars despite the fact that it looked like every ounce of footage for this game was nothing more than random assets from the unreal engine store slapped into the game with no Rhyme or Reason it looked like that because that's exactly what it was as Callum upped improved on his YouTube channel by showing each asset pack in the store even the main protagonist featured in all of the shots is the default mannequin from the Unreal Engine the red flags were everywhere but somehow that didn't stop four people from donating nearly two thousand dollars to the game once you have backed the game you were promised access to the pre-alpha however the fine print stipulated that you wouldn't actually receive access to the pre-alpha until you also forced two of your friends to back the project as well it's things like this that start to push this entire Kickstarter farther away from ignorance and closer to malice as soon as the kickstarter close and they had all of their money they went to work on the game right well no they immediately went on vacation causing everyone to wonder if they'd run with the money it would eventually come back however and resume work on the game they started a Discord server that used 14 to 16 year olds as moderators so they wouldn't have to pay anyone like many of the stories on this list this is one that just kept on giving even Zachary's ex-girlfriend chimed in on the whole situation to explain that the nine years of game development experience Zachary claimed he had was actually nothing more than him writing ideas down on paper at best Garrison's claims of being a former employee at Google were also a bit misleading as it turns out he was nothing more than an intern for a few months she also explains that she broke up with Zach for a number of reasons one of which being that when she went to get her wedding ring refitted so that she could actually wear it the Jeweler explained that it was so fake that it would break in half if they tried I'm not at all materialistic and I don't care about the size or the quality of a wedding ring I'd argue it's the least important aspect of any marriage but buying your fiancee a ring so fake it can't be resized and then gaslighting her for asking about it shows severe lack of communication and maturity but this was some pretty damning information we basically confirmed that both of these guys greatly misled their investors where it pertained to their previous experience in this type of a project fortunately for them they would have a chance to prove all of their doubters wrong as with all things like like this eventually the product would be delivered or not on May 20th of 2021 we'd finally get to see dream world in all of its Glory the moment everyone had been waiting for content creator skiasso posted a video of himself playing the alpha and let's just say it was somehow worse than anyone expected this footage was pure nightmare fuel it looked like something that someone's toddler could have made in about five minutes of spamming random assets into an open world in the Unreal Engine it was unforgivably bad probably because that's exactly what Zachary did in fact I'm positive someone could have made something far more attractive given just five minutes in the Unreal Engine leaving everyone wondering where did the money go and what was the time spent on but hey maybe the game just needed more time it was an ambitious project after all while that major reveal was two years ago so where's the game now nearly two years after becoming quote unquote playable to their credit they did continue to try and at least give the impression that they they were trying to improve the game for some time posting weekly updates on their website and on YouTube however those updates mysteriously stopped a little over two months ago for all their work their YouTube channel and its two years of existence has managed to gather about 500 subscribers so what is the future of dream world I don't think there is one these guys set out to make an ambitious game and failed that in itself would have been acceptable if it weren't for the fact that they misled people claiming they had years of experience in an industry that they didn't in an effort to get their money claiming that they had a solution to a problem that prevented games like this from existing in the first place when they didn't which begs the question at which point do we call these things a con at what point do they slide past an aptitude and into malicious intent let me know down in the comments below these guys are 65 000 richer and all it costs them was their entire reputation Zachary Kaplan and Garrison bellick left quite a trail of evidence on the internet at this point telling the world exactly what type of people they are thanks to YouTubers like Callum Upton and Kira TV it's been incredible well documented and I think it's safe to say no one in their right mind would work with these guys or give them money in the future next up we have identity identity is another game put on Kickstarter way back in 2015 that promised the Moon it was going to deliver not just any MMO experience but the MMO experience where you could do literally anything in a game full of other people doing literally anything they wanted the world and its economy would be determined by the players playing the game what did they need from the public just one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to deliver an experience that AAA Studios would spend hundreds of Millions on but this was 2015 before we'd seen a ton of scam Kickstarter projects materialize and failed to deliver people's guards were down and so they managed to collect 10 times their goal with over 1.5 million dollars earned how did they do this well a handful of assets purchased from the Unreal Engine Shop and placed into a world of course we are starting to see a trend here aren't we pledgers were even able to spend five thousand dollars for packages that would allow them to go into the office and game with development team except there wasn't one there was no office and there was no development team just two friends the studio was only just created immediately prior to this Kickstarter by John vandersweet one of the consistent problems with all of these scams is the lies every development Studio on this list has a habit of lying these lies were a large part of why people were willing to give their money to these projects in the first place it is these lies that should absolutely come back to haunt them in court but for some reason never do in the case of John vandersweet his lie was that he had invested lots of his own money in the game and that he just needed the last 150 000 to get it over the Finish Line he even went as far as saying should we meet our goal here in Kickstarter we'll have everything we need to ensure that identity gets completed as mentioned the game received 10 times what he asked for Jon received 1.5 million dollars so according to him this was now a slam dunk he needed 150 000 but received 1.5 million the estimated delivery of this game according to the kickstarter page December of 2016. the kickstarter closed and they began accepting additional funding on their own personal website it wasn't until 2016 the year the game was due to release that people started becoming suspicious of the project noticing that outside of the initial video of some pre-made assets placed into Unreal Engine the only thing the developers had produced for the public were some sketches and some conversations yet another thing this game has in common with the rest of the games on this list with the beta supposedly just months away the developers still had zero footage of the game to show to the backers heck they couldn't even manage to share a screenshot the developers explained that they were simply too busy to communicate with the public due to the fact that they were hard at work on the game so they were claiming they didn't have time to do this simply hitting the print screen button here will do the trick the image is now on your clipboard ready to paste into paint or other Imaging programs yeah that makes total sense it's at this point that the people with a brain started to realize something was wrong while the zealots without a brain attacked them for questioning their developers this is the stage we see all too often in these publicly funded game development Cycles the first people to talk critically about the game and question how realistic its plans are are crucified by those who have chosen to Simply believe in their new higher power without questioning it a couple of months before the beta due date they announced that something playable would be available in 2017. this was a delay but not a massive one they followed this announcement up with an actual video of gameplay much to everyone's surprise the video received hundreds of thousands of views and was mostly well received by the audience but now with 2017 coming and going despite the promise of a playable beta releasing that year an announcement would come on November 3rd 2017 stating that something playable would be released on March 21st 2018. it wouldn't be the whole game but rather just a small module not the entire world that you could do anything you wanted anywhere you wanted but instead One Small Town Square at this point Asylum had raised over eight hundred thousand dollars over five times what it asked for it was all also behind schedule and proposing to deliver a small fraction of the game that was promised but at least it was something tangible that players would finally be able to boot up and play on February 12 2018 they finally released a trailer with actual gameplay footage although this footage was incredibly underwhelming as much as backers wanted to see this gameplay they were ultimately disappointed with what they got this game still looked like little more than some basic assets slapped into the Unreal Engine something we're growing all too familiar with now backers had one thing to keep their hopes up the playable beta was only weeks away that is until Asylum Delayed it again but this time only by a month given players had waited this long one extra month was not a big deal then days before the launch They delayed it again this time indefinitely and why not they had at this point made over 1 million dollars by delivering absolutely nothing players still knew next to nothing about the game something that seems to be quite key to getting thousands of people to part with millions of dollars tell them you're creating something amazing while also telling them nothing at all and watch how easily a fool and his money are separated on November 30th 2018 the game would finally be playable on steam or at least the Town Square module which is just a name for a handful of buildings slapped together around a few streets that players could walk around players could no longer imagine what the game would be instead they had to face what it actually was an unplayable unsalvageable mess and so with the illusion shattered players would stop sending funding to the game the game instantly received a mostly negative review on steam the worst that you could get so where is Asylum entertainment and its MMO five years later almost none of the bugs or problems that existed at launch have been fixed but it gets better it seems John vandersweet emboldened by successfully scamming his backers couldn't help himself in 2020 he would go on to explain that the studio needed more money to finish identity the game that had basically seen no progress in almost two years since its release he explained that another developer had asked Asylum to be the publisher of their mobile game now you might be wondering why would any developer in their right mind go to this man to publish their game given his 100 track record of failure in delivering games as a studio well what he did not tell everyone is that the developer that approached him to publish their game was him yeah he created a second Studio to develop a mobile game while he was supposedly working on identity and he needed us to give him more money to fund this new game so that identity would have the money it needed to finish he even created a brand new Kickstarter campaign for the new mobile game called furballs This is perhaps the most infuriating part of people getting away with this they dive right into it again he claimed that none of the money from Identity went into the new mobile game and that he only worked on it on his free time while he wasn't working on identity two things that are all but certainly a lie fortunately this time the kickstarter campaign would be a complete failure people were not as easily fooled by Jon given the reputation that he had now rightfully earned for himself giratv did some great research on Jon after the fact and discovered that he had consistently moved into a more expensive home despite John claiming that he lost money on the Venture and had no other form of employment one could theorize that a substantial amount of the money that was due to be invested into identity actually was just used by John and nicer house if that's the case would anyone be surprised recently Asylum put up a post a few months back at the end of 2022 reaffirming that the game is still the Studio's main priority though they are also working on other projects now tragically the game itself is still available on Steam for thirty dollars though with the reviews that it's garnered I doubt anyone is falling for it after eight years and 1.6 million dollars raised all John was able to produce was a few assets slapped into Unreal Engine in a completely unplayable State whether it was malicious intent or complete ignorance I would never invest in John vandersweet ever again he's proven that he's willing to abolish on his experience as a developer and fail to reach unrealistic goal goals while moving into a nice house and attempting to cash in on a mobile game that he developed while supposedly working on a game that people gave him 1.5 million dollars to develop John vandersweb has a new house but he lost his reputation proven by the fact that his second Kickstarter earned him a whopping 430 dollars next up we have day of dragons day of dragons was supposed to essentially be a survival game where you played as a dragon you spawn in as an egg then you have to navigate the typical Survival game elements like hunger thirst and predators with a Twist being that you were actually a dragon instead of a person this is simple enough and unlike many of the games on this list sounds like an actually achievable goal the kickstarter started on September 2nd of 2019 and promised to deliver the game just two months later okay well that part sounds a lot less achievable it set an initial goal of twelve thousand dollars but by the end of the campaign it had made over half a million dollars once again the demo that sold the entire game just another asset flip demo meaning that the supposed developer of the game simply purchased these assets on the Unreal Engine store threw them into the game and gave the impression that this is the type of work that they were able of producing the kickstarter claimed that this game had been in development for two years but the developer Jo himself was a ghost no one could find him on the Internet or any proof of him having any experience in the industry though that didn't stop Jail from making over five hundred thousand dollars from this Kickstarter campaign jail would even go on to post pictures of work that wasn't even his own as examples of progress being made on the game essentially lying about what was being done to the game seeing the success of his Kickstarter campaign jao greedily rushed to add more tiers of funding to the kickstarter campaign such as extra Dragon DLCs that Founders would have to purchase to enjoy this wasn't all though he even intended to sell merchandise for the game he hadn't built yet everything he was doing and saying was 100 focused on extracting money from the people that supported his game when accused of Simply using store-bought acid jail denied it claiming that he had coded a substantial portion of the game himself but when a Linux version of the steam build was unpacked it revealed that there were only four lines of custom code in the entire game a game he had supposedly been working on for two years and had secured half a million in funding to finish had an impressive four lines of code in it when the beta of the game was finally released to the content creators to play it was 100 asset flips without any core functions existing in the game at all you literally spawn in and fly around that's it there was no eating drinking or any systems in the game there wasn't even sound it was nothing more than store-bought dragons placed with a store-bought terrain package into a pre-created example map that came with the store-bought terrain package but despite the fact that the game was so far from finished to Jail's credit the game did release in 2019 as promised so where is the game now almost four years later in 2023 well probably not where you would expect actually it's currently on Steam with recent reviews showing a very positive rating while the all-time review is mostly positive it's got hundreds of players online at any given moment and is receiving the monthly updates to the game presently you can do little more than choose one of the multiple dragons available in the game fly around and kill a few things and after a half a million dollar cash injection from the kickstarter plus the money made from the thousands of steam sales at twenty dollars each and over three years of additional development time it's still incredibly far from being a finished game but players seem to be enjoying the game thanks to the sheer beauty of Unreal Engine 5 and the gorgeous dragons they get to fly around as in this small and simple world the fact that there doesn't seem to be much more to it than that doesn't seem to bother the customers and if the customers are happy that's all that really matters right was this a game that was meant to be a scam or was it just incredibly poorly handled in the early days no one knows except for Jo the game isn't finished nor is it close to finish but it's still being supported and its players are on average quite happy so it looks like for now at least the jail has been delivering on his promise of making a Dragon Simulator game that people could enjoy as expected progress is slow as this is about as small and Indie Dev as you can get but it would appear he is legitimately trying which makes this story a nice change of pace from the rest on this list I think the takeaway from this video should be that it's entirely too easy to make it look like you are creating something amazing and Unreal Engine when in reality all you've done is purchased a few assets from talented individuals and slap them into a map that you also bought from another talented individual most of these games showed a few moments of gameplay inside of a gorgeous engine using entirely purchased assets that would take an experienced developer mere hours to put together they then leverage that footage and greatly exaggerated their experience while promising the moon to successfully separate people from their money the main difference between the MMOs on this list that ended in failure and the one that has a positive rating in Steam is that the ones that fail promised to solve technical problems AAA studios in the genre with hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal have not been able to solve meanwhile day of dragons merely promised to be a simple game that is little more than a Dragon Simulator a promise that is actually realistic to deliver on if you take anything away from this video let it be that if an MMO promises to deliver everything if it promises to have every system you can imagine and to have player numbers the developers can only dream of fitting into a single server that MMO is either being driven by malicious intent or severe incompetence neither of which you should be giving money to until it's a finished product that has proven its worth and if you do give it your money history has shown that you will be disappointed so be careful with those Kickstarter campaign spreads and if you enjoyed this video be sure to check out the amazing content creators like Kira TV and Callum Upton who have both done a lot to protect the MMO Community from fraudulent kickstarters by covering them in depth massive shout out to my YouTube members if you want to be a YouTube member to help me make the best content I can and for behind the scenes footage emotes and private Discord channels and more click the join button down below please like And subscribe for the algorithm gods and if you're into it catch me live on Twitch over at twitch.tv lucky ghost if you're not sure what to do next check out one of the amazing videos popping up on screen right now [Music] thank you foreign

Channel: Lucky Ghost

Views: 1,228,532

Keywords: mmo scams, scams, crowdfund mmorpg, kiratv, callum upton, chronicles of elyria, dreamworld, the day before, day of dragons, identity mmo

Id: uQvZuSQVXGc

Length: 39min 13sec (2353 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023