Reply To: BattleTech: Mercenaries – CGL does a shipping booboo? Internet rages!

[dawfydd 12586xp 1]

Kickstarter *had* the chance to enforce what were some pretty decent rules & penalties towards creators who either launched multiple projects to feed one after another, or those who did not make a good faith effort to fulfill their stated obligations. But after a bunch of high-earning projects (the first Zombicide comes to mind, and I *think* Star Citizen) those T&C’s were loosened up massively as the likes of CMON began treating the platform more like a pre-order service for their products (admittedly this *can* only be how things appear to the backers – a number of companies have gone to great lengths to explain that whilst it may *look* like they are bringing a finished product to the platform with no need to crowdfund, the funding is often speeding up the cycle they can release in, from years to months). I’m 1500 projects+ at this point, anything from a quid to hundreds of pounds depending on the project and my interest/available funds. In 15 years I’ve had maybe 20 that failed to fulfill or fully fulfill, and only one of those (the infamous Robotech RPG Tactics from Palladium) has made me angry at the dev. Kickstarter gets something like a 10-20% slice of whatever a campaign brings in, and they chose the road paved in greenbacks.

Now, all that being said, I do agree that Catalyst have not done themselves any favours with the management & communication of Mercenaries over the last 10 months, but I’m not convinced that it has been due to malicious intent. Frustratingly we may never know just why things went so awry during fulfillment and how shortages in product were not flagged sooner, but at this point the majority of folks *do* appear to have received their rewards ( @limburger that is not in anyway to minimise how yourself and other folks who are still waiting must be feeling right now). I don’t however think that CGL are in anywhere near the sorts of dire straights as Ninja Division and Mythic Games found themselves in when their respective houses of cards came tumbling down on them. I suspect that with the Voltron and Frostpunk RPG projects CGL are under the gun due to them being licenced projects and had time limits in place by which they had to have the projects launched or else they would lose the rights and associated development costs. Neither project is of any interest to me, but i am willing to give them some benefit of the doubt. Leviathans does at least seem to be moving, just very slowly.

Ironically the tabletop games company that I *think* has the best approach right now is Monolith. Ironic as back when they and Mythic went their separate ways post-the first Conan campaign most assumed that the issues with the end product were on Monolith’s side but Mythics demise would suggest they were somewhat scapegoated. But their current model of wanting to hold off launching a campaign until everything is ready to go to manufacturing so that it just requires that crowdfunding to get it going seems to be working for them quite well.

Also worth bearing in mind that Battletech does seem to have legs to it given how much non-KS product CGL have announced. Admittedly getting hold of it outside the US remains a pain in the proverbials (he says having just received copies of the Hinterlands & Kurita books he had to order from Amazon US…), but compare to how the game looked pre-2020. Battletech was still going but it was niche as hell my dudes. It was a struggle to find anything outside the US or Germany. Now? My local FLGS has books & boxsets, and multiple webstores carry the line.

Sorry, starting to ramble now as I’ve just had my meds for the night.

Just….. be cool folks. Be cool…..