Fans of gaming…personalities (?) Yogscast have been left in the lurch after a Kickstarter to create a game based on the popular crew went nowhere.
Eurogamer have the full story, including comments from Yogscast, but the gist is that in 2012 a third-party ran a successful (over $US500,000!) Kickstarter for a game called Yogventures. That game has since failed to materialise and the studio has gone bust, leaving backers scrambling for refunds and Yogscast scrambling for a way to make things right.
To their credit, they have done probably as good a job as they could under the circumstances: backers of the dead game are instead getting free copies of another game, TUG, which we actually covered briefly last year.
Yogscast is also doing their best to ensure that the physical rewards promised for Yogventures are still sent out.
Kickstarter-funded Yogventures canned, backers given Steam key for another game instead [Eurogamer]
Comments
9 responses to “Failed Kickstarter Hits Yogscast Fans”
It’s really the risk you take when you buy into a Kickstarter campaign. You’re investing in something, not buying something. Sometimes business investments go badly and you can’t get your money back.
Nice to see Yogscast are trying to make up for it though (I’m sure there’ll still be a lot of complaints anyway).
this exactly, people act as if they are entitled to a refund. They aren’t, they invested in a company/product. They took the risk. If i invest money in stocks and they go belly up, i dont get a refund.
But the pitch is presented as a sale. It says quite clearly if you give them this much money you will get these items when they’re ready. I’m not saying you shouldn’t consider it a risk when you back something on Kickstarter, just that Kickstarter frames these in a way that is selling a product.
At the end of the day Kickstarter is an agreement with a stranger to pay for goods in advance and it comes with all the risks you’d imagine. It’s certainly not some sort of investment. You don’t get returns based on success, you’re not giving them money to build their business, you’re paying for goods (and perhaps being generous about it). You’re buying something. It’s possible that what you paid for will never be delivered and you should take that into consideration when going in, but that doesn’t excuse people who screw up.
You’re not buying anything, it’s not a shop. You’re helping fund an idea, and in exchange you can elect to receive thank-you rewards. You can choose not to receive them too.
Look at the average Kickstarter. It is presented as ‘for $15 you get a copy of the game!’. You are paying for the product being sold even if it’s a little blurry (I doubt the Yogventures Kickstarter had pledge goals with ‘you might, if you’re lucky, get this’ at the start). You can argue the spirit of Kickstarter is about backing ideas but ultimately you’re giving these people money to do something. They’re meant to have their act together enough that the minimum goal is enough to deliver the product*. If they don’t reach the minimum goal everyone gets a refund and no harm is done. That’s how the system works.
Things go wrong and projects don’t always work out, I understand that it’s just as risky as investing or funding an idea, but ultimately it’s more complicated than just donating money to try because promises are being made. You can draw parallels between it and investing but it isn’t. It’s also worth noting that investors don’t just shrug off stuff like this as though they were playing roulette.
If a Kickstarter I’ve backed goes bad personally I’m not really bothered, I know that’s a possibility going in and I know the money isn’t coming back, but I’m not going insist that everyone else be totally casual about their money going up in smoke. Oragnising a replacement game is a nice apology but I can totally understand how people are still frustrated with them.
*I would argue that they’re meant to have the minimum goal set to enough to deliver the product and make a solid profit. Even if the person starting the fund is willing to just break even it’s sort of irresponsible to not build a safety buffer into it.
You arent paying for a product, you are investing money in that company and if they are successful you will get a gift from them. If they arent you wont. Kickstarter has already stated several times they are not an online shop and they wont provide refunds on the basis of you not receiving an item because the company failed.
As much as I am a fan of these guys I am not surprised that this happened. even if it launched I couldn’t see it going anywhere
Honestly I’m surprised it took this long. I’m a fan of them, but even I know that games take more then comedy to build.
See, it’s funny. When you open the profile of ‘Winterkewl Games’ on the Kickstarter project, this comes up:
That looks a lot like the Yogscast to me. It’s only with the failure that they’ve pulled the shell game move of making it a separate company to shut down and wash their hands of responsibility.
Yogcast sux.