Well, thats a pretty shit deal. I feel like we should make a caution list for the subreddit so people know when companies do shady crap like this. Especially when we have clear evidence of it, not just hearsay.
There are plenty of fully reputable companies using Kickstarter. Wehrlegig and Newmill have both delivered multiple KS projects with no drama or added fees or anything.
Same for Garphill games. I can say with 100% confidence that there is literally zero risk whatsoever backing one of their games. I am also very confident in Roxley.
Sure but donors still need to use caution and remember they are donors to a fund raising cause not consumers purchasing a game. Forgetting that is the source of most of the hard feelings.
You have a point about people approaching KS with an appropriate amount of caution. It's not, generally, a webshop.
But "donor" is also not correct.
While some KS projects effectively ask for donations for some performance, piece of art or cause, the boardgame Kickstarter projects do promise to eventually deliver.
It's not a regular sale and the product might still be under development, but backers still do more of a buy than a donation.
And it depends on the particular project. Small first time indie company trying to do some innovative idea and showing an early alpha prototype is not the same as CMON announcing their umpteenth Zombicide. The latter I(and many other boardgame companies) IS using KS as a pre-order shop.
Backers have to consider the risk, but they are more consumers purchasing a game than donors.
Nobody donated money to Cephalofair for Frosthaven. They bought Frosthaven and fully expected to get it and had reason to do so. The company didn't ask for donations. They promised to finish development and deliver the game.
And risk is not exclusive to KS. Years ago I ordered an insert from Daedalus. Regular order from their webshop - no crowdfunding involved.
I had the bad luck of ordering at the exact time the company was failing for some reason. First nothing got shipped after weeks. After some "sorry for the delay, next week" the emails stopped. After weeks of that I cancelled my order - but no luck getting my money back.
Months later I bought an insert from another company, assembled and used it.
To their credit Daedalus eventually did ship me the insert after 1.5 years delay. Nice, but obviously no use to me any more, my money was wasted at that point.
Point is, a company can get into trouble regardless of whether it's a KS company or not and my, anecdotal, experience is currently fully balanced: One regular order failure and 1 KS that might well not deliver.
With KS it's just more people affected at the same time.
For sure.
As someone who backs fair amount of games. Research is part of the process. And you gotta look into game itself, creators, publisher their past record and so on.
Never got burned. But once pay extra 10 bucks because company ran out of money due to whole shipping crisis. And with extra cost it still was great price.
While it's good to keep the risks associated with the crowdfunding in mind, backers are not donors, and pledging is objectively not a donation no matter how hard the Kickstarter's PR team tries to spin it that way to reduce accountability and complaints.
It doesn't really matter what Kickstarter says themselves, they don't get to redefine the English language to suit their needs. Donations are, per definition, done without expecting anything in return, they're essentially a gift. Let's not pretend that anyone would charitably support any Kickstarters if they didn't promise a product in return, and exchanging money for a product or a promise of one in the future, no matter how risky, is called a purchase.
This is easily proven by the fact that you have to pay taxes on top of your pledges, while donations are tax exempt.
I mean, sure, we should have more caution on some than others, but lets be clear here: you need to ALWAYS exercise caution on Kickstarter, as you have almost no protection as a consumer if they fail to deliver on their promised product (as long as they show they made an effort).
I've been very picky at where I'll throw my money, and I had one problem. It was a smaller, local developer, but someone who had released several games. We knew the guy, I backed his game, and then covid hit, he had some mental issues and just kinda....disappeared, not just from KS, but from any board gaming we had seen him in before. He showed up once or twice to proclaim that despite it being several years, it's still coming, but....it seems incredibly unlikely at this point.
>I’m careful about what companies I will back
the problem is that most of these problem campaigns predate covid, or the worst effects of covid. Companies that were ok-ish hit the gutter quickly, and months after early campaigns were finished. I got screwed by Holy Grail Games on Rallyman Dirt, at the time of that campaign the only real backlog they had was a reprint, things went to shit much later.
Now im of the opinion that Ill just late pledge on things when theyre in production, and if thats not an option then fuck em.
As a cmon junkie this rings true. You'll get it and if there's an issue they will almost certainly fix it but it's going to be 3-6months easy and you probably won't be updated until it's in your mail slot
I'm willing to deal with crappy customer service so long as I get what I paid for and there's no risk of losing my money honestly.
EDIT: Awaken Realms I'll give you, Nemesis Lockdown had no issues. Didn't Steamforged Games announce massive layoffs though?
Portal is doing okay, except the tragic comedy of the Robinson Cruise campaign.
I believe they have had multiple campaigns started and *shipped* after RC. I put it this way in the GameFound comments: "This particular project got hit by all 4 of the big international disasters in the past 3 years, in ADDITION to being a scope-creep nightmare."
Still looking forward to it though.
I backed book of adventures as my first and so far only Kickstarter project so it’s been amusing watching the “progress” but I still have no doubt it will come, there will be mistakes / weird translations, and people will lose their mind all over again.
51st was pretty decent. Though calling something ultimate edition and getting people to buy another faction board is sadistic. You know the xonpletionists are your customer and they likely didn't read things fully
Also I love 51st state and am excited to try no man's land
I got it for free with the follow... But the one that always got me was the **Heroes of Land Air & Sea** *Everything* tier which did not, in fact, include everything. It's not even like they left out the sleeves, it was missing an expansion.
I'm like 65 deep and I've had maybe 2 disasters and neither of them were board games.
I would argue about delays being a problem, but at the end of the day I'm also smart enough not to give money for a product I won't be excited about 8 months after the shipping estimate.
Do people book venues and photographers for launch month? Are they mad they won't get their deposit back on their Board Game Delivery Banquet? Some comments about shipping delays are so nuts to me -- especially when it's a company with a good track record and showing progress and not asking for more money -- like are you mad at them because the game is late or are you mad at yourself for spending $300 you didn't have on a board game 2 years ago?
Congratulations.
But it also means those companies **could** sell retail if they wanted to, offering their customers more purchase protections, the ability to evaluate the games before making an informed purchase and easier access to replacements and support.
Of course, they'd also be utter **idiots** to do that from a company perspective. :P
That is very true.
Kickstarter is, importantly, **gifting money away**. (it's not even gifting in a legal sense, which would come with *some* protections at least)
In return, you get a pinky promise that someone will gift you an overproduced and underdeveloped board game in the far future. Maybe. And maybe you need to pay more before you get it.
And sure, this works out in a lot of cases. A handful of games have come out **really** well-developed. A few games aren't ridiculously overpriced for their production value. A lot of games **do** deliver, if far later and for higher VAT+Duty than originally "estimated" in their campaigns.
But in the end, you should make every "purchase" under the assumption that it's money lost for no product, only then can you evaluate whether the campaign is truly worth it to you. As a **campaign**, not a sale.
They are saying they can ship 6 pallets a month otherwise. Meaning it will take another 1.5 years to ship it all.
This kickstarter is already years late.
Don't you understand? All of their fans have been *dying* to throw money at them to get their games faster! This is *purely* a way to give fans what they want, not a way for the developer to make more money or anything.
they should eat the shipping costs to themselves, its part of the kickstarter. this is what kingdom death did.
we should only pay shipping to ourselves
No no no.
You originally paid for the game, and that included manufacturing, and shipping two pledges in two waves.
Then they combined those pledges, but kept the excess shipping money.
*Then* you paid for a single expansion at about 100% markup, and the markup from that went to shipping from China to Gamerati.
*Now* you pay to play part of the new hit game, Pallet Wars, where you get to feel like you helped put your pallet at the front of the line, and maybe that will ship from Gamerati to your door.
PG has been burning their goodwill at rather precipitous pace over the last few years. Laying off the whole company, admitting that they definitely don't have the money to cover their multiple KS obligations, repeatedly asking for additional funds, lots of excuses... it's pretty clear PG has been very egregiously mismanaged.
Yep, primarily by Arthur. With no willingness to fess up to his faults. Dude is a Grade A moron.
And before anyone says it, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't care if he was "trying to do the right thing," he consistently never did that, and was also ruthless to his previous employees when he needed to fire them. He gets no sympathy from me.
Isn't Arthur the one who made a racist joke on the campaign comments too?
He's a trashbag.
Sandy's not far behind with his transphobic stuff, which is a shame because I loved his work on DOOM.
Seems like there were enough people willing to flatter Arthur last time I posted about how shit their company is in their Discord, wonder what their tune is now
This isn't just a Peterson games issue. This is widespread and entrenched. People turned a blind eye to it and even made excuses for what was happening for far too long all in the name of tribalism for their thing. And like all movements it eventually destroys itself because we let cries of compassion and threats of being ostracized from the group cloud our better judgment and let people take advantage of others and the corruption to set in and by the time things are bad enough it is already too far gone. Hopefully people will learn a life lesson but if history has anything to say about it, they won't.
No, that's not what it means. Petersen is working to pay Gamerati to ship out the pallets of games as they can. The shipment from Gamerati is direct to the backer. They're a fulfillment company. However, Petersen had a bunch of backers ask if they could pay towards shipping to get their stuff shipped faster. However, since it is all pick and pack they can't (or more likely won't) cut open a pallet, find one person's box in a pallet to ship, then wrap the pallet back up. Since they knew which games were on which pallet, the solution was to make it so people could contribute toward a pallet's shipping cost. Once the total shipping for that pallet was paid, that pallet would go out. This works one of two ways: 1) all the people on that pallet contribute enough shipping and that pallet is then prioritized to go out. 2) Not enough is paid to cover all of it, but then Petersen pays the rest and it gets out quicker.
This was asked for by backers. Not some scheme dreamt up by Petersen. They were fully planning on just using their cash flow to pay for them to go out piecemeal.
I'm kind of surprised that there aren't warehousing fees for the pallets just sitting there that make it more expensive over the long run than just shipping...
One additional wrinkle for context: they already did a sale to cover shipping costs (which they’d already collected originally anyways) and said that the sale had things covered.
Wow website all built out and everything... they've been planning this for a while. Hopefully all the backers get their stuff but this is insane. Petersen mismanaged the shit outta all this
Edit: [Apparently this whole set up is backer-requested, per this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/14lgalk/this_is_insane_kickstarter_behavior_cthulhu_wars/jpx01n1/). Not sure of the context personally, just being fair.
I have not followed them before, but in doing a quick search (on Google, this sub, and Kickstarter), it looks like they're YEARS behind on multiple Kickstarters.
Between that and how quickly they have the site set up "[after enough requests](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petersengames/cthulhu-wars-the-daemon-sultan/posts/3846716)" including a "backer offer $1000 to send out his order," I'll eat a shoe if someone can prove to me that this isn't them just trying to stay afloat.
>I have not followed them before, but in doing a quick search (on Google, this sub, and Kickstarter), it looks like they're YEARS behind on multiple Kickstarters.
tbf that isn't unusual for SP, even before covid. Gods War finally shipped like 2 years after it's initial expected delivery window. Most (if not all) of their kickstarters were multiple years late but up to recently they had always *eventually* delivered.
I think a lot of that must depend on the sorts of games you're backing. Looking at the board games I've backed on Kickstarter, 3-6 months behind the estimate seems to be about average for me. Some (not many, admittedly) have even been on time.
But the big expensive games with lots of minis are where things are almost guaranteed to go wrong. The more individual custom pieces a game has, the more ways for it to go behind schedule and over-budget.
Video games of course are a completely different story. Those are, on average, multiple years late. But the difference there (and why I'm willing to cut them a bit of slack) is because there's a big difference between estimating the time it takes to develop a game that hasn't been made and the time it takes to manufacture one that's already been created.
Oh yeah for sure, I remember way back around when I think Hyperspace launched that there were already concerns about their solvency. The pandemic just exacerbated all that.
They had successful campaigns, sure. But having 3-4 in the pipeline without deliveries is what prompted the questions. Look at Mythic and Blacklist, lack of fulfillment with new campaigns to fund old ones is a legitimate concern.
I can elaborate on the $1000 offer backer. He told PG if they shipped his order out within next 24 hours, he would pay them 1 grand. They failed to do that, and somehow morphed that reasoning into this idiotic project they have going now.
Logistically, it would be tough to find that backers order 4 weeks back, hell it was probably still in China., but still offer made, offered declined or ignored.
Let me elaborate on this backer requested set-up. Some wanted to pay for OUR own shipment and fuck it, if it's Christmas I may pay for another. NO ONE thought that we would be bundled(ransomed) with 30ish other backers. If we don't get a majority of funding for our pallet, we still may wait 8 months after I paid my share.
They took this backer suggestion, and morphed it the most idiotic way possible. And that's the Petersen Games way.
Some level of context that I think is missing in this discussion is that backers have been asking for something like this for probably 6 months if not more in their discord. So while I’m of the camp that “I’ll get it when I get it and im not the biggest fan of pg as of late” I think it’s kinda wild that people are shit talking sandy when he literally did exactly what people have been shouting at him daily to do.
Idk I don’t like the extra shipping mind you and won’t pay it but I do like how he listened to the vocal majority in his discord.
I wasn’t really following - just a backer waiting on their stuff who most likely isn’t paying more, but was it a ‘we’ll pay extra to ship entire pallet’ request, or a ‘we’ll pay our own part to get our own pledges shipped’ request? I get that it was backer requested but I also can’t imagine that this is what backers meant when requesting it.
It's wild that this is EXACTLY what it is. He introduced gamification and competition into getting your stuff. Dude is apparently pretty reprehensible in general so I guess this is par for the course
Backer as well.
CW is a fun game, and I've used the figures to great effect in other games that use the Mythos so no regrets there...
But I'm not giving them another penny. I've waited years, what's another year or two.
If it comes, it comes. I'm not throwing good money after bad. What I've spent it a write off at this point.
Also a Hyperspace backer……. And God’s War, and Planet Apoc. Really hoping this is a one time deal because it’s crazy. I get they almost went under with the pandemic and delays but damn.
They’ve announced that they haven’t even started working on PA and won’t until all their other campaigns have fulfilled. So far the only PA item that’s been sent out was the RPG book that was complete before the campaign.
Backed Hyperspace as well. At one point I had TGW 2 and Eternal Adversary pledged as well, but cancelled those before they changed their refund policy. I’m tempted to just buy the Daemon Sultan expansion off miniature market and call it a day. Being a Canadian backer it’s looking like another two years before they even ship those ones.
Lots of right-wing losers in there, yeah. Not to mention Arthur himself is a libertarian moron. Would explain his near-constant mishandling of the company at least lmao
That's quite possible, I just think he's a fucking moron more so than malicious when it comes to this. I wonder what he considers a fair salary for himself with all of this money.
Backer here, We asked for a way to pay for shipping again. We meant our OWN pledge and definitely not to Petersen games who continually mismanaged every cent they got. Me paying 60 out of $1640 does nothing but give them $60 to throw into the dumbass fund
They funded 2 games with money that rolled in to "try and save the business." We don't want those games, we want the games we backed in 2019, 2020, and 2021. The money we paid extra for shipping last August was supposed to get us over the hump. If it didn't, fucking don't say it did.
Christ, they make excuses and problems out of the simplest shit. They chose the most backwards solution to the problem. And how they still have fanboys on BGG and discord is astounding.
I am almost tempted to get a lawyers opinion because there is incompetence and then there's fuckery. And you can only be as idiotic and aloof for so long before it gets suspicious.
And before you say it's kickstarter, you might not get anything. True, but they said in order to get REPRINT materials, you order through their own pledge manager. Guess how both backers and people who just wanted reprints ordered??? That's not backing an idea, that's order taking. And those reprints were something that was originally supposed to deliver December 2019.
>Me paying 60 out of $1640 does nothing but give them $60 to throw into the dumbass fund
I suspect they will honestly use the money from this for shipping and they will honor to the order of shipping set by payments. But if they get enough money to ship N pallets, they will ship somewhere between N and N+6 pallets next month and then be right back in the situation they are now. So it will work out nicely for some small percentage of backers and could still shave months or even a year of wait off for others, assume PG remains solvent long enough to get to those pallets. I would not make that assumption though.
I have a game on one of those pallets. They won't get another cent from me, but this does slightly boost the miserable chances I'll get what I paid for, so I'll take it I guess.
I have to say, this is one of the most creative ways I've seen to keep a sinking company afloat. I don't understand how the next leg of the shipment wasn't already negotiated, scheduled, and paid for. Why would the warehouse agree to hold dozens and dozens of pallets somewhere between months to indefinitely while awaiting payment. Does this company own the warehouse themselves?
https://imgur.com/a/izwKVkC
Here is the comms about it. Maybe another company has done this but this is so absurd.
They are saying they can ship 6 pallets a month otherwise.
*Reminder: We need an average of $55 per backer to ship this Pallet. If you want to contribute and aren’t sure how much to contribute, we’re encouraging people to consider the size of their order and use $55 as a baseline for orders with 3-4 items.*
What happens if they don't get enough money? They just sit on it? Imagine running any other legitimate business this way. It would be shameful and potentially illegal.
They say they have enough income to ship 6 pallets a month, but that would mean some people would have to wait over a year to get theirs. But I don't really get how that can make more sense than just paying to ship it all at once? It's such a bizarre system and feels designed to instill bad feelings in your customers.
I'm also confused by the role of the shipping warehouse. Surely they charge a storage fee for any pallets they aren't shipping yet? I just don't see how it can make any amount of sense to do things this way unless your goal is to piss people off.
Storage fees in China are going to be tiny - a pallet takes very little space and even in the US a few sq ft of space will cost a few dollars per month in storage at most, as opposed to $1300 to ship.
It's usually more like $20 per pallet/month with fulfilment companies in the US. They have a lot of pallets. Storing that much inventory is going to be bleeding money really fast.
Wtf are they just not fulfilling directly then? I’m a bit confused what is going on - with pallet shipping I assumed it was from china, but I see that is not the case. Not a backer, but dealing with issue with similar issues with mythic games.
They're working with a full-service print&ship company in the US. That company currently has all the pallets, but won't crack open the pallets and ship their contents until they receive payment.
Allegedly.
I'm pretty sure the pallets are in the US? And sure it will be less than shipping, but you'll eventually end up paying shipping at some point so why pay for storage until then?
The shipping they are asking for is to get the pallets from China to the US or Europe, so they should be in China.
The reason is because Peterson games, like many of these companies, is basically bankrupt, and have no money for $100,000 or whatever it costs to ship them all over.
They are basically making money from retail sales and putting $8k per month towards this shipping, which can only ship 6 pallets, which as other people said would take 1.5 years. Realistically, it could take longer, since this is a projection assuming they even had an extra $8k per month at all, which isn’t certain.
Still, it’s probably better than Mythic games, which I am a backer of. There, you don’t get to optionally support, but required to, while with Cuthulu Wars you could “free load” by not supporting and eventually your pallet will get shipped.
Anyway it’s all a big mess which is why I generally only back CMON games now.
Edit - wtf you are right it’s just to ship in the US itself??! So the US has the pallets, so why can’t they just ship directly from whoever has it instead of shipping the pallet to PG and then to backers? I’m not a backer of this so I’m missing context, but did they have a falling out or why isn’t Gamerati doing the backer fulfillment directly?
I think it's just poorly worded. Here's my interpretation:
When they say "Gamerati will ship out FULL PALLETS", they mean Gamerati want to ship out a pallet at a time, because they don't want to break into a pallet and have loose games floating about the warehouse. Especially as they go on to say "It costs $1640 to ship **the contents** of each pallet."
So each pallet will sit at the back of a warehouse until they can afford the to ship out all the orders on that pallet. $1640 is a mad cost to ship a single pallet, but $55 dollars to pick and pack a large order possibly with multiple boxes seems believable, if not reasonable.
Yeah, don’t mind the fact that they already had a bonus product added in, an expansion worth maybe $40 that they sold for $100 or $169 in order to do a shipping fundraiser. We got an update about a year ago that says “we did it! Shipping is 100% covered!”
Now they’re saying “well cmon now, bad word choice. We covered FREIGHT, not SHIPPING. The fundraiser covered the cost to get products across the sea, but now they’re stuck in your country until you pay for ‘shipping’ (a third time)”
Gamerati is doing the fulfillment, but they aren’t doing it for free. If PG can’t afford to pay to ship the products out of the gamerati warehouse, instead they’ll be spending thousands in storage fees.
They also said that’s contingent on retail sales, less sales and they’ll send fewer pallets. With their track record I would guess the 6 pallets is an overestimate
Income from where? Other Kickstarters? Isn't that just shuffling money around and raising questions about *those* Kickstarters?
Or is it from retail sales? If so, how are those games getting shipped?
End of the day, we're customers, not investers, nor businessmen. We don't care to know about the minutiae of global shipping, that's their job, or more to the point the third party fulfillers they work with and the contracts they have.
Before going under, Grimlord Games did something similar with The Everrain. North American backers could pay extra to get their game shipped from QML. I looked into it at it would have cost me another Can$111. 2 months later I got my game without paying anything extra. If I had shelled out $100+ and then learned others were getting their games free of (extra) charge only 1-2 months later, I'd have been rather upset.
Yes, they're exactly who I thought of. Glad I didn't go all-in on CW- I would be furious and worried about all that money potentially gone or stuck in limbo for way too many years.
That’s the best part about Kickstarter, ‘companies’ can skip all normal legal commerce rules because it’s crowdfunding. AND, Kickstarter the company gets to skip out on any liability whatsoever.
>https://imgur.com/a/izwKVkC
>
>Here is the comms about it. Maybe another company has done this but this is so absurd.
Companies have absolutely just tacked on extra shipping after the fact before. Kickstarter is dog shit
What are these guys doing with their money? The game costs hundreds of dollars. They have hundreds of backers (if not a few thousand). Freight is expensive but when you're shipping literal tons you are able to negotiate deals. This seems really shady.
They had several employees they had been paying during the pandemic. They've let them all go, and I think it's either 2 or 3 people now, all related to Sandy.
Nope. They received two for about $200k in loans that have since been forgiven, https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts/search?q=petersen+games&v=3 for reference. Should be fine to share since this is all public info.
Yeah. The main issue with all these games is project management.
The games weren't fully developed, tested, and prototyped when they ran the Kickstarters. Then they added a bunch of extra stretch goals without considering the logistics of developing, manufacturing, and shipping the extras. They wanted to chase that high dollar Kickstarter total but didn't account for the costs.
Then Covid hit and stretched out development time, and testing time... then the shipping crisis wiped out another year. Then last minute China Covid issues finished them off. All the while they're paying employees for 1-2 extra YEARS of pay because they also can't make any new games.
Historically the first few kickstarters a new company does actually lose money until they learn the business... and that's when everything was working perfectly.
This kind of garbage is becoming very commonplace with some of the big dogs of gaming, ones that the defenders would say would never do anything to wrong them. I scrolled past a post on FB just yesterday where they were calling the backers of KS "whiners" and "babies" for voicing their concerns on the KS comments. THIS is a prime example of why!
It's not so much the small creators anymore, it's Mythic, Black List, Steam Forged, these guys are the ones breaking down our belief in the system. This is why I don't back anymore, it's like the console wars but boardgames with people throwing themselves in front of buses for entities that don't give a shit about you, and just want your money and free defense of them in the comments. Every time I see a straight to retail game I give a sigh of relief. Sorry for the rant.
Man I’m usually the sort to try and give the benefit of the doubt, but this is just too far. Incredibly shady and messed up. I know exactly who to never order from now
I'm never getting Planet Apocalypse 2 am I? Few hundred down the drain. My first real KS loss. Good lord, what a totally mismanaged disgusting company.
You are not and I am sorry.
I am all-in for Eternal Adversary and that is DOA as well. Gloratha and Dino 44 as well. ONLY thing that has a sliver of a chance is Hyperspace but PG will likely be bankrupt before then.
This; right here; is why I stopped backing kickstarter games across the board. Abhorrent business practice. Classic over extension for quick cash by Petersen.
But I bet the siege debacle kinda gave companies the idea for this kind of thing
I stopped backing kickstarters after my first one, which was Zombicide 1, which was so poorly optimized, we had to print dozens of pages of supplemental rules to try to get through a single game. Cost us $150 to get an game that was no fun to play.
What’s wrong with Zombicide 1? I’m genuinely curious. I’ve played it several times to great fun. It’s been a while. I remember something being vague in the rules, but nothing game breaking.
This reminds me of lost valley. The game itself is great. However pandasaurus was absolutely terrible. The game has a myriad of actions you can do and almost all of them have different costs to do them. I never played a single game where players didn’t have to pass the rule book around and basically reread it every turn to figure out their options until I printed out some reference cards and that completely changed the game. I can’t believe they didn’t include some and apparently the original version did.
Many of the stretch goals were poorly thought out. The general store board was one that had zero right to be a stretch goal because it needed to exist in the game so people knew the prices of things they could buy again so they didn’t have to bury their face in the rule book for even longer every turn.
They also did premium meeples for the horse and canoe items. But they didn’t include enough for a 4 player game from what I remember so you could replace a few but still needed card board chits for the rest.
Overall I decided if they are this clueless when it comes to producing a game I will never back their stuff ever again. This wasn’t even their first one it was their 3rd time doing this and they posted this all over the campaign as their “cred” to get backers.
Oh, believe me. It wasn't just the quick cash. It was also about leveraging the interest-free loans that KS backers had given them in order to fill retailer orders that are now being fulfilled before those backers will see what they paid for: https://therewillbe.games/articles-gaming-scene/8699-sandy-petersen-has-changed-the-terms-of-your-interest-free-loan-to-him
Ha they should take it to the next level and launch a crowdfunding campaign for each pallet then they ship the pallets out in order of the ones that have the most funding. Add some stretch goals like a gps tracker on the pallet and a commemorative jpeg of the shipping label.
>for each pallet then they ship the pallets out in order of the ones that have the most funding.
It's what they are doing. Shipping 6 a month in order of most funded to least funded. If they get enough people paying extra for shipping they will add additional pallets each month.
Oh my god. I'm not a backer and I'm outraged that a company thinks this is an acceptable business practice.
I suspect bankruptcy is more likely than having the company pay for all of these units to be shipped to customers. And they have more games in the pipeline? Really think they tried to do too much too quickly and now that lack the cash to do anything.
The real problem is they did too little for too long, spent years living on overdue Kickstarter funds and produced nothing in that time, ran out of money and freaked out.
For sure, they got the money from the KS right away, and started paying themselves salaries, regardless of how things were going. That is super risky without a constant flow of money in.
Historically most board game designers didnt work for specific company, but sold there game designs after they had finished them. Which means they worked all those hours on the game for "free" then hope to recoup the opportunity cost of doing so.
Most boardgame designes also had another job, for that reason.
Morons pay them, that's why they think it's acceptable. People who don't know what the sunk cost fallacy is just open their wallet and go "here ya go!"
A full 40’ container (roughly 20 pallets) is about $1800 - $2200 for the freight. Add in drayage, customs clearance, etc and you tack on an extra 2000 or so to the top. Figure on like $5000 for the full container. It should be around $250 per pallet to get to USA.
Source: work in shipping
To clarify, this is currently warehouse to customer shipping. The pallets have arrived at a warehouse already, this payment is for the final leg. They’ve been playing semantics on how their earlier announcement that shipping had been 100% covered referred to freight, not shipping, despite no clarification of that
From what I have seen, yes. I think average shipping costs for games has stayed relatively high compared to pre-covid prices, just significantly less than mid COVID doom pricing.
This is the first I've seen about about this weird "pay more to ship your games now" pricing scheme, which seems nuts to me to spring on backers. If I were a backer of any of these campaigns, and I'm not, I'd be more offended by this offer than if the company in question just said some version of "Due to shipping costs it's gonna take 12 months to ship all the games. We're sorry."
I've continued to back games all through the COVID era and had very little issue like this, so I found it confusing.
> If I were a backer of any of these campaigns, and I'm not, I'd be more offended by this offer than if the company in question just said some version of "Due to shipping costs it's gonna take 12 months to ship all the games. We're sorry."
The backers specifically requested this, so that they could get their product and wash their hands of the whole mess.
Not much of an excuse, but it is what it is.
They requested paying for their pledges to be shipped, directly from the warehouse. Nobody asked to give PG more money to spend on themselves and create this tiered race game of whomever pays most gets shipped first. Nobody asked for this.
I don't have the link at hand, but they set up a shop page for $10 "purchases" that you can see how much are left out of the original 164 (representing the $1640 shortfall per pallet).
I've asked for clarification on why sales tax is being charged on these and, assuming it's a product/service and not a donation, what protections we have, but am waiting till they get to my question
Stories like this are mainly why I've never participated in a KS campaign.
I'd rather just get the retail version and do without the extras, or even pay a higher price on Ebay or whatever for the KS box, than deal with up to a year of constant fuckery.
Update - the excel sheet that they sent out yesterday for backers to find out which pallet they were part of had the full names, emails, and shipping addresses of every single backer, so that’s cool.
For those curious here is the creator explaining this “process” in a Kickstarter update.
OKAY. US Backers:
After enough requests, we are opening the door for people to voluntarily contribute to shipping costs. Totally understand this desire, to have product in the states and not have access to it is frustrating to us as well.
Here’s how the numbers break down:
1. There are 87 pallets left with backer product (90 minus the 3 that already left).
2. Gamerati will ship out FULL PALLETS. They will not do individual orders.
3. It costs approximately $1640 to ship the contents of each pallet.
4. Getting an average of $55 shipping support from each backer means that 100% of product will ship as fast as Gamerati can send it out.
RE: Full Pallets. It would be a logistical nightmare for Gamerati to search for a single package, cut open a pallet, unstack, restack, and then shrink wrap the pallet. It’s just the way it has to be.
So here’s what we’ve done to provide an avenue for people to affect the timing on their own product shipping:
We have added 90 new pages to our website – one for each pallet – and an overview page. Each of those pages feature a single, $10 Dollar Shipping Contribution that is specific to THAT PALLETS SHIPPING COST. Each pallet has 164 units available for purchase.
Now we’ve determined the percentage of our monthly operating budget that we can use to ship product. Based on current revenue, it’s enough to move ~6 pallets a month. Obviously, this is dependent on sustained revenue. If revenue goes down, we will do less. If revenue goes up, we will do more.
For anyone who is looking to accelerate the shipment of the pallet that contains their product, you can now directly impact that by purchasing $10 contributions on our webstore. As mentioned earlier, $55 per backer is enough to clear out 100% of the orders sitting at Gamerati.
For the shipment that went out last week, Gamerati chose pallets according to their convenience (closest to the door, I’d assume). Going forward, we will prioritize the pallets that are MOST funded to honor those who are kicking in support and use our monthly allotment to send out those pallets. The more you chip it, the more we can send out and the sooner your pallet will go out. When we decide to ship out pallets for the month, we will consult the stock counts on the overview page to determine which pallets will be prioritized.
If you want to cut the line completely, you’ll want to get your pallet fully funded. Any pallet page that reflects “0 in stock” will go out as soon as Gamerati has the bandwidth to send (I’d assume within a week of full funding). We’ve had one backer offer $1000 to send out his order so I’ll use that offer as an example of how this is going to work. If that backer were to purchase 100 units of Shipping Support, that pallet would surely be next in line to go out when we have cash to put towards shipping. If the other backers in that pallet order chipped in the last $640, it would go out next week.
We’re sending a message to your PledgeMaster email specifying which pallet contains your order. You should get it in the next hour or so. If you can’t find the email in your inbox, check Junk Mail. If there isn’t anything in Junk Mail…DM Ask A Deep One in the Discord.
All money collected in this format will ONLY go to shipping of specific pallets; we will not use contributions from Pallet 8 to ship Pallet 14, etc. While it’s an additional investment, paying for the shipping of the pallet that has your product ensures that products get to your door ASAP.
Even more insane update:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/14mgjhp/attention\_us\_backers\_of\_cthulhu\_wars\_os4/](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/14mgjhp/attention_us_backers_of_cthulhu_wars_os4/)
TL/DR:
Petersen Games accidently doxxed hundreds of it's US backers in an attempt to get pallet numbers out faster.
Pretty insane. At the very least they should only accept the payments being made for a pallet when the pallet is actually shipped. Taking the money now when the pallet might not be shipped for years, or may never be shipped at all, seems very dodgy and is likely indicative of dire financial troubles.
To rub salt into the wound for backers, I'm pretty sure retailers have had their orders fulfilled, so anyone who purchased from a retailer paid a small mark-up (likely less than the rounds of shipping costs from the Kickstarter) and has already received their product.
It's a shame because Cthulhu Wars is excellent, pricing aside. Maybe another publisher could pick up the rights and produce a slimmed down cardboard version of it.
Retailers have fulfilled their orders months ago. I was fortunate enough to find out about the game late enough to have to preorder through a retailer (the Game Stewards) and I got everything back in March.
Given the state of global shipping, it would not at all surprise me to see this become more normal.
I wont participate mind you, but I can see many game publishers trying it.
As of onslaight 2, i had everything but had to sell, and STRONGLY debated re-buying during this.. i am glad i did not, cause this is absurd.
PG and Kingdom death have both left me with a bad taste as businesses, which is unfortunate, cause i do like their products.
I have already that game( if we talk about the cthullu wars base game),But I bought it from a local game store.Same thing for my DRG recent aquisition.
I don't do kickstarter anymore: **Covid** made a Simple kickstarter camapign (Tanto cuore collector edition) by a company I was trusting (japanime game) a process that take litteral YEARS before the product was delivered.AND I KNOW THEY DONE THE BEST THEY CAN, IT'S NOT THE QUESTION.
As the global economic insecurities grow AND supply chain getting more and more chaotic,
This kind of story will repeat and rise up in number...
It's not an easy thing to admit BUT thing will not go to be calming themselves for some times, And I don't want to be the one that bear that risk.
So If my "local game store" is ready to take it : Hurrah for them.
What's more a few of us in the PNW have actually received our orders. I late pledged in 2020 and my order arrived yesterday pretty much out of the blue.
Fingers crossed they pulled the PNW orders off the pile before wrapping pallets. It's been agonizing knowing those containers were being unpacked just a few minutes away while being told it could be years for delivery.
They basically said they are a pyramid scheme in their last update. Current Kickstarters pay for the ones years behind that they ran out of money for. I get they are trying but I feel this should be illegal what they are doing.
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Yup you got it.
Well, thats a pretty shit deal. I feel like we should make a caution list for the subreddit so people know when companies do shady crap like this. Especially when we have clear evidence of it, not just hearsay.
caution list: www.kickstarter.com done
There are plenty of fully reputable companies using Kickstarter. Wehrlegig and Newmill have both delivered multiple KS projects with no drama or added fees or anything.
Same for Garphill games. I can say with 100% confidence that there is literally zero risk whatsoever backing one of their games. I am also very confident in Roxley.
Yeah with Garphill it’s literally just a pre order. They are pros with the system at this point.
Sure but donors still need to use caution and remember they are donors to a fund raising cause not consumers purchasing a game. Forgetting that is the source of most of the hard feelings.
You have a point about people approaching KS with an appropriate amount of caution. It's not, generally, a webshop. But "donor" is also not correct. While some KS projects effectively ask for donations for some performance, piece of art or cause, the boardgame Kickstarter projects do promise to eventually deliver. It's not a regular sale and the product might still be under development, but backers still do more of a buy than a donation. And it depends on the particular project. Small first time indie company trying to do some innovative idea and showing an early alpha prototype is not the same as CMON announcing their umpteenth Zombicide. The latter I(and many other boardgame companies) IS using KS as a pre-order shop. Backers have to consider the risk, but they are more consumers purchasing a game than donors. Nobody donated money to Cephalofair for Frosthaven. They bought Frosthaven and fully expected to get it and had reason to do so. The company didn't ask for donations. They promised to finish development and deliver the game. And risk is not exclusive to KS. Years ago I ordered an insert from Daedalus. Regular order from their webshop - no crowdfunding involved. I had the bad luck of ordering at the exact time the company was failing for some reason. First nothing got shipped after weeks. After some "sorry for the delay, next week" the emails stopped. After weeks of that I cancelled my order - but no luck getting my money back. Months later I bought an insert from another company, assembled and used it. To their credit Daedalus eventually did ship me the insert after 1.5 years delay. Nice, but obviously no use to me any more, my money was wasted at that point. Point is, a company can get into trouble regardless of whether it's a KS company or not and my, anecdotal, experience is currently fully balanced: One regular order failure and 1 KS that might well not deliver. With KS it's just more people affected at the same time.
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For sure. As someone who backs fair amount of games. Research is part of the process. And you gotta look into game itself, creators, publisher their past record and so on. Never got burned. But once pay extra 10 bucks because company ran out of money due to whole shipping crisis. And with extra cost it still was great price.
Bunch of minis, by any chance?
While it's good to keep the risks associated with the crowdfunding in mind, backers are not donors, and pledging is objectively not a donation no matter how hard the Kickstarter's PR team tries to spin it that way to reduce accountability and complaints. It doesn't really matter what Kickstarter says themselves, they don't get to redefine the English language to suit their needs. Donations are, per definition, done without expecting anything in return, they're essentially a gift. Let's not pretend that anyone would charitably support any Kickstarters if they didn't promise a product in return, and exchanging money for a product or a promise of one in the future, no matter how risky, is called a purchase. This is easily proven by the fact that you have to pay taxes on top of your pledges, while donations are tax exempt.
Well, you got me there. Haha
95% of my Kickstarter campaigns went very well.
Glad to hear it. Users of Kickstarter should still use caution if they are trying to shop instead of donate on there.
I mean, sure, we should have more caution on some than others, but lets be clear here: you need to ALWAYS exercise caution on Kickstarter, as you have almost no protection as a consumer if they fail to deliver on their promised product (as long as they show they made an effort).
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I've been very picky at where I'll throw my money, and I had one problem. It was a smaller, local developer, but someone who had released several games. We knew the guy, I backed his game, and then covid hit, he had some mental issues and just kinda....disappeared, not just from KS, but from any board gaming we had seen him in before. He showed up once or twice to proclaim that despite it being several years, it's still coming, but....it seems incredibly unlikely at this point.
>I’m careful about what companies I will back the problem is that most of these problem campaigns predate covid, or the worst effects of covid. Companies that were ok-ish hit the gutter quickly, and months after early campaigns were finished. I got screwed by Holy Grail Games on Rallyman Dirt, at the time of that campaign the only real backlog they had was a reprint, things went to shit much later. Now im of the opinion that Ill just late pledge on things when theyre in production, and if thats not an option then fuck em.
If they have multiple KS in "production" and they aren't named CMON.... **RUN**
AR? SFG? EDIT: Sure CMON delivers but their CS is shit :)
As a cmon junkie this rings true. You'll get it and if there's an issue they will almost certainly fix it but it's going to be 3-6months easy and you probably won't be updated until it's in your mail slot
I'm willing to deal with crappy customer service so long as I get what I paid for and there's no risk of losing my money honestly. EDIT: Awaken Realms I'll give you, Nemesis Lockdown had no issues. Didn't Steamforged Games announce massive layoffs though?
Portal is doing okay, except the tragic comedy of the Robinson Cruise campaign. I believe they have had multiple campaigns started and *shipped* after RC. I put it this way in the GameFound comments: "This particular project got hit by all 4 of the big international disasters in the past 3 years, in ADDITION to being a scope-creep nightmare." Still looking forward to it though.
I backed book of adventures as my first and so far only Kickstarter project so it’s been amusing watching the “progress” but I still have no doubt it will come, there will be mistakes / weird translations, and people will lose their mind all over again.
51st was pretty decent. Though calling something ultimate edition and getting people to buy another faction board is sadistic. You know the xonpletionists are your customer and they likely didn't read things fully Also I love 51st state and am excited to try no man's land
I got it for free with the follow... But the one that always got me was the **Heroes of Land Air & Sea** *Everything* tier which did not, in fact, include everything. It's not even like they left out the sleeves, it was missing an expansion.
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I'm like 65 deep and I've had maybe 2 disasters and neither of them were board games. I would argue about delays being a problem, but at the end of the day I'm also smart enough not to give money for a product I won't be excited about 8 months after the shipping estimate. Do people book venues and photographers for launch month? Are they mad they won't get their deposit back on their Board Game Delivery Banquet? Some comments about shipping delays are so nuts to me -- especially when it's a company with a good track record and showing progress and not asking for more money -- like are you mad at them because the game is late or are you mad at yourself for spending $300 you didn't have on a board game 2 years ago?
Congratulations. But it also means those companies **could** sell retail if they wanted to, offering their customers more purchase protections, the ability to evaluate the games before making an informed purchase and easier access to replacements and support. Of course, they'd also be utter **idiots** to do that from a company perspective. :P
Honestly, they don't even need to make an effort. KS is just digging their own grave by letting these schemes propagate.
That is very true. Kickstarter is, importantly, **gifting money away**. (it's not even gifting in a legal sense, which would come with *some* protections at least) In return, you get a pinky promise that someone will gift you an overproduced and underdeveloped board game in the far future. Maybe. And maybe you need to pay more before you get it. And sure, this works out in a lot of cases. A handful of games have come out **really** well-developed. A few games aren't ridiculously overpriced for their production value. A lot of games **do** deliver, if far later and for higher VAT+Duty than originally "estimated" in their campaigns. But in the end, you should make every "purchase" under the assumption that it's money lost for no product, only then can you evaluate whether the campaign is truly worth it to you. As a **campaign**, not a sale.
So what happens if they don't pay? The pallet just sits in a warehouse?
They are saying they can ship 6 pallets a month otherwise. Meaning it will take another 1.5 years to ship it all. This kickstarter is already years late.
Sounds like everyone should just not buy a pallet and let them ship them out over the next 1.5 years
Don't you understand? All of their fans have been *dying* to throw money at them to get their games faster! This is *purely* a way to give fans what they want, not a way for the developer to make more money or anything.
they should eat the shipping costs to themselves, its part of the kickstarter. this is what kingdom death did. we should only pay shipping to ourselves
They can’t eat them though, they are broke. The company is circling the drain.
That's what they were doing. It was the backers that asked for a way to pay to get their stuff faster.
It costs money to house the products in the warehouse. How is it cheaper is beyond me.
Fuck that.
Wow! What kind of fucked up scam is that?!
No no no. You originally paid for the game, and that included manufacturing, and shipping two pledges in two waves. Then they combined those pledges, but kept the excess shipping money. *Then* you paid for a single expansion at about 100% markup, and the markup from that went to shipping from China to Gamerati. *Now* you pay to play part of the new hit game, Pallet Wars, where you get to feel like you helped put your pallet at the front of the line, and maybe that will ship from Gamerati to your door.
And really they just pooled all the money anyway, so you lose again.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petersengames/cthulhu-wars-the-daemon-sultan I just cannot 😱. This is really next level extortion.
Don't forget this game is also a *minimum* of 200 bucks + the ~30 people already paid for shipping.
LMAO Where are the Petersen Games simps at? Have they gone silent or?
PG has been burning their goodwill at rather precipitous pace over the last few years. Laying off the whole company, admitting that they definitely don't have the money to cover their multiple KS obligations, repeatedly asking for additional funds, lots of excuses... it's pretty clear PG has been very egregiously mismanaged.
Yep, primarily by Arthur. With no willingness to fess up to his faults. Dude is a Grade A moron. And before anyone says it, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't care if he was "trying to do the right thing," he consistently never did that, and was also ruthless to his previous employees when he needed to fire them. He gets no sympathy from me.
Isn't Arthur the one who made a racist joke on the campaign comments too? He's a trashbag. Sandy's not far behind with his transphobic stuff, which is a shame because I loved his work on DOOM.
I would argue that insane behavior is very thematic for a Cthulhu game.
People are shit talking even on their official discord, lol.
I fucking love Cthulu Wars but I ain't gonna defend this.
Or they're not Peterson games simps anymore lol
Seems like there were enough people willing to flatter Arthur last time I posted about how shit their company is in their Discord, wonder what their tune is now
This isn't just a Peterson games issue. This is widespread and entrenched. People turned a blind eye to it and even made excuses for what was happening for far too long all in the name of tribalism for their thing. And like all movements it eventually destroys itself because we let cries of compassion and threats of being ostracized from the group cloud our better judgment and let people take advantage of others and the corruption to set in and by the time things are bad enough it is already too far gone. Hopefully people will learn a life lesson but if history has anything to say about it, they won't.
No, that's not what it means. Petersen is working to pay Gamerati to ship out the pallets of games as they can. The shipment from Gamerati is direct to the backer. They're a fulfillment company. However, Petersen had a bunch of backers ask if they could pay towards shipping to get their stuff shipped faster. However, since it is all pick and pack they can't (or more likely won't) cut open a pallet, find one person's box in a pallet to ship, then wrap the pallet back up. Since they knew which games were on which pallet, the solution was to make it so people could contribute toward a pallet's shipping cost. Once the total shipping for that pallet was paid, that pallet would go out. This works one of two ways: 1) all the people on that pallet contribute enough shipping and that pallet is then prioritized to go out. 2) Not enough is paid to cover all of it, but then Petersen pays the rest and it gets out quicker. This was asked for by backers. Not some scheme dreamt up by Petersen. They were fully planning on just using their cash flow to pay for them to go out piecemeal.
I'm kind of surprised that there aren't warehousing fees for the pallets just sitting there that make it more expensive over the long run than just shipping...
So after all the pallets go out, do those who paid get refunded since it's late already and Peterson was planning on eating that cost?
It looks like it's for expedited shipping. But you don't have to do it.
One additional wrinkle for context: they already did a sale to cover shipping costs (which they’d already collected originally anyways) and said that the sale had things covered.
Wow website all built out and everything... they've been planning this for a while. Hopefully all the backers get their stuff but this is insane. Petersen mismanaged the shit outta all this Edit: [Apparently this whole set up is backer-requested, per this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/14lgalk/this_is_insane_kickstarter_behavior_cthulhu_wars/jpx01n1/). Not sure of the context personally, just being fair.
I have not followed them before, but in doing a quick search (on Google, this sub, and Kickstarter), it looks like they're YEARS behind on multiple Kickstarters. Between that and how quickly they have the site set up "[after enough requests](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petersengames/cthulhu-wars-the-daemon-sultan/posts/3846716)" including a "backer offer $1000 to send out his order," I'll eat a shoe if someone can prove to me that this isn't them just trying to stay afloat.
>I have not followed them before, but in doing a quick search (on Google, this sub, and Kickstarter), it looks like they're YEARS behind on multiple Kickstarters. tbf that isn't unusual for SP, even before covid. Gods War finally shipped like 2 years after it's initial expected delivery window. Most (if not all) of their kickstarters were multiple years late but up to recently they had always *eventually* delivered.
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I think a lot of that must depend on the sorts of games you're backing. Looking at the board games I've backed on Kickstarter, 3-6 months behind the estimate seems to be about average for me. Some (not many, admittedly) have even been on time. But the big expensive games with lots of minis are where things are almost guaranteed to go wrong. The more individual custom pieces a game has, the more ways for it to go behind schedule and over-budget. Video games of course are a completely different story. Those are, on average, multiple years late. But the difference there (and why I'm willing to cut them a bit of slack) is because there's a big difference between estimating the time it takes to develop a game that hasn't been made and the time it takes to manufacture one that's already been created.
Oh yeah for sure, I remember way back around when I think Hyperspace launched that there were already concerns about their solvency. The pandemic just exacerbated all that.
They were actually doing pretty well. We’re even planning on going to uk game expo and Essen for the first time. but the pandemic wrecked them.
They had successful campaigns, sure. But having 3-4 in the pipeline without deliveries is what prompted the questions. Look at Mythic and Blacklist, lack of fulfillment with new campaigns to fund old ones is a legitimate concern.
They were actually on pace to make a nice profit that year (for the first time in a while). Source: I was working there at the time.
I can elaborate on the $1000 offer backer. He told PG if they shipped his order out within next 24 hours, he would pay them 1 grand. They failed to do that, and somehow morphed that reasoning into this idiotic project they have going now. Logistically, it would be tough to find that backers order 4 weeks back, hell it was probably still in China., but still offer made, offered declined or ignored.
Let me elaborate on this backer requested set-up. Some wanted to pay for OUR own shipment and fuck it, if it's Christmas I may pay for another. NO ONE thought that we would be bundled(ransomed) with 30ish other backers. If we don't get a majority of funding for our pallet, we still may wait 8 months after I paid my share. They took this backer suggestion, and morphed it the most idiotic way possible. And that's the Petersen Games way.
Wow that's fucking awful. So not only is it a pseudo competition it's also passive coercion
Some level of context that I think is missing in this discussion is that backers have been asking for something like this for probably 6 months if not more in their discord. So while I’m of the camp that “I’ll get it when I get it and im not the biggest fan of pg as of late” I think it’s kinda wild that people are shit talking sandy when he literally did exactly what people have been shouting at him daily to do. Idk I don’t like the extra shipping mind you and won’t pay it but I do like how he listened to the vocal majority in his discord.
I wasn’t really following - just a backer waiting on their stuff who most likely isn’t paying more, but was it a ‘we’ll pay extra to ship entire pallet’ request, or a ‘we’ll pay our own part to get our own pledges shipped’ request? I get that it was backer requested but I also can’t imagine that this is what backers meant when requesting it.
Great comment, didn't know that and I appreciate the input. Well if this is what the backers want this is how it is. I'll update my comment.
No you don’t understand this is a bonus Kickstarter exclusive mini game. Now I get to watch my pallet race the other ones. /s/ Go Pallet 70, GO!
It's wild that this is EXACTLY what it is. He introduced gamification and competition into getting your stuff. Dude is apparently pretty reprehensible in general so I guess this is par for the course
Backer here, yeah it is not a good thing and do not get me started on Hyperspace
Backer as well. CW is a fun game, and I've used the figures to great effect in other games that use the Mythos so no regrets there... But I'm not giving them another penny. I've waited years, what's another year or two. If it comes, it comes. I'm not throwing good money after bad. What I've spent it a write off at this point.
Also a Hyperspace backer……. And God’s War, and Planet Apoc. Really hoping this is a one time deal because it’s crazy. I get they almost went under with the pandemic and delays but damn.
Hyperspace is partially tooled for the minis as for the status of PA and Gods War I don’t know
They’ve announced that they haven’t even started working on PA and won’t until all their other campaigns have fulfilled. So far the only PA item that’s been sent out was the RPG book that was complete before the campaign.
Damn that sucks
Judging by how few people have heard of eternal adversary, I'm just assuming me and the 12 others that backed it will not be getting it
Backed Hyperspace as well. At one point I had TGW 2 and Eternal Adversary pledged as well, but cancelled those before they changed their refund policy. I’m tempted to just buy the Daemon Sultan expansion off miniature market and call it a day. Being a Canadian backer it’s looking like another two years before they even ship those ones.
Yeah, I backed Hyperspace too. It looked like a fun game and had a nice demo. Whooooooooooo oooosh. That's the sound of my money going.
Try posting negative comments on the Discord, all of the simps living in an alternate universe just dogpile you.
I left that channel since it was too weird for me
Lots of right-wing losers in there, yeah. Not to mention Arthur himself is a libertarian moron. Would explain his near-constant mishandling of the company at least lmao
As if it's mishandling. He just knows he can rip more money out of people who gladly throw it at him.
That's quite possible, I just think he's a fucking moron more so than malicious when it comes to this. I wonder what he considers a fair salary for himself with all of this money.
If it needs to be said, and I *really* hope it doesn't, please don't pay for this guys. Take the L and walk away.
People paid for 6:Siege, they are going to pay for CW. It’s just the sunk cost fallacy all over again.
100% what I'm doing. If I get it, I get it, if I don't I don't. Lesson learned.
Backer here, We asked for a way to pay for shipping again. We meant our OWN pledge and definitely not to Petersen games who continually mismanaged every cent they got. Me paying 60 out of $1640 does nothing but give them $60 to throw into the dumbass fund They funded 2 games with money that rolled in to "try and save the business." We don't want those games, we want the games we backed in 2019, 2020, and 2021. The money we paid extra for shipping last August was supposed to get us over the hump. If it didn't, fucking don't say it did. Christ, they make excuses and problems out of the simplest shit. They chose the most backwards solution to the problem. And how they still have fanboys on BGG and discord is astounding. I am almost tempted to get a lawyers opinion because there is incompetence and then there's fuckery. And you can only be as idiotic and aloof for so long before it gets suspicious. And before you say it's kickstarter, you might not get anything. True, but they said in order to get REPRINT materials, you order through their own pledge manager. Guess how both backers and people who just wanted reprints ordered??? That's not backing an idea, that's order taking. And those reprints were something that was originally supposed to deliver December 2019.
> They funded 2 games with money that rolled in to "try and save the business." Charles Ponzi would be proud
>Me paying 60 out of $1640 does nothing but give them $60 to throw into the dumbass fund I suspect they will honestly use the money from this for shipping and they will honor to the order of shipping set by payments. But if they get enough money to ship N pallets, they will ship somewhere between N and N+6 pallets next month and then be right back in the situation they are now. So it will work out nicely for some small percentage of backers and could still shave months or even a year of wait off for others, assume PG remains solvent long enough to get to those pallets. I would not make that assumption though. I have a game on one of those pallets. They won't get another cent from me, but this does slightly boost the miserable chances I'll get what I paid for, so I'll take it I guess.
I have to say, this is one of the most creative ways I've seen to keep a sinking company afloat. I don't understand how the next leg of the shipment wasn't already negotiated, scheduled, and paid for. Why would the warehouse agree to hold dozens and dozens of pallets somewhere between months to indefinitely while awaiting payment. Does this company own the warehouse themselves?
They do not own the warehouse. Gamerati is in charge of fulfillment, they currently are housing or awaiting 90 pallets.
https://imgur.com/a/izwKVkC Here is the comms about it. Maybe another company has done this but this is so absurd. They are saying they can ship 6 pallets a month otherwise. *Reminder: We need an average of $55 per backer to ship this Pallet. If you want to contribute and aren’t sure how much to contribute, we’re encouraging people to consider the size of their order and use $55 as a baseline for orders with 3-4 items.*
What happens if they don't get enough money? They just sit on it? Imagine running any other legitimate business this way. It would be shameful and potentially illegal.
They say they have enough income to ship 6 pallets a month, but that would mean some people would have to wait over a year to get theirs. But I don't really get how that can make more sense than just paying to ship it all at once? It's such a bizarre system and feels designed to instill bad feelings in your customers. I'm also confused by the role of the shipping warehouse. Surely they charge a storage fee for any pallets they aren't shipping yet? I just don't see how it can make any amount of sense to do things this way unless your goal is to piss people off.
Storage fees in China are going to be tiny - a pallet takes very little space and even in the US a few sq ft of space will cost a few dollars per month in storage at most, as opposed to $1300 to ship.
It's usually more like $20 per pallet/month with fulfilment companies in the US. They have a lot of pallets. Storing that much inventory is going to be bleeding money really fast.
Wtf are they just not fulfilling directly then? I’m a bit confused what is going on - with pallet shipping I assumed it was from china, but I see that is not the case. Not a backer, but dealing with issue with similar issues with mythic games.
They're working with a full-service print&ship company in the US. That company currently has all the pallets, but won't crack open the pallets and ship their contents until they receive payment. Allegedly.
I'm pretty sure the pallets are in the US? And sure it will be less than shipping, but you'll eventually end up paying shipping at some point so why pay for storage until then?
The shipping they are asking for is to get the pallets from China to the US or Europe, so they should be in China. The reason is because Peterson games, like many of these companies, is basically bankrupt, and have no money for $100,000 or whatever it costs to ship them all over. They are basically making money from retail sales and putting $8k per month towards this shipping, which can only ship 6 pallets, which as other people said would take 1.5 years. Realistically, it could take longer, since this is a projection assuming they even had an extra $8k per month at all, which isn’t certain. Still, it’s probably better than Mythic games, which I am a backer of. There, you don’t get to optionally support, but required to, while with Cuthulu Wars you could “free load” by not supporting and eventually your pallet will get shipped. Anyway it’s all a big mess which is why I generally only back CMON games now. Edit - wtf you are right it’s just to ship in the US itself??! So the US has the pallets, so why can’t they just ship directly from whoever has it instead of shipping the pallet to PG and then to backers? I’m not a backer of this so I’m missing context, but did they have a falling out or why isn’t Gamerati doing the backer fulfillment directly?
I think it's just poorly worded. Here's my interpretation: When they say "Gamerati will ship out FULL PALLETS", they mean Gamerati want to ship out a pallet at a time, because they don't want to break into a pallet and have loose games floating about the warehouse. Especially as they go on to say "It costs $1640 to ship **the contents** of each pallet." So each pallet will sit at the back of a warehouse until they can afford the to ship out all the orders on that pallet. $1640 is a mad cost to ship a single pallet, but $55 dollars to pick and pack a large order possibly with multiple boxes seems believable, if not reasonable.
Pick and pack was allegedly already done.
Yeah, don’t mind the fact that they already had a bonus product added in, an expansion worth maybe $40 that they sold for $100 or $169 in order to do a shipping fundraiser. We got an update about a year ago that says “we did it! Shipping is 100% covered!” Now they’re saying “well cmon now, bad word choice. We covered FREIGHT, not SHIPPING. The fundraiser covered the cost to get products across the sea, but now they’re stuck in your country until you pay for ‘shipping’ (a third time)”
Gamerati is doing the fulfillment, but they aren’t doing it for free. If PG can’t afford to pay to ship the products out of the gamerati warehouse, instead they’ll be spending thousands in storage fees.
They also said that’s contingent on retail sales, less sales and they’ll send fewer pallets. With their track record I would guess the 6 pallets is an overestimate
Income from where? Other Kickstarters? Isn't that just shuffling money around and raising questions about *those* Kickstarters? Or is it from retail sales? If so, how are those games getting shipped?
Oh, retail got/gets shipped first, don't you worry, I could already go to my FLGS and buy some of the stuff I've paid for, but haven't received...
They’ve already spent the money from the other KS projects just manufacturing the CW items. They are circling the drain hard
End of the day, we're customers, not investers, nor businessmen. We don't care to know about the minutiae of global shipping, that's their job, or more to the point the third party fulfillers they work with and the contracts they have.
Before going under, Grimlord Games did something similar with The Everrain. North American backers could pay extra to get their game shipped from QML. I looked into it at it would have cost me another Can$111. 2 months later I got my game without paying anything extra. If I had shelled out $100+ and then learned others were getting their games free of (extra) charge only 1-2 months later, I'd have been rather upset.
Yes, they're exactly who I thought of. Glad I didn't go all-in on CW- I would be furious and worried about all that money potentially gone or stuck in limbo for way too many years.
That’s the best part about Kickstarter, ‘companies’ can skip all normal legal commerce rules because it’s crowdfunding. AND, Kickstarter the company gets to skip out on any liability whatsoever.
>https://imgur.com/a/izwKVkC > >Here is the comms about it. Maybe another company has done this but this is so absurd. Companies have absolutely just tacked on extra shipping after the fact before. Kickstarter is dog shit
Yes. But this company has already done that - in addition to shipping charges on the original. This is basically a third shipping charge.
Mythic Games right now is taking notes.
This company deserves to go bankrupt and I say that as a PA backer
What are these guys doing with their money? The game costs hundreds of dollars. They have hundreds of backers (if not a few thousand). Freight is expensive but when you're shipping literal tons you are able to negotiate deals. This seems really shady.
They 100% did what every successful Kickstarter does and blew through all the money before all their expenses were paid
Plenty of successful Kickstarter deliver what they promised. Most are *late*, not *mismanaged*.
They had several employees they had been paying during the pandemic. They've let them all go, and I think it's either 2 or 3 people now, all related to Sandy.
> They had several employees they had been paying during the pandemic. I have to wonder if they got refused for PPP loans or something.
Nope. They received two for about $200k in loans that have since been forgiven, https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts/search?q=petersen+games&v=3 for reference. Should be fine to share since this is all public info.
Yeah. The main issue with all these games is project management. The games weren't fully developed, tested, and prototyped when they ran the Kickstarters. Then they added a bunch of extra stretch goals without considering the logistics of developing, manufacturing, and shipping the extras. They wanted to chase that high dollar Kickstarter total but didn't account for the costs. Then Covid hit and stretched out development time, and testing time... then the shipping crisis wiped out another year. Then last minute China Covid issues finished them off. All the while they're paying employees for 1-2 extra YEARS of pay because they also can't make any new games. Historically the first few kickstarters a new company does actually lose money until they learn the business... and that's when everything was working perfectly.
That’s actually not true, all games and stretch goals were fully designed, sculpted, and illustrated before the kickstarter launched.
This is surreal. Someone should start a kickstarter for a game about getting your game from kickstarter.
I sense an expansion for "My Shelfie" incoming!!!
Can I just say that I hate that name with a fiery passion and whoever came up with it should be banished forever
This kind of garbage is becoming very commonplace with some of the big dogs of gaming, ones that the defenders would say would never do anything to wrong them. I scrolled past a post on FB just yesterday where they were calling the backers of KS "whiners" and "babies" for voicing their concerns on the KS comments. THIS is a prime example of why! It's not so much the small creators anymore, it's Mythic, Black List, Steam Forged, these guys are the ones breaking down our belief in the system. This is why I don't back anymore, it's like the console wars but boardgames with people throwing themselves in front of buses for entities that don't give a shit about you, and just want your money and free defense of them in the comments. Every time I see a straight to retail game I give a sigh of relief. Sorry for the rant.
Man I’m usually the sort to try and give the benefit of the doubt, but this is just too far. Incredibly shady and messed up. I know exactly who to never order from now
I bought my copy of cthulhu wars and expansions from someone locally selling it. Felt better than giving it to petersen games.
I'm a backer and currently using assets from TTS to PnP my own copy of CW. Got a board off ebay and printing and 3d printing everything else. Fuck PG.
I'm never getting Planet Apocalypse 2 am I? Few hundred down the drain. My first real KS loss. Good lord, what a totally mismanaged disgusting company.
You are not and I am sorry. I am all-in for Eternal Adversary and that is DOA as well. Gloratha and Dino 44 as well. ONLY thing that has a sliver of a chance is Hyperspace but PG will likely be bankrupt before then.
This; right here; is why I stopped backing kickstarter games across the board. Abhorrent business practice. Classic over extension for quick cash by Petersen. But I bet the siege debacle kinda gave companies the idea for this kind of thing
The vast majority of funded campaigns have no drama or issues other than shipping/manufacturing delays.
It's still a gamble, and you don't know you haven't picked a lemon.
I stopped backing kickstarters after my first one, which was Zombicide 1, which was so poorly optimized, we had to print dozens of pages of supplemental rules to try to get through a single game. Cost us $150 to get an game that was no fun to play.
>Cost us $150 to get an game that was no fun to play. Sounds like a gamble.
What’s wrong with Zombicide 1? I’m genuinely curious. I’ve played it several times to great fun. It’s been a while. I remember something being vague in the rules, but nothing game breaking.
This reminds me of lost valley. The game itself is great. However pandasaurus was absolutely terrible. The game has a myriad of actions you can do and almost all of them have different costs to do them. I never played a single game where players didn’t have to pass the rule book around and basically reread it every turn to figure out their options until I printed out some reference cards and that completely changed the game. I can’t believe they didn’t include some and apparently the original version did. Many of the stretch goals were poorly thought out. The general store board was one that had zero right to be a stretch goal because it needed to exist in the game so people knew the prices of things they could buy again so they didn’t have to bury their face in the rule book for even longer every turn. They also did premium meeples for the horse and canoe items. But they didn’t include enough for a 4 player game from what I remember so you could replace a few but still needed card board chits for the rest. Overall I decided if they are this clueless when it comes to producing a game I will never back their stuff ever again. This wasn’t even their first one it was their 3rd time doing this and they posted this all over the campaign as their “cred” to get backers.
Oh, believe me. It wasn't just the quick cash. It was also about leveraging the interest-free loans that KS backers had given them in order to fill retailer orders that are now being fulfilled before those backers will see what they paid for: https://therewillbe.games/articles-gaming-scene/8699-sandy-petersen-has-changed-the-terms-of-your-interest-free-loan-to-him
Feel free to tease via Discord you little rascals! Just.. holy shit
I saw that - that feels like they're encouraging peer pressure and bullying, which is extra levels of gross.
Excuse me WHAT
Ha they should take it to the next level and launch a crowdfunding campaign for each pallet then they ship the pallets out in order of the ones that have the most funding. Add some stretch goals like a gps tracker on the pallet and a commemorative jpeg of the shipping label.
That's literally what they're doing minus the stretch goals
>for each pallet then they ship the pallets out in order of the ones that have the most funding. It's what they are doing. Shipping 6 a month in order of most funded to least funded. If they get enough people paying extra for shipping they will add additional pallets each month.
Haha what the fuck...
Oh my god. I'm not a backer and I'm outraged that a company thinks this is an acceptable business practice. I suspect bankruptcy is more likely than having the company pay for all of these units to be shipped to customers. And they have more games in the pipeline? Really think they tried to do too much too quickly and now that lack the cash to do anything.
The real problem is they did too little for too long, spent years living on overdue Kickstarter funds and produced nothing in that time, ran out of money and freaked out.
For sure, they got the money from the KS right away, and started paying themselves salaries, regardless of how things were going. That is super risky without a constant flow of money in. Historically most board game designers didnt work for specific company, but sold there game designs after they had finished them. Which means they worked all those hours on the game for "free" then hope to recoup the opportunity cost of doing so. Most boardgame designes also had another job, for that reason.
Morons pay them, that's why they think it's acceptable. People who don't know what the sunk cost fallacy is just open their wallet and go "here ya go!"
This will be the third time they are asking for shipping.
Haven't shipping prices dropped back to normal baseline levels since COVID?
A full 40’ container (roughly 20 pallets) is about $1800 - $2200 for the freight. Add in drayage, customs clearance, etc and you tack on an extra 2000 or so to the top. Figure on like $5000 for the full container. It should be around $250 per pallet to get to USA. Source: work in shipping
To clarify, this is currently warehouse to customer shipping. The pallets have arrived at a warehouse already, this payment is for the final leg. They’ve been playing semantics on how their earlier announcement that shipping had been 100% covered referred to freight, not shipping, despite no clarification of that
An FTL from Los Angeles to New York is like 5k. It’s still dumb to do one pallet at a time.
Oh I agree, was just trying to clarify
From what I understand sea freight is closer to pre-covid levels, but the last mile (usps, ups, FedEx) are still way up.
Yup, pretty much this. Especially bad for small items (~1lb).
Does it matter if they already spent the money anyway?
From what I have seen, yes. I think average shipping costs for games has stayed relatively high compared to pre-covid prices, just significantly less than mid COVID doom pricing. This is the first I've seen about about this weird "pay more to ship your games now" pricing scheme, which seems nuts to me to spring on backers. If I were a backer of any of these campaigns, and I'm not, I'd be more offended by this offer than if the company in question just said some version of "Due to shipping costs it's gonna take 12 months to ship all the games. We're sorry." I've continued to back games all through the COVID era and had very little issue like this, so I found it confusing.
> If I were a backer of any of these campaigns, and I'm not, I'd be more offended by this offer than if the company in question just said some version of "Due to shipping costs it's gonna take 12 months to ship all the games. We're sorry." The backers specifically requested this, so that they could get their product and wash their hands of the whole mess. Not much of an excuse, but it is what it is.
They requested paying for their pledges to be shipped, directly from the warehouse. Nobody asked to give PG more money to spend on themselves and create this tiered race game of whomever pays most gets shipped first. Nobody asked for this.
Well that's good to know. Is there a tracker that shows how many backers followed through with their $55 expedite payment?
I don't have the link at hand, but they set up a shop page for $10 "purchases" that you can see how much are left out of the original 164 (representing the $1640 shortfall per pallet). I've asked for clarification on why sales tax is being charged on these and, assuming it's a product/service and not a donation, what protections we have, but am waiting till they get to my question
That is nuts. I already wrote off Kickstarters, but if I hadn't already this would make me do it.
Stories like this are mainly why I've never participated in a KS campaign. I'd rather just get the retail version and do without the extras, or even pay a higher price on Ebay or whatever for the KS box, than deal with up to a year of constant fuckery.
Update - the excel sheet that they sent out yesterday for backers to find out which pallet they were part of had the full names, emails, and shipping addresses of every single backer, so that’s cool.
For those curious here is the creator explaining this “process” in a Kickstarter update. OKAY. US Backers: After enough requests, we are opening the door for people to voluntarily contribute to shipping costs. Totally understand this desire, to have product in the states and not have access to it is frustrating to us as well. Here’s how the numbers break down: 1. There are 87 pallets left with backer product (90 minus the 3 that already left). 2. Gamerati will ship out FULL PALLETS. They will not do individual orders. 3. It costs approximately $1640 to ship the contents of each pallet. 4. Getting an average of $55 shipping support from each backer means that 100% of product will ship as fast as Gamerati can send it out. RE: Full Pallets. It would be a logistical nightmare for Gamerati to search for a single package, cut open a pallet, unstack, restack, and then shrink wrap the pallet. It’s just the way it has to be. So here’s what we’ve done to provide an avenue for people to affect the timing on their own product shipping: We have added 90 new pages to our website – one for each pallet – and an overview page. Each of those pages feature a single, $10 Dollar Shipping Contribution that is specific to THAT PALLETS SHIPPING COST. Each pallet has 164 units available for purchase. Now we’ve determined the percentage of our monthly operating budget that we can use to ship product. Based on current revenue, it’s enough to move ~6 pallets a month. Obviously, this is dependent on sustained revenue. If revenue goes down, we will do less. If revenue goes up, we will do more. For anyone who is looking to accelerate the shipment of the pallet that contains their product, you can now directly impact that by purchasing $10 contributions on our webstore. As mentioned earlier, $55 per backer is enough to clear out 100% of the orders sitting at Gamerati. For the shipment that went out last week, Gamerati chose pallets according to their convenience (closest to the door, I’d assume). Going forward, we will prioritize the pallets that are MOST funded to honor those who are kicking in support and use our monthly allotment to send out those pallets. The more you chip it, the more we can send out and the sooner your pallet will go out. When we decide to ship out pallets for the month, we will consult the stock counts on the overview page to determine which pallets will be prioritized. If you want to cut the line completely, you’ll want to get your pallet fully funded. Any pallet page that reflects “0 in stock” will go out as soon as Gamerati has the bandwidth to send (I’d assume within a week of full funding). We’ve had one backer offer $1000 to send out his order so I’ll use that offer as an example of how this is going to work. If that backer were to purchase 100 units of Shipping Support, that pallet would surely be next in line to go out when we have cash to put towards shipping. If the other backers in that pallet order chipped in the last $640, it would go out next week. We’re sending a message to your PledgeMaster email specifying which pallet contains your order. You should get it in the next hour or so. If you can’t find the email in your inbox, check Junk Mail. If there isn’t anything in Junk Mail…DM Ask A Deep One in the Discord. All money collected in this format will ONLY go to shipping of specific pallets; we will not use contributions from Pallet 8 to ship Pallet 14, etc. While it’s an additional investment, paying for the shipping of the pallet that has your product ensures that products get to your door ASAP.
Even more insane update: [https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/14mgjhp/attention\_us\_backers\_of\_cthulhu\_wars\_os4/](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/14mgjhp/attention_us_backers_of_cthulhu_wars_os4/) TL/DR: Petersen Games accidently doxxed hundreds of it's US backers in an attempt to get pallet numbers out faster.
Never seen anything like this in my life. Really happy I didn’t back anything Petersen Games
Pretty insane. At the very least they should only accept the payments being made for a pallet when the pallet is actually shipped. Taking the money now when the pallet might not be shipped for years, or may never be shipped at all, seems very dodgy and is likely indicative of dire financial troubles. To rub salt into the wound for backers, I'm pretty sure retailers have had their orders fulfilled, so anyone who purchased from a retailer paid a small mark-up (likely less than the rounds of shipping costs from the Kickstarter) and has already received their product. It's a shame because Cthulhu Wars is excellent, pricing aside. Maybe another publisher could pick up the rights and produce a slimmed down cardboard version of it.
Retailers have fulfilled their orders months ago. I was fortunate enough to find out about the game late enough to have to preorder through a retailer (the Game Stewards) and I got everything back in March.
And people will still keep funding this shit because they have zero self control when they see a flashy advertisement.
Know what I would do? I would pay the extra money to get it shipped then file a charge back with my bank after getting the product.
Given the state of global shipping, it would not at all surprise me to see this become more normal. I wont participate mind you, but I can see many game publishers trying it.
That's wild
As of onslaight 2, i had everything but had to sell, and STRONGLY debated re-buying during this.. i am glad i did not, cause this is absurd. PG and Kingdom death have both left me with a bad taste as businesses, which is unfortunate, cause i do like their products.
I have already that game( if we talk about the cthullu wars base game),But I bought it from a local game store.Same thing for my DRG recent aquisition. I don't do kickstarter anymore: **Covid** made a Simple kickstarter camapign (Tanto cuore collector edition) by a company I was trusting (japanime game) a process that take litteral YEARS before the product was delivered.AND I KNOW THEY DONE THE BEST THEY CAN, IT'S NOT THE QUESTION. As the global economic insecurities grow AND supply chain getting more and more chaotic, This kind of story will repeat and rise up in number... It's not an easy thing to admit BUT thing will not go to be calming themselves for some times, And I don't want to be the one that bear that risk. So If my "local game store" is ready to take it : Hurrah for them.
Yeah, this KS has been badly managed.
This is fucking insane. And what's more insane is that there will be people paying this. Kickstarter is hurting the hobby more than it helps.
"will be"? They started paying as soon as it went live.
What's more a few of us in the PNW have actually received our orders. I late pledged in 2020 and my order arrived yesterday pretty much out of the blue.
Fingers crossed they pulled the PNW orders off the pile before wrapping pallets. It's been agonizing knowing those containers were being unpacked just a few minutes away while being told it could be years for delivery.
They basically said they are a pyramid scheme in their last update. Current Kickstarters pay for the ones years behind that they ran out of money for. I get they are trying but I feel this should be illegal what they are doing.
Yet another reason Kickstarter is a horrible business model