bojay1997

I agree that Mike never really delivered on the promises that drove the Kickstarter campaign in connection with Retro. Having said that, to have someone else come in and essentially take their existing fanzine that had poor readership and failed and then simply adopt the "Retro" brand and expect that to be acceptable to backers or subscribers is absurd. I don't know what kind of financial assets Triverse has, but this is a business that would required hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-launch and even then, the chances of success are very low. The magazine business is dying for a reason and Mike's "mismanagement" aside, I seriously doubt that any small time entrepreneur can launch and maintain a magazine with retail distribution in this day and age without the support of a large publisher and very deep pockets.

Yep, not sure how you can engage in a "hostile takeover" of a company that isn't even publicly traded.

I'm fully aware of that. It doesn't change the fact that even before the whole Chameleon thing, he was oddly obsessed with Retro and seemed very fixated on the idea that Retro had somehow infringed on his name when in fact Retro Gamer had been around for longer than both of them and there have been other non-game related magazines and other trademarks in printed media for Retro for many years now.

Agreed. While I think Triverse did some good investigative journalism on the whole Chameleon fiasco, I think he also suffers from some of the same odd obsessive and pipedreamer qualities that Mike Kennedy expressed. Triverse seems to be obsessed with the name "Retro" for a magazine which frankly doesn't seem like a very valuable asset given everything that has happened here and the fact that there is already a great magazine out there called "Retro Gamer". Also, running a magazine with retail distribution requires a massive investment in writers and other staff. While Mike may have been able to string people along for a year and a half on a promise of sharing in the profits, you can bet that qualified journalists and writers are not going to make that mistake again. The whole premise of Retro was that some of the great team members from leading magazines of the 90s were going to be the staff behind it. I doubt backers are going to want additional issues of something by an entirely new team that is essentially a glorified fanzine. I think it's best to just let Retro die and if Triverse wants to create a new magazine, there will at least be one fewer competitor out there in an already dead marketplace.

Can't believe Not only did someone win this at over $2200, but another apparently long term Ebay member offered almost as much. I know it's tax refund season, but this is a new height of insanity.

I always thought it was shady when Mike would magically win auctions for the few rare items that he convinced people to put up on Gamegavel. I suspect he was able to see exactly what other people bid so he could win every time. There was also the fact that at the height of his promotion of Gamegavel as an Ebay alternative, he listed some of his own rare items on Ebay and refused to explain why he didn't use Gamegavel and yet wanted other people to continue to list their rare items there.

Looks like "Coleco" pulled the plug. http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/08/coleco-pulls-support-from-chameleon/

My understanding is that the Kickstarter approval process is now automated (i.e. nobody reviews the submission or launch as long as their automated system doesn't reject something in the pitch). Having said that, if people complain or they catch wind of something problematic as a result of press coverage, they can and do suspend or cancel campaigns.

So is the Toy Show set up similarly to how E3 used to be where they had that really low end hall under the main halls where the odd thirty party vendors used to set up? You know, the ones with mind control accessories or really obscure Eastern European games that likely will never see a US release? This booth appears to be in a corner in a very sketchy looking group of no-name vendors.

I'm not following. Even after all of the evidence that much of what Mike has presented in the previous iteration and at the Toy Fair is likely misleading at best and fraudulent at worst, you still want it to succeed? While I also don't understand the fixation some people have on the project, as a frequent backer of crowdfunded video game projects, I feel very strongly that anything with this many red flags deserves hard scrutiny if only to preserve the integrity of crowdfunding.

I've never understood this approach. Outrageous start pricing has the exact opposite impact on me. I just assume anyone that is so unrealistic would be insulted by a market value offer and ignore their auctions. I'm sure many people take my same approach and you're missing out on people who actually have the money to make a good offer, but won't deal with you because of your ridiculous starting price.

Agreed. It's not even about trying to run a reasonable business anymore through hard work, but instead people scooping up Ebay or other local deals and then immediately relisting them and asking long time community members to do all of their research and pricing work while they pocket massive profits. I mean this guy admitted that he paid almost nothing for this stuff, but he wants to maximize his profits and isn't even open to non-reserve auctions as that won't guarantee him all of the money he believes he is entitled to. On the positive side, I have yet to see one of these "retro" game stores last for more than a few years as the owners are generally greedy and don't understand their own business or clientele and end up losing it all.

If this was an internal holiday gift item, it's unlikely they would have bothered with copyright symbols or other notices. I work for a large entertainment company and we regularly get gifts that have lots of well known corporate IP on them without such formalities. I'm not saying it couldn't be a fake, but copyright notice is not something that in and of itself would be dispositive of that fact.

I really don't understand this mentality. Would the thread have been ok if everyone had been supportive and positive about the idea regardless of the fact that it had major flaws that likely would have resulted in backers losing the money they kicked in had it been successfully funded? I get not wanting to be seen as a place for personal attacks, but at the end of the day, Mike has made this a very personal thing by blaming everyone for the major failures in his business plan. He also chose the timing of this new announcement and it's not like people just picked the holidays to ramp up the attack. I know lots of people on other sites have been using this thread as fodder for their own discussions and frankly, I don't think there is anything wrong with being seen as a place where honest and vigorous debate occurs. I agree that there have been some inappropriate posts on both sides, but frankly, there haven't been that many and they could have easily been moderated away while the thread continued.

You seem to lack patience or any ability to plan in advance what you are going to do and this just seems like another situation where you rushed to get something out that now you acknowledge was at best inaccurate and at worst grossly misleading. Your first attempt to create this "console" was an unmitigated disaster and yet here you are just a couple of months later announcing a new identity and that you will be showing a prototype at a national trade show attended by the very people who in theory could make or break this product in less than two months. You also seem to be making the same misleading claims about industry heavy hitters wanting to meet with you or support your product. Guess what? Toys R Us attends the Toy Fair every year and they will likely meet with just about everyone there with any kind of tangible product. Claiming that this shows industry support is just totally false. Why not take a year or two to create a really compelling prototype, do some testing and then go out to developers and show them that prototype with an actual financial and marketing plan for how you intend to sell the hardware? Why not give the developers time to create actual unique and proprietary content rather than forcing them into your hasty and haphazard schedule? Why continue to pursue a crowdfunding approach to this when you seem to want to start an actual business? Why not raise the funding yourself, prove the concept by actually generating some sales and by answering to real investors? I think that perhaps at the end of the day, the answer to all of these questions is the same. Deep down you know this isn't viable and putting the actual time and effort into doing this right would just distract you from your ability to live in this fantasy world you've created where you can launch a viable niche hardware and software business in the modern era with little or no money, experience or relationships and have it become a massive success.

So, a PR firm that you hired made an unauthorized last minute addition to your press release without your approval? Forgive me, but if that really happened, it just proves that the same incompetence you showed with the first failed attempt at Retro VGS is still in full effect here.

They still have Kickstarter logos all over their Photoshops of the "Coleco" branded device. I also doubt that the company that holds the Coleco IP has the financial ability to back much of anything. My understanding is that they just license the name out in exchange for payment from various licensees. If you have facts to support your claim that this is being corporately funded in any significant way, I'd love to see it.

Wow, so not only is "Coleco" going to try and sell this into retail, but they still expect people to pay for the development and production through Kickstarter? I had a slight hope this morning that this meant that they weren't going to go after individuals to try and fund this monstrosity and that "Coleco" would be picking up the development and initial production run tab to fulfill any retail orders they may get at the Toy Show. I guess that was too much to hope.

Yes, apparently they learned nothing from the last disaster of a campaign. They need to take a good amount of time off to get this thing right and to plan their campaign. Rushing a prototype and opening a new campaign during the worst time of year for crowdfunding is just absurd.

Yep, that's the first thing I thought about when I saw the announcement about this new company yesterday. Granted their focus is on PS4 and Vita, but there's no reason somebody couldn't take this model and expand to PC or indie games (sort of like Indiebox, but without the other physical goodies). One of my biggest issues with Retro VGS all along has been the lack of any compelling reason for people to buy a unique platform just to buy games that are already available elsewhere and would likely be developed on PCs or other systems that didn't rely on custom hardware. It seems like they could just cut deals with developers to release games on physical media for PC or other current platforms and skip the whole hassle of trying to fundraise and build a machine people don't need or want.

I thought it was more than a mention. I recall just about every post after they finished with all those posts about color options were pretty adamant that the Retro VGS could become just about any classic system through cores and that the cores were what would attract well known developers to the system to release games that had never had a deluxe physical release or had only a limited physical release like Pier Solar. Admittedly, that's when things started to get weird as some of us started to point out that recent retro style games like Shovel Knight are actually very complex and would require starting from scratch to make them run on an NES core or something similar. In any event, I don't know that a truly unique platform would attract developers unless you had a very substantial user base right out the door. You then have the problem of not being able to attract buyers for the hardware because there is no must have or unique software. I just don't know how you get around either problem short of having a massive amount of capital up front so you can essentially pay developers to create unique launch titles and keep the pipeline stocked with games until the user base is viable enough for small developers to put resources into doing unique titles for the platform. I mean the Neo Geo AES survived for years by essentially selling a few thousand copies of each new first party game at $300+ a pop, but it also benefitted from arcade sales of the same games and licensing of ports for other platforms and a niche audience that was willing to pay a premium for games. The later releases also tended to recycle graphic and game engine assets pushing development costs lower. Ultimately the niche wasn't enough to keep new first party releases coming and it really makes me wonder what the actual size of the collector's market for new cartridge based games is in 2015.

Wasn't the whole point of the FPGA and cores to serve as not just a means to play already released games, but more importantly, a way to give developers and publishers an easy road to releasing stuff that was either already completed or in development for other platforms on the Retro VGS on physical media? I don't recall Mike or Steve ever talking about a truly original platform that would play cartridge based retro games. My recollection is that this came later in their Facebook posts when people started posting wish lists for some kind of new 8 bit or 16 bit platform and then they talked about creating a new core that had unique characteristics that were different from the other classic cores. Don't you lose almost all of the developers if they have to create something for a unique platform that has a tiny niche audience? Isn't what you're talking about just an Ouya, FireTV, Nvidia Shield, Razer Android TV or something similar that uses cartridges instead of either digital media or SD Cards?

Strongly agree with this point. I've never understood the need to force people to buy a whole new platform to play games when many collectors and retro gamers already own the original hardware or systems capable of playing the original software.

I actually take strong issue with your stereotyping and generalizations about retro gamers. There may be some very vocal posters here and elsewhere that are frugal, but plenty of us who are retro gamers give generously to Kickstarter projects and buy homebrews and other small run items that are fairly expensive all in the interest of supporting something we believe to be worthwhile. Similarly, I am far more likely to support someone like Kevtris who has actually put in a lot of hard work on a project and who has given back to the community over the years versus a team of folks who I have had very little interaction with and who seem to have poor business and decision making skills. As I pointed out to Mike on Facebook in the run up to this project, there are other groups and entities supporting physical releases, including small publishers and companies like IndieBox, Gamers Edition and others. Creating a whole new platform to support physical releases was both unnecessary and ignorant of the marketplace. It would have been a much better use of the time and resources to create a company that helped small developers publish games on physical media with high quality packaging and media. I don't know Mike personally, but I do know his previous work and I have been largely disappointed with all of it. From his attempt to compete with Ebay that offers no benefit to buyers and frankly less protection (indeed, he allowed a fraudulent seller that was banned from Ebay to sell on Gamegavel even after being made aware of the previous fraud and banning, explaining that the guy hadn't done anything similar on Gamegavel yet and so he was going to give him a chance) to a magazine that seems to lack editorial direction or even basic proofreading and doesn't even have much "retro" content, I have found his work amateurish at best. I know it's popular to bash on "haters" nowadays, but sometimes I think it's ok to say to someone that has too many bad ideas and schemes, "hey, maybe business isn't for you and maybe you should stop wasting your time and money and that of your family and friends on ideas that have no future". I personally believe there are such things as bad ideas and bad products and all of the good intentions in the world won't bring back money or time that has been wasted.

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft couldn't care less about small retailers like yourself. If you sell used games, even less so. Retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Target and others are more than happy to sell digital consoles and the points or credit cards for them. While I think NX will have physical media, large retailers where most of the sales happen aren't going to be a deterrent or problem should some manufacturer decide to move to a digital only console. Heck, Gamestop and Target both sold Ouya and the PSP Go.