The Point - Yogscast's Cancelled Kickstarter & The Missing Half A Million

Well, this is easily an interesting episode.

I feel sick...

After being pointed to their most polular video I was not entertained.

Maybe it's my intelligence.

Cloning minecraft with a voxel engine.

I can't believe some people are accusing Danny of 'jumping on the bandwagon' with this video and making this without doing research. This video was very good and Yogscast deserved to be held up in the spotlight and forced to take responsibility. Anyone saying this was bad journalism is really just a Yogscast fanboy.

Why aren't these dirty scammers in a jail? And why their crappy channel has so many views?

People must be really stupid...

I checked Youtube to see if I was subscribed to Yogsast.

I'm glad to find that I wasn't.

For a Youtuber, or any entertainer really, the audience/fans deserves the up-most respect for the support.

An improper response to the audience/fans, especially after what happened, is definitely something I'll remember about Yogcast.

I was familiar with Yogcast, but this is my first time hearing about them.

Definitly not a very good first impression for sure.

Take $150,000 for who knows what, then " We're under no obligation to do anything...". Wow, that's very good business !

Spot on, Danny !

I've contributed to a fair number of crowdfunded projects, and not all of them have been games. So far, none that were funded have actually been abandoned (many have been succesfully completed, and a few I've actually been quite thrilled with the results of).

That said, you have to be very careful about where you put your money, as there are some truly fraudulent projects that seem to sneak in under the radar of the various crowdfunding platforms. For example: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/crowdfunding-pseudoscience/. http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/01/ever-wanted-to-read-your-dogs-thoughts/

As far as games are concerned, I wouldn't put your money towards any project that is being run by an inexperienced programming team. A playable demo is usually a very good sign (Dungeonmans, for example, had a great demo even before the kickstarter, and the progress of the game has been impressive. I've been less impressed with certain other projects that I will not name, but none of them have been abandoned.

I was never a fan of yogscast to begin with, and this does not help to give me any interest in them.

Im pretty sure that yogscast pulls in a very large amount of money from their youtube account, as far as im concerned there are only 2 roads to redemption, give everybody refunds, or finish the project. Otherwise they better watch their behind because its going to bite them.

Proper scumbags.

Developer: Yoggatta be kidding me!! The money is gone?

Yogscast: Yeah! I had to donate the money so Danny can keep making those WEIRD Harry Potter style videos. xD

I immediately subscribed to Danny after that brief clip :')

Seems to me Yogscast kept the last 100 grand for themselves instead of hiring the main programmer. Thus dooming the project.

Well who you can blame after reading this, (bad)human nature or inexperience.

"Unfortunately, right off the bat we had one major incident that happened that we could not fix. Our good friend and matte painter really terrific artist that created most of the concept art with environments on the Kickstarter page, he left PDI to work at LucasArts. LucasArts wouldn't give him a carve out in his contract to work on Yogventures so he couldn't work on the project any longer.

This is a very good example of how my inexperience caused some problems in the development. Because we had worked out a contract that guaranteed each of the principal artists a $35,000 lump sum payment, and we didn't make any clear clause on how and why someone could legally stop working on the project, The artist in question got paid, worked for about 2 weeks and then stopped working on the project. We had no way to force that person to pay back any of the funds and it was a bitter lesson to learn. Always get every possible scenario in writing or you will have no legal recourse."

Never heard of 'em.

At a fundamental level it does sound pretty wrong of them to be going down this path, but Barry's comment at the end kind of rings true. A lot of people lose money on investments all the time. We've heard of this one because it's happened in a more public form.

UPDATE: Winterkewl have just posted a breakdown of the spending of the funds.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2b4bzm/yogventures_final_kickstarter_update/
From this it appears the majority of the blame lies with Winterkewl's awful financial management, but it's still a shame that Yogscast didn't get involved at an earlier stagem as they appears to have been involved in the project all along. Wow.

always a pleasure to watch your videos Danny. Good Work

They hired some dude thats not professional and he blew the money and the project. Now Yog is acting like its all his fault, but if some of the bigger backers get lawyers, the court will go up the line to them since the developer works for them. I imagine someone with $10,000 to spend on Kickstarter probably also has $10,000 to give to a lawyer as a retainer too.

Psst, hey Danny. You're my favorite.

Shameless self promotion of own YouTube channel... I love it! Subscribed :)

(just kidding btw - but not about the subscribing part)

I've been a fan of the Yogscast for a while but they do have a history of making big promises that they later try to back out of, and some of them don't seem to feel that they have any responsibility toward their fans. This situation is just shameful, though, and I'm going to have to reassess my support of them. Knowing them, however, don't expect any real answers anytime soon.

I'm not surprised this is happening. The majority of kickstarter projects will be delivered but there is bound to be a failure rate and that will hurt other projects. I first said this years ago, we aren't entering a golden age of crowd funding, we're just passing through the phase of unrealistic optimism before everyone crashes back to reality.

Ironically in the long run the biggest losers here might be Yogcast if they are hit with legal action. It's pretty viable the money was spent on developing the game and it fell through. It's also possible they will legally be held responsible for refunds. If so they will be out of pocket and their reputation will still be hurt.

Though this isn't anywhere near as bad as Oculus Rift. Even if it's crowd funded it doesn't belong to the masses, it can still become the property of massive company that would love to be able to pump adverts directly into your eyeballs.

Whoever looked at this pile of garbage and actually put money towards it.....I have no sympathy for you

Never even heard of Yogscast until today.

I was waiting for the first big ripoff in the Kickstarter era. This is pretty damned huge, and if those people don't get their money back, it's highly possible the ripples of this one could affect Kickstarters as a whole.. Yeah, there have been people who took the money and ran, but this is much more impactful, simply because of the large brand name attached to the property.

It's stuff like this that makes me SO glad I've never put any money into Kickstarter.

The "icontrolpad 2" project comes to mind... The guy literally disappeared off the face of the earth, probably after citing some lame excuses like this guy did... "My wife left me because I was so stressed".. boo f***in hoo.

It seems like they got way over their heads and drowned pretty quickly. While that's on them, it's somewhat understandable. It happens. But the way they handled themselves after the fallout seems beyond shameful.

What a bunch of scumbags.

More people need to understand that Kickerstarter is donation service. There is no contract, only 'promises'