Top Ten Kickstarter Fails

help give kids an extra Life by donating today to help sick and injured children Link in the description and pinned comment below so how'd you like my new glasses [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] capitalism is cruel especially when it comes to video games we live in a society where to replace studios are afraid to take risks with new ideas because if a game doesn't make over one more billion dollars it's somehow a flop as such there are many cases where young up-and-coming devs can't get a deal with Publishers and instead have to get their funding elsewhere welcome to the turbulent world of crowdfunding and the most well-known name in The crowdfunding Biz Kickstarter where dreams can be invested in and discretion is very much advised because for every campaign that delivers on its promises like bloodstained Shantae half Genie hero and shovel Knights there are at least a dozen like the 10 I'm about to show you now simply failing to make your goals simply because people aren't interested is one thing but I'm looking for projects that either fail to meet their goal for Extraordinary reasons or met their goal but fail to deliver what they promised let this be a reminder that crowdfunding is like any other form of investment you need to be careful what you invest in it's game game time [Music] ROM hacks are an interesting can of worms If someone knows enough about a classic game they can alter the maps Sprites music or anything else and make the game completely different it's basically mods for retro games and there's a lot of them out there some good others not so much but what does this have to do with Kickstarter you might ask well someone once tried to raise ten thousand dollars to complete a rom hack of Smash Brothers 64. needless to say that didn't go over so well yes very sad anyway now commissioning ROM hacks is nothing new in fact from what I've been told it's actually a common practice but 10 large for a rom hack but wait that alone wouldn't have been enough to get this on the list nope we gotta figure in the all too common Kickstarter Pitfall of over-promising and under delivering and uh shout out to snooplats for putting together the video that debunks this whole scam feel free to check it out if you want to learn more I'll just give you the cliff notes first plane 24 playable characters nope the trailer made it look like there were additional characters but it was all just video editing Magic subplate 12 new characters how come only four were shown the only newcomers in the trailers were Conker goemon Rayman and banjo and they were little more than Echo Fighters eight new stages so why was only one new stage shown off looks kind of suspicious if you ask me third plane 25 new items yeah no the three items from the trailer looked more like Ray skins fourth plane new character moves really you're gonna have to show off more than just a few moves that look like previous ones fifth claim playable and N64 Hardware um how show off some proof and again why would you need ten thousand dollars on Kickstarter for this putting that aside even if the campaign did succeed it would no doubt have found itself in Nintendo's legal crosshairs faster than you can say boom Headshot [Music] speaking of over-promising and under delivering oh dear it's time for me to tackle a game that on the surface doesn't look anything like a failure but as with so many things a lot happens Under the Skin and that Rings especially true for a game as over ambitious as Star Citizen this was promising to be a huge game a space flight Sim slash trading Sim which launched its Kickstarter campaign in 2012 and raised over 2 million dollars for developers Cloud Imperium games which was founded by Chris Roberts the brave is behind the famous Wing Commander series wow with a pedigree like that how could it possibly fail yeah famous last words before the USS ambition fly Smackdown into the asteroid field that encircles the reality Galaxy the initial plan was to finish and release a game of this scale in detail in two years you'd have better success making the Kessel Run in less than 10 parsecs having worked for an indie Dev myself I can tell you that making games is not easy I can't even imagine how much effort it would take to make an outer space Sim and not make it empty and boring two million dollars in two years there is no try Cloud Imperium quickly realized this and decided to release parts of the game to tied players over yeah the most recent addition to the latest module came in 2019 and the game still has no concrete release date and yet the money still kept coming in mainly through non-kickstarter related swag such as in-game ships said ships have actually resulted in the creation of a gray Market which Cloud Imperium has no interest whatsoever in cracking down on speaking of money there was plenty of controversy surrounding the game's developments including lawsuits from both disillusioned backers and crytek Who provided their engine so let's face it at this rate the game is almost never coming out in full and with some people still pouring money into this game it's almost like it would be more profitable for them if the game were forever trapped in development hell than if they actually finished it somebody stabbed these guys before they try to write a musical [Music] one common theme that seems to happen around Kickstarter is when someone who was deeply involved in a classic video game or series wants to recapture those Glory Days and sees Kickstarter as a potential Avenue to develop a spiritual successor sometimes you get a successful project helmed by someone who understands what the hell they're doing case in points Koji igarashi listened to backer feedback during the development of bloodstained and ended up giving us a solid result other times you end up on the list case in point in 2014 yasami matsuno the director of such strategy RPG Classics as Final Fantasy Tactics and vagrant story teamed up with play Deck to pitch a campaign for a tactical RPG called unsung story for the record playdeck was a board game company I think some of you can figure where this is going however the game which promised a unique take on the genre raised over six hundred thousand dollars on Kickstarter what happened after that was four years of broken promises dubious behavior and money piddled away like Mana from a careless warlock one of the first backer updates was for a card game that playdek was also working on at the time not a good sign of course they promised a slow of updates through 2014 after the campaign concluded nearly a year later all they gave was basic details about stuff like story and info on gameplay almost a year after the campaign ended and they still hadn't shown off any gameplay footage only a few screenshots and they looked like the devs spent their money on lavish parties instead of developing the game by May of 2015 just two months before the original planned release date playdick promised a new development timeline to be unveiled over the summer of that year this was a recurring pattern of long periods of radio silence punctuated with rough photo and videos until 2017 when playdek announced they were abandoning the project and leaving it in the hands of a new developer little orbit and by leaving it in their hands I mean the new devs got none of the money and basically we're starting from scratch but hey at least something good came out of this the first chapter is in Early Access on Steam and they're hoping to salvage something of value one can only hope [Music] funny thing about failures with Kickstarter campaigns that reach their goals is that we rarely know what happened to the money from the kickstarter hey we all know by now that commercial game development is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination that's part of the reason that Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites exist in the first place and it's not exactly easy either at any point any number of things can go wrong which can result in a project getting canceled which leads us to the next controversy on our list the unusual case of ant simulator so this dude named Eric tarasinski started up this company called itexy to raise just four thousand dollars on Kickstart upon the project or to be more accurate the kickstarter was to fund a series of video tutorials on game development to show us how the whole thing works and the game which was funded through pre-orders would be a demonstration of the concepts demonstrated in said videos the game itself was looking pretty basic essentially a rudimentary look at the life cycle of ants for those who are so inclined it was just a simple harmless game from how it was looking that is until 2016 when Eric suddenly quit the team and canned the whole project he would post a video on his personal YouTube channel which was created before the project launched claiming that his associates blew most of the wad on liquor restaurants bars and even strippers something that a smart person would use their own money for and all of those tutorial videos were taken down as well well worst of all he said he wouldn't have been able to finish the game on his own since that would have left him open to one big ass lawsuit because of a contract he signed and suing his Partners was right out because the legal cost to recoup just over four grand would not have been worth the trouble well that's a real shame of course his former partners fired right back and the response to Eric's claim is basically Amanda too that is [ __ ] so who's right who's wrong who or what caused an otherwise harmless Kickstarter to evolve into such a controversial mess of greed and betrayal the answer may be as elusive as finding intelligent life on other planets I'd worry about our own collective intelligence first before pursuing that answer to be honest [Music] foreign ly condemned to the Eternal darkness of obscurity saved where it's relatively small but passionate fan base granted being a psychological horror game which was exclusive to Nintendo GameCube it was always going to be fighting an uphill battle given Nintendo's generally family-friendly reputation at the time but the way it actively messed with players with the whole sanity meter mechanic was definitely unique honestly where else are you gonna find a game that pretends to erase all your save files not to mention how it served as an anthology of several Tales over multiple eras kind of like if live alive got exposed to the Eldritch horrors of the Abyss so it should come as no surprise that someone would try to recreate a similar experience and in another case of a game's original developer seeking to create a spiritual successor to a beloved work Dennis diac former head of silicon Knights co-founded a new studio precursor games to create shadow of the eternals a game that was originally planned for Wii U and PC the game promised to recapture the essence of Eternal Darkness sadly from what little footage we did have there was little way of knowing if the fourth wall breaking sanity effects would have carried over what we did see from that footage was really nice looking environments decent looking character models and voice acting and a similar premise to the story with a creepy book giving us insight into the lives of other characters not to mention some disturbing monsters unfortunately for the game its campaign failed not just once but multiple times ultimately raising less than 350 thousand dollars of its 750 000 Target during the final attempt truth is the game had a couple albatross around its neck namely precursors co-founders Dennis diac faced allegations of mismanagement during the development of X-Men Destiny siphoning of funds from other projects at Activision and stealing technology from other companies dayak himself has denied the allegations but by the time he did the damage had already been done and it's not clear who would have believed him to begin with it also doesn't help at another founding developer Ken McCulloch was arrested for possession of unsavory pictures of children for lack of more in a scriptive term that won't get this video demonetized sadly due to these controversies it was only a matter of time before this attempt to revive the ideas of a cult classic horror game would be banished to the darkness for all eternity shame too the game looked pretty good for a Wii U title [Music] licensed games oh dear yeah there are some really good ones especially in recent years but by and large their reputation for [ __ ] isn't necessarily unearned especially when said license wouldn't necessarily lend itself well to a game so the Yogscast a YouTube channel that initially gained popularity making World of Warcraft videos but eventually became one of the biggest variety gaming channels around with dozens of people contributing in various ways including at one point pitching a Kickstarter for a Minecraft inspired game called Gog Ventures yep about time I got to this one now the idea itself isn't exactly a red flag I mean they made a point-and-click based on strongbat and that was apparently decent and given the popularity of the Yogscast especially back in 2012 when they launched the kickstarter and raised more than double their goal it seemed like a good idea at the time except there were some serious problems from the start first of all they were putting development in the hands of winter cool games a studio with no prior experience under their belts it's not like Yacht Club games who are made up of people who split off from way forward to make their own things this was an inexperienced team of six devs who were tasked with a project that was way more ambitious than they could have been expected to pull off again this was Minecraft inspired with the addition of a complex physics engine the way destructible terrain randomly generated worlds a robust crafting system full support for modding and even adventures with fan favorite characters from the channel wow sounds too good to be true doesn't it doesn't this sound like a familiar tale it did have a closed beta back in 2013 but less than a year later the project got canned and winter cool ended up filing for bankruptcy shortly after Packers were given codes for another open world game called tug but that doesn't even come close to making up for the broken promises and lack of communications for a game that had no realistic chance of coming to fruition given what we know now and it's even worse considering that the game was pitched as the yogscasts projects but the more became Flair was gonna fail the more the Yogscast tried to distance themselves from it and winter cool were left holding the bag still I feel really bad for winter cool if they'd had more chances to develop stuff they may have been able to deliver more than they were able to or at the theory at least they may have been able to realize that a project like this was way out of their league [Music] nfts just for that alone you know there's going to be some [ __ ] nfts and crypto Bros in general have been a horrible abomination of mankind from their insistence that they're a symbol of Freedom when they're really anything but to outright hacking other people's YouTube channels to turn them into Havens for Shilling Bitcoin the Willis blockchain technology has been poisoned so much it's not even worth salvaging at this point and wouldn't you [ __ ] know it game developers have drunk from the toxic well themselves from the disaster that was Ubisoft quartz to square enix's president doubling and tripling down on nfts you gotta wonder how much backlash it's gonna take before the Menace is eradicated for good and if you think Indie devs are blameless my Counterpoint is Untamed aisles at first the game seemed harmless ambitious even it was to be an MMO inspired by Pokemon featuring a living breathing world where players could breed train and battle with magnificent creatures said world was said to be filled with unique areas for exploring discovering dungeons PVP trading and so much more with a story that could be discovered at your own pace it also promised rewards for achievements that you could display publicly such as rare monsters items player housing and so much more with such a tempting premise the game made the equivalent of over half a million US Dollars over four times its initial goal this game was on the road to success that is until people realize what it actually was it was a play to earn or as anyone who was paying attention knows a crypto scheme in fact this little piece of information was withheld on its steam page to which the devs lied about this game to get it listed on Steam because valve has a ban on blockchain games and considering that many of the game's supporters outside backers were crypto Bros the whole game had crypto inexorably tied to its very core not to mention the money they raised to the kickstarter as impressive as it was was nowhere near enough to cover the costs of the game and properly pay the developers who worked on it and considering that crypto investors were pulling out combined with the crypto crash during the game's development fat loot dams didn't have enough money to keep the train running the game has been an indefinite Hiatus for a while now and yet instead of removing the nft [ __ ] from the game altogether they're waiting for a more favorable time for the crypto Market before starting again and they can't even afford to give backers refunds in the end Untamed Isles is one of the biggest examples of why crypto can't be trusted in gaming it relied on a purely speculative Market obfuscated that fact and probably wouldn't have been able to deliver on its promises anyway they say they'll pick things up again once the crypto Market picks up again but given the well-deserved backlash against nfts I doubt that highly tell me again why Square enix's president is so drunk on the Promises of nfts oh right ignorance and greed [Music] well so far I've covered games in all sorts of situations from Kickstarter of course Kickstarter is for all sorts of products not just games there's categories for design and Tech animation music film and more I just focus on games because that sort of thing is my bag baby but eventually it should happen that Hardware should enter the situation and considering that consoles and especially gaming PCs make for a considerably expensive point of entry you'd have to wonder why doesn't someone try to make a cheaper console well thanks to one particular blunder on Kickstarter we have an answer you could try to make a cheaper console but then it would be cheap oh yeah it's about time I talked about this one on paper the idea of an affordable console sounds like it would have been a slam dunk the Oya was meant to be an Android based micro console which promised to deliver console quality gaming at a price of 99 it hoped to combine the home gaming experience with the growing Mobile Market at the time it also hoped to open up the gaming development space to the point where a Dev could create their next big game from their living room without a license or expensive dev kit wow what an idea so in 2012 a Kickstarter was launched to gauge interest in the project and it raised over 8 million dollars wow with numbers like that how could it possibly fail well several reasons when it was released in 2013 problems became very apparent the console itself wasn't too bad but there were some critical problems with it first of all it had connectivity issues with the internet which is a problem with a console based around a mobile OS and the need to download games for it second was the controller which not only had input lag but also questions about its build quality with critics noticing buttons getting stuck third and most detrimental games were performing worse on Ouya than on mobile devices you know the kinds of devices that uyo was meant to emulate on TV oh and there was the matter of the game selection which was pretty damn lacking in order to help bolster its catalog Ouya announced the free the games fund which would match A Game's Kickstarter funds if they raised at least 50k under the condition that they would be Ouya exclusive for the first six months but not only did it not help their catalog to any significant degree the first two games to reach the threshold were said to have inflated their stats in order to get funding and despite all the hype behind the console it only sold around 200 000 units and was deemed a failure as a result in 2015 the console's assets and staff were acquired by Razer who shut the whole thing down in 2019. guess when your console competition is the big three and actual mobile devices of the time were better at playing mobile games in your console which operates off of a mobile OS only the morbidly curious would have any interest without any regret and it's a real shame because the concept was such a banger making gaming and development affordable to the masses but like so many other Kickstart campaigns the ouya's failure to deliver on its promises turn it into an Uno [Music] I fed up with this world Mighty number nine of all the fails on this list this is the one that hits me the most personally mainly because I backed it myself if you've followed my channel for long enough my love of Mega Man is probably abundantly clear by now it's my favorite franchise ever and for the Creator part of the 2010s the way Capcom was treating the franchise was downright shameful a crappy mobile game is your big 25th anniversary title really not to mention that that was shortly after Mega Man Legends 3 got canceled not to mention Mega Man universe and a whole bunch of other projects so when kg inafune the longtime character designer who eventually became producer of Mega Man Who had recently left Capcom announced that he was launching a Kickstarter for a spiritual successor to Mega Man of course I was gonna be on board and so were enough people to raise over 4 million dollars unfortunately for Mighty number nine or as some of my friends call it mighty No 9 because no this project was the victim of hubris and over ambition they promised so much like an All-Star development team veteran composer manami matsumaye had a whole mess of stretch goals that got shattered including ports for numerous systems including the 3DS and Vita yeah no those versions are never coming out stop huffing the copium unfortunately the devs were taking on way too much way too fast instead of using the initial PC version as a base for the other versions they were developing for every planned platform at once increasing the time it would have taken to properly test it not to mention some of the promised features like the online play took a lot longer than planned leading to numerous delays another failing of the project was a severe lack of good communication with backers oh and that four million dollars it probably wouldn't have been enough to properly pay for everything even if they got all of it on top of that they were planning an animated series to go along with it they were counting on making a franchise out of this number before it even got out of the starting blocks which is a huge risk as if that weren't enough enafone announced a second Kickstarter Red Ash which was meant to be a game and Anime as a spiritual successor to Mega Man legends no and as the game approached release the game just kept looking worse and worse and the marketing would make you cry like a Mega Man nut who backed mighty No 9. the cherry on top was that when the final game was released in 2016 it was riddled with bad Graphics poor performance terrible voice Direction contrived mechanics all problems that could have been addressed with the more solid development plan better testing and just knowing when to say when and in a delicious Twist of irony Mega Man actually did come back with a new game in 2018 and Mega Man 11 would go on to become the best-selling game in franchise history not to mention will soon have yet another generation of blue bomber Classics on Modern platforms I think that makes five now this one with online play so we can all leave inepune's Legacy of over ambition behind I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he's gone in on the nfts himself never meet your Heroes and before we move on here are some dishonorable mentions for fun The Stomping Land Unwritten that which happened project Phoenix and shenmue 3. now let's see what the arcade nation has to say with this month's Patron picks Napoleon won we're not for the rules that it would be Kickstarter games and consoles only nft based web 3 game console you would make the list after hearing the Felder probe breaking the switch systems I would say my pick for the kickstarter fail would be pelder Pro [Music] one of the running themes on this list is broken promises all too often Kickstarter campaigns promise so much with their projects in hopes of raising the funds they need to create their magnum opus but it turns out to be more that they can handle and if you've been paying attention to the industry enough there's a certain thing whose name keeps coming up when it comes to over promising and under delivering those of you who are familiar with Peter Molly knew probably know that he has a track record of doing the marketing equivalent of stroking his own dick he gets so excited about his own stuff that he'll spout whatever [ __ ] he thinks will get people interested in his latest Rube Goldberg device you need to only look as far as Fable or project Milo or in this case a project that began with an app from 2012 called curiosity what's inside the cube which was a social experiment that had users in the millions tapping away at the layers of a gigantic virtual cube with the promise of a life-changingly amazing prize at the center for the one who has persistent and lucky enough to reach it eventually on May 26 2013 a man from Scotland named Brian Henderson struck what was supposed to be gold but it was just more of molyneux [ __ ] the whole thing was a marketing stunt to promote his other big game a god simulator aptly named goddess which had completed a Kickstarter campaign that raised over 450 000 pounds by its conclusion in December of 2012. the game was supposed to be a spiritual successor to one of his most famous works populace with it being a game about exploration and development however here's where the twist comes in Henderson being the big lucky winner who had enough licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of curiosity was going to be a part of the game by being the virtual did who ruled over all other players and get a cut of the game's profits to boot wow that would have been life-changing keyword being would the problem was that the development of the game was riddled with issues with the staff basically admitting that they wouldn't be able to come close to implementing all the features promised in the kickstarter including a promised Linux Port when the engine the game was developed on dozen support Linux the PSE version never left early access and the mobile versions are riddled with microtransactions where still with Molly new all but abandoning the project in 2015 for his next game combined with the radio silence and broken promises backers naturally demanded refunds the game has been a failure and poor Brian Henderson didn't get a cent out of this and as one last kick in the teeth malinu said that in December of 2021 the first update for the game in two years would be out by Christmas guess what it was about by Christmas this whole project combined every aspect of a failed Kickstarter gross over ambition broken promises abysmal communication manipulation abandonment and a lackluster final product that's a failed spiritual successor to one of molyneux classic Works to sum this whole thing up molinu got a whole lot of money for a Kickstarter got a bunch of people to take part in a social experiment whose sole purpose was to drum up interest in the game while the kickstarter was going on promise that the winner will be at the center of his big project and in the end he played us like a damn fiddle and the cherry on top millennia's latest project is a Land Management Sim based on you guessed it nfts how long before Anarchy becomes the only solution left and it's sad because we've seen some genuinely great games come out of Kickstarter that wouldn't have had a chance of left to the whims of big name publishers but at the end of the day Kickstarter isn't a pre-order program it's an investment and like any other investment it comes with inherent risks to be honest all I can say here is buyer beware I'm the quarter guy and until next time the arcade is closed foreign [Music] qg here if you enjoyed the video please like subscribe leave a comment and share the video around feel free to check out my Twitter and my quick streams and consider supporting me through patreon and donating to my extra life campaign to support children's Wisconsin thanks for watching foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Quarter Guy

Views: 13,478

Keywords: The Quarter Guy, Quarter Guy, Quarter, Guy, Video Games, Gaming

Id: nK-tAdHk4LY

Length: 29min 29sec (1769 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023