It’s Wednesday boys, girls, toasters, assault helicopters and other, time for another failed crowdfunded nonsense product and/or service. And today’s utter failure is Yogventure, a masterstroke of failure, as it never actually released into anything resembling the promised product.
I ought to know, I funded the stupid kickstarter and I regret it to this day.
The concept originated from a Youtube group know as the Yogscast, who made their fame from a series of Minecraft adventures, mostly scripted with various storylines about wizard and cookies and what not, high production values, decent fun for the time.
The idea behind Yogventure was essentially a Minecraft clone, with a heavy focus on multiplayer and modding, i.e. creating maps and gameplay elements tailormade for whatever purposes your specific players needed.
They managed to get over half a million US dollars out of it, with 13,647 backers essentially preordering the game, they even had a prototype to show off.
Let’s list the promises:
- Just like Minecraft
- Not blocks though
- Multiplayer-focus
- Has characters from our Award-winning YouTube series.
- Crafting
- Easy to mod
There we go. Fortunately, there are no real stretch-goals, thank fuck for that at least.
So, what happened? Well, they outsourced the entire development to some other studio, rather than making it themselves, which turned out to be brave. As in the whole thing just vanished into bankruptcy and wasted money.
Apparently the developer they’d basically outsourced the actual work to, hired an artist to do assets, without a contractual obligation to actual do it and paid the artist in advance? Which sounds utterly bonkers to me, you’d have to be completely fucking stupid to anything like that.
Although there’s been at least seven other kickstarters that have failed due to contractual shenanigans, so perhaps it wasn’t that odd.
The single potentially fraudulent thing the Yogscast crew really did, was that to claim that they had a prototype during the kickstarter, turns out if was a Unity engine hackjob put together just for the crowdfunding campaign, probably not fraud, definitely unethical as fuck.
The lesson? Don’t trust anyone.
- https://www.polygon.com/2014/7/17/5912245/yogscast-kickstarter-failure-crowdfunding-risks
- https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-07-17-kickstarter-funded-yogventures-canned-backers-given-steam-key-for-another-game-instead
- https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/yogventures-developer-as-confused-as-everyone-else-about-kickstarter-funds/