MYTH being sold by mercs miniatures.

[nic-e]

Not sure if this impacts anyone here, But I thought it was worth posting. with the recent loss of two gaming companies and the possible sale of their IP it could be worth keeping an eye on this to see who's picking up these properties and what factors have caused their sale.

"We can pull back the curtain a little more.

The Myth property is being purchased. When the contracts are finalized we will answer all your questions (including replacement questions). This has been an extremely long process. It still isn't finished, but it is very close. We still have to be careful with the NDA because the whole thing could collapse. When the contracts are all signed, expect an extremely long update. I'll tell you the whole story.

All the remaining material in JM will be delivered in one more wave. Please hear my sincerity. It is extremely important to us to get you the rest of your product. When everything is finalized, we can go back to show and tell updates. We've been wanting to show you all the stuff we've got done and soon we will be able to.

Last Friday, Keith submitted the most recent batch of Myth JM from the PM to the shippers. This will be the last one downloaded and submitted until the final wave is shipped."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megacongames/myth-journeyman/posts/1886542?ref=backer_project_update


No mention of who's buying it. Off the top of my head I'd guess asmodee or CMoN ?
Also very odd for a property to be sold off whilst still being fulfilled to it's backers.

[nic-e]

More recent update that I missed :

"We appreciate the patience most of you have shown. I can say more now, so I will.

We started this process almost a year ago. I sent emails out to those people in the industry that we respected, could afford our properties, and we would fit into as a studio. In the email, I explained we didn't want to be publishers any more:

We started MegaCon Games 8 years ago under the name MERCS Miniatures. There are three of us. In that time, we’ve had our share of successes and setbacks. We are reaching the completion of our active and last Kickstarters. We have plans for several more games, including expansions to existing properties, but we've decided we don’t want to be a game publisher any more. We're pretty far from what we truly wanted to do, which was design games. Publishing has made us smarter game designers, but there are things we don't have the bandwidth or the skill to do effectively: marketing, community, logistics. 

We are looking to become a design group for a larger game publisher and/or sell off some of our IPs. The pressure of performing all the jobs is too much. You know what is required to run a hobby game business. We cover all the jobs: warehousing, distribution, finance, marketing, logistics, customer support, art, game design, and game testing. We cannot continue as we are; we are dying a slow death.

There is more to the email, but it is focused on each of the potential publishers so I cannot share any more details.

One of the reasons we can be so patient is we do not intend to ever publish another game again. So this option is the only option for fans of the Myth property. You would never see another Myth game if we didn't get this right. No Myth Master. No Myth Battles. No more modules. No Myth 2.0 box in retail. No rpg. No Myth Legendary. No Myth Adventurers toolkit. It would stop. So we can take some heat in the comments and a bad Facebook review or 10, because we understand this is the only way forward. If the deal fails, we are done.

We agree with you. We design cool games. We suck at the business part. The communication part. We see the changes in what a backer expects out of Kickstarter. We are not CMON. We do not have half the game produced before we even launch the KS campaign. We have to do 90% of the work required after the KS closes. As much as our games look like they come from a team of 20, they come from a team of 3.

So, I sent that email out and we had a lot of interest. I went out to GAMA in March and met with everyone. All of those meetings required an NDA. I can't talk about the who and what we spoke about. But, I left those meetings with real offers.

Over the course of the next few months, we reduced the three or four real offers down to one. Since that time we've been working to get this thing taken care of. At times during the negotiation, it appeared as though it might fall apart. Even now we don't have a final, definitive yes. Both of us, we the seller and they the buyer, are waiting on a third party to give us the go ahead. We are waiting for a yes or a no. It could come this week or next.

In the meantime, we've continued to finalize all the elements of the Journeyman KS. Some of you have expressed resentment toward the Emergence Event and Dark Frontier KS, because they are being completed before the JM stuff. We can appreciate this perception. They were easier to finalize and get off our plates in terms of production and shipping.

For some perspective, the EE expansion is the equivalent of 1 JM module. In design. In production prep. In cost. It took 6-8 months to produce. Journeyman has 11 modules. It takes a lot of time to finalize and produce these elements.

While this was going on, we were in negotiation to sell Myth and become a design studio. We are still under an NDA, but there is a mutual understanding of trying soothe the JM backers because you see some of our other KSers finishing.

Some of the events that have happened are under NDA and may never be revealed. Other information you are looking for I simply don't have yet. I do not have a shipment date for the last wave. We aren't even finished with production. So much of what you all our asking I can't answer because of the NDA or because of we don't have that information yet. With all that said, I can address some questions:

-Replacements? We are not sending out any replacements until we have produced and paid for all the production and fulfillment shipping. Shipping replacements is expensive and we cannot afford to dip into the production money until we have paid all that is due.

Some might push back and say it should come out of our salary. First off, we don't make a salary. We take draws based off of profit. And we haven't had any form of payment from game publishing for 14 months now. We saw the writing on the wall coming last summer. It is one of the reasons we made so many changes to overhead. It also spurred the conversations about our future.

Not only have we poured our heart and soul into our games, we have poured our own financial security and that of our families into this business. We are invested and the only way that investment will ever pay out is if we deliver the last wave of this KS to you and can sell the property. If we don't deliver the last wave, the property has little to no real value and as I said, we are done with publishing and KSers. "

[Cubs]

This is probably the shape of things to come for the foreseeable, with the KS and crowd-funding avenues allowing people to get things off the ground quickly and more easily than applying to the bank for a loan, for example. But a bank requires a business plan for a reason, because their business advisors can make a shrewd prediction about whether you're likely to float or not. Lots of people are able to get started, but without a solid plan or the necessary expertise to steer the ship in the right direction.

I don't know if this change in how products are released and companies started is a good or bad thing, it's just a thing. It's why we have so many of these examples of people being unable to cope with the pressures of running their company, because it's gone in an unexpected direction or they lack the experience or support to deal with everyday difficulties.

[Daeothar]

I have quite some money in that last Myth KS, as the game is fun and I had already hitched a ride with a friend during the first KS after it closed, so I already have the entire first one too.

I've always understood their position pretty well, and because they're all enthousiastic and driven people, I've never felt the impatience, irritation or even downright nerd-rage and vitriol towards them that so many people have shown.

It was pretty clear from the first KS already that those guys were in way over their heads, especially considering the core group existed of only 3 people (plus a sculptor and a CS person). The tremendous success of the first KS took them completely by surprise and put them on a runaway train they could not get off of.

If there is anything irking me at all, it has nothing to do with the Myth property, but rather the Mercs:Recon one. That was their second KS, propelling their original Mercs skirmish game towards a boardgame setting, and at the same time, the 2nd edition of Mercs was released.

There was the huge delay in delivery as with the first one, and again, I could live with it. But what really put me off big time was the sub par quality of the casting of the game's miniatures (and boy there were a lot of minis in there).

That was clearly a quality issue; some of the minis didn't even have a recognisable face. So that, combined with the very convoluted game play, made me wish I had gone with the Nakamura Tower KS instead...

But I still understood their predicament. they were responsible for the poor quality of their product, yes, but knowing the position they were in, I found no reason to be enraged with them. It did give me the incentive to sell off the Mercs:Recon game though; in the end it was not what I expected or wanted, but that is not all Megacon's fault.

Before that though, I had already pledged heavily (the most I've ever put into a KS) for the Myth Journeyman KS. After a while, some of the components were delivered, but then the radio silence began.

Not that I minded that, really. Because the second thing I find that Megacon Games could have really improved on is their communication (and not even their lack of!). The clunky and often inept way their  communication took place often made me think that they should better have not sent out any emails at all...

And those bumbling emails were probably one of the major contributors to the rage fests on Board game Geek, the KS message board and other places. They consistently failed to understand the needs/wants of their customers. And that lead to a very negative atmosphere on boards, forums and other platforms, which was more often than not (IMHO) not deserved.

But that was the environment they created, which put even more pressure on an already overburdened small team. I cannot help but wonder that if their communication had been better, they could have retained (more of) their customers' goodwill. There will always be malcontents, but things would not have become so toxic that the Megacon team would have lost their spark to the degree that they did no longer have the energy to cope with the pressure of running an exploding business.

I've met Brian at Spiel Essen back before the original Myth was delivered; played a demo game with some friends and him and he was a really nice guy. Very clearly passionate about his/their creation and full of energy. I think it's sad that they had to throw in the towel.

The writing was on the wall years ago already, but there was always the hope that they would somehow be able to pull through. Now all we can hope is that their IP's are picked up by the right company, so  they can still be expanded. And I hope for them that they will be able to keep working on their games  as the designers they are, as opposed to publishers, marketeers, buyers, planners, distributors and customer service people...