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Don't get me wrong, I'm worried... but I don't go to Vegas often... and I feel the odds are better... a little gamble is worth the reward here to me.
Maelstrom was very different though. That was an emergency move to try and sakvage something from what was the result of a move by Wayland, who had bought debt from Wyrd and then called it in. At that time Maelstrom was one of their leading competitors.
Everyone keeps mentioning Ludik Bazare as a company involved and this Kickstarter... it's not one of the guys with this Kickstarter was the owner of Ludik Bazare... totally separate company and they just shut the company down... they didn't screw anybody they didn't do anything wrong it just wasn't feasible anymore and they shut it down. I have several LLCs with my name on it that have nothing to do with each other. if I start to think one isn't feasible anymore I'll shut it down. I don't understand why it would have anything to do with one of my other companies though. people are giving us this a bad rap because Ludik Bazare is shutting down their company even though there's not one person that said they've ever lost money with Ludik Bazare. That whole arguments just not valid with me I see why they keep wondering why everyone's so worried about a company that's not involved.
So, let's think about this. I, and I believe most people here, want the return of Confrontation. CMON dropped the ball on this when they held the rights. They teased Phoenix edition through a different project and never delivered on that, and now SD holds the IP rights and plans to bring the game back via Resurrection. So far, so good, I think. We got a company who is actually doing some work to bring the brand back. Awesome.OK, so back in early 2017 SD announces that Classic and Ressurection will be something they are working on, and at some point Classic will be a Kickstarter project. Awesome. I'm jazzed about this, I love this game and the minis and can't wait to see how SD does with it. Then... not a lot happens. As the project draws closer there is a poll for characters to be included with the pledge, actually pretty cool. Get the community involved, good idea. But then...Mostly silence from SD. People, in general, don't get responses to questions on the FB. One thread in particular had a ton of pretty basic questions - what's the pledge structure, etc... - but the only question that was answered was someone asking for SD's Twitter account. So, we know SD is seeing these questions but ignoring them. I'm not saying I was expecting detailed answers, but a simple "Wait and see" or "This is the basic idea" would have been nice. This would be a trend that SD continues to this day - they mostly don't respond to social media inquiries.Anyway, the KS launches and funds in 2 hours. It raises about 650K Euro. Awesome. But then... people start asking questions and looking closer at things. The minis will be PVC with ABS weapons, similar to what Wrath of Kings does. Personally, this doesn't make too much sense to me, as my metal Confrontation minis tended to have stability issues with ankles more than anything else. But, this is the project SD wants to do. So, we will have PVC and ABS. The issue of quality comes up again and again. It's answered, but because a prototype isn't shown people don't believe it. We are told to trust SD, many backers do because they've delivered on their RPG projects before. SD posts and update saying they can be trusted because they've made products before. OK.So, we are 3 days from the end of the project and it is down to about 461K Euro right now. That's nearly 200K lost and about 66% of what it was at the height of funding. What happened? Here's where I am going to get really critical: Sans Detour barely worked on this project.The project launched with over a year of planning able to go into it. What we saw was pictures of the old Rackham minis - the same ones used in their catalog and on the mini's cards. There's even art used in a few situations instead of miniature images. That's weird. Not a single model was ever cast by SD. They're offering a resin pledge, people thought maybe SD made some of those minis. Nope, I confirmed that they were leftover from old Rackham. SD then doubles down on this and states that they are unable to produce a mini they have made, that it is cost prohibitive. I have never seen a single miniature company using KS that has said this. So then people start asking to see how they will scan the masters into a computer, as SD stated they will do this to make molds. Nope, again. So we are left to conclude that Sans Detour has not done -any- work prior to the KS campaign to show people what they plan to produce. They said they've made calls to factories. That seems like it is enough for some people.Then, we get into the weird grey area of how business ownership and partner companies. In an update, Sans Detour stated they would use Ludik (with whom they share an owner and address) for logistics on this project. They stated that, if Ludik were to go under, they wold simply switch to a different company. So, in a comment, it was disclosed that Ludik is now controlled by a liquidator. I don't know how this wasn't known before, it's a huge red flag. Then, we also find out that Stellar Licensing, the company who owns the IP, only owns the Confrontation IP as their single asset and is owned by the financial Director of SD. Again, kind of weird.So - in the year leading up to this project, the only prep work done was to photoshop existing images together, make a choice of minis featured, and contact factories. That is, observably, the only work done by SD leading up to what they hoped (looking at the stretch goals) would be a million Euro+ project.This brings us to the current situation. Sans Detour, the account, is barely involved with getting information out. Instead, Joss - the project manager - has his own account and comments, while other collaborators - who are friends of the project and not SD employees - also give official information. The collaborators get all their info from SD directly, so if they don't have the answer to a question and want to answer it, they have to ask someone. Fine so far. But - we have seen that some of the collaborators have berated and ignored people who have questions or concerns about the project. It's also apparent that there is no native English speaker who works on this project, which sometimes causes misunderstandings. It's a small issue, but for a company to launch a large project in English without a native speaker seems like a mistake.It also came out that SD was not able to produce game play videos of the game they are pitching, which was a request frequently asked of them. I asked a collaborator about this and was told that there are only 2 players around their office and they had no time to record. I don't see how, in the year they had to prepare for this, they couldn't run through a game and take pictures or record. That doesn't add up to me, and makes me think this project wasn't taken seriously by SD from the start.It would appear that SD thought it could put together a project for a game that hasn't been produced in about 10 years and expect that people would be willing to buy a 300 Euro box of minis without even seeing how they might look in the material they will receive them in. Next to no prep work was done, and SD seems to be happy with the fact that it passed it's goal at all despite the fact that it lost 1/3 of it's funding so far. SD plans to launch a new edition of Confrontation next year sometime. No one has seen any work that has gone into that so far, so we are left to conclude that as much effort will go into that project as went into their current one. Which is to say - not much at all.
In case it's deleted or forgotten:
That is .... terrifying. If I had backed this, I'd be pulling out faster than a Cardiff bus driver (I cleaned that one up considerably). Having it put down blandly like that must surely fire off alarms in people's heads, when they realise they are paying someone who has done absolutely nothing to prepare for actually delivering a product.
With the amount they promise I imagine they will try to use the cheapest possible PVC molds etc they can get (If it will cover it) and this will yield rather sub par miniatures to say the least. Just conjecture mind you.