Nerd Kingdom, TUG and the Chinese offshore mobile games firm
Jun 28, 2016 17:47:56 GMT
Lord Ba'al, 13thGeneral, and 1 more like this
Post by deadlock on Jun 28, 2016 17:47:56 GMT
I think some of you may recognise this story. Perhaps this version has a fractionally less incompetence, but a lot more greed.
RPS and other sites covered the plight of Nerd Kingdom, the hipster co-op that volunteered to inherit the Yogventures disaster after successfully Kickstarting their Minecraftbut called "TUG":
www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/26/tug-layoffs-yogventures/
And then everyone lost interest. Nobody, not even the backers, seemed to notice was that only a few months later at the close of 2014, the founder of Nerd Kingdom sold the whole shebang to a Chinese mobile gaming company, IGG, based out of the Cayman Islands. Partly because Nerd Kingdom didn't tell anyone:
img1.igg.com/9900/news/2015/05/05/359514116.pdf
So they took the foreign tax-free dollars and surrendered overall control of their outfit, despite explictly promising they would never, ever do this to all the Kickstarter backers:
This purchase by a plagiaristic mobile gaming corp ("Clash of Lords", anyone? sound familiar at all?) running from a tax haven - so socially responsible - does add context to the decision by Nerd leadership not long afterwards to completely trash every single thing the company had produced for the previous two or three years, and bafflingly start all over again with a web-friendly set of ideas. Bearded CEO Peter Salinas started talking about mod monetisation and making the game Free to Play, immediately alienating everyone who had already paid for it on Steam or backed it on Kickstarter, while the other founder of Nerd Kingdom just took the cash and slouched off. More mysterious changes in direction followed, like transitions to more web-based tech and getting rid of the voxel terrain, simplifying crafting ... almost as if a tablet/phone cow clicker was on the cards. How mysterious!
Nearly eighteen months have passed since then, and most of the Nerd Kingdom staff twitters stop twitting and the deluge of videos, tickets and screengrabs simply dried up and stopped in about February 2016. The little that has been shown since then is massively retrograde compared to what they had even two years ago.
But worse, some of the higher level Kickstarter backers still haven't yet seen their "physical rewards" after waiting over three years and almost nothing on that original Kickstarter page, with its quaint-seeming references to 2012-2013 Minecraft mods like Aether II, still applies:
steamcommunity.com/app/277930/discussions/0/358415206078977219/
But this is all fine, right?
Stupid Kickstarter backers, falling for a wall of glossy promises, meticulous artwork, and PhD nerds recording hours of video.
They deserved it, right? Small print is what it is, right?
No. I don't think so. I think crap like this should get called out.
It's all a bit ... Godus. Sorry for the strong language.
(As well as TUG, Yogscast also handed out free copies of Landmark. That also suffered the kiss of death, but I digress.)
RPS and other sites covered the plight of Nerd Kingdom, the hipster co-op that volunteered to inherit the Yogventures disaster after successfully Kickstarting their Minecraftbut called "TUG":
www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/26/tug-layoffs-yogventures/
And then everyone lost interest. Nobody, not even the backers, seemed to notice was that only a few months later at the close of 2014, the founder of Nerd Kingdom sold the whole shebang to a Chinese mobile gaming company, IGG, based out of the Cayman Islands. Partly because Nerd Kingdom didn't tell anyone:
img1.igg.com/9900/news/2015/05/05/359514116.pdf
So they took the foreign tax-free dollars and surrendered overall control of their outfit, despite explictly promising they would never, ever do this to all the Kickstarter backers:
This purchase by a plagiaristic mobile gaming corp ("Clash of Lords", anyone? sound familiar at all?) running from a tax haven - so socially responsible - does add context to the decision by Nerd leadership not long afterwards to completely trash every single thing the company had produced for the previous two or three years, and bafflingly start all over again with a web-friendly set of ideas. Bearded CEO Peter Salinas started talking about mod monetisation and making the game Free to Play, immediately alienating everyone who had already paid for it on Steam or backed it on Kickstarter, while the other founder of Nerd Kingdom just took the cash and slouched off. More mysterious changes in direction followed, like transitions to more web-based tech and getting rid of the voxel terrain, simplifying crafting ... almost as if a tablet/phone cow clicker was on the cards. How mysterious!
Nearly eighteen months have passed since then, and most of the Nerd Kingdom staff twitters stop twitting and the deluge of videos, tickets and screengrabs simply dried up and stopped in about February 2016. The little that has been shown since then is massively retrograde compared to what they had even two years ago.
But worse, some of the higher level Kickstarter backers still haven't yet seen their "physical rewards" after waiting over three years and almost nothing on that original Kickstarter page, with its quaint-seeming references to 2012-2013 Minecraft mods like Aether II, still applies:
steamcommunity.com/app/277930/discussions/0/358415206078977219/
But this is all fine, right?
Stupid Kickstarter backers, falling for a wall of glossy promises, meticulous artwork, and PhD nerds recording hours of video.
They deserved it, right? Small print is what it is, right?
No. I don't think so. I think crap like this should get called out.
It's all a bit ... Godus. Sorry for the strong language.
(As well as TUG, Yogscast also handed out free copies of Landmark. That also suffered the kiss of death, but I digress.)
