jennytablina

I wondered if he was the Janus guy but that was Co-Founder/Creative Director of RETRO Mark Kaminski, not this guy. In all honesty AA's been pretty forgiving towards RETRO staff even though there's CoI's for them all over this mess. I'm not sure how they were expected to ever be able to be impartial or fair & objective on a system that originally was going to bear their name and had one of their founders speadheading it. How would that of worked? One poor review and Kennedy could just blacklist you for not "promoting sales" or just plain hurting his other business. I mean I do feel for the staff a bit (though I gather most are freelancers anyway?) you probably felt you had to brown-nose lest you tested the above theory. But it's a two-edged sword as it stings your credibility too. Also maybe just me, but considering mentions that RETRO is still 2 issues off last years promised quota + 2 major content writers mentioning a lack of work prior to jumping ship doesn't exactly sound healthy for the publication. Kinda makes it a wee bit obvious that Retro VGS/Chameleons crowdfunds were probably needed & intended to be used in a sneaky way to keep RETRO afloat too : P

The problem is this is how a lot of project creators view crowdfunding. Did you manage to hit your goal? Well done! But that's not the end of the story - you still have to deliver a product even if you are securely funded for it's development. This is where Crowdfunding starts going south for a lot of projects. A lot of people call Ouya a "success" and that's reasonably true of the KS which did STUNNINGLY well for a mini-box with already aged android architecture even at the KS start. But it really cannot be called a success by any measure as an actual platform. Sadly a lot of the details of how hard they failed has gone largely un-noticed, Games press turned a blind eye when things at Ouya started going south bar a few things. They did produce the system, but messed terribly with backers, sending them early systems with wifi issues and dodgy controllers, some waiting almost a year past the point they started shipping consoles, missing controllers in orders ect. But that's only the beginning of the problems. At launch the dev environment was insecure, they couldn't attract many indies who could actually make *good* games (mostly lazy halfhearted efforts with exception to Towerfall) , when they attempted to attract indies with their "free the games" promo, they actually managed to scare most of them off with the terms and conditions (which required being successfully funded to $250,000 before they would chip in). They had also scared off the bigger fish by taking a "we're for the indies and those other guys are like, THE MAN, bringing us down!" stance. Ironically the few people who went for it actually scammed their own KS projects, with suspect large amounts pumped in by fake accounts. Ouya was forced to split the payout for "free the game" projects in order to maybe ensure an actual game was developed, rather than people running off with $$. By that point, interest in Ouya had dried up, people who already owned the system (mostly just as a nice emu/media stream box) already had one, and everyone else got bored and forgot it existed. So the money dried up and they ended up selling the business to Razer. Who also quickly found out that they had inherited debts to devs and angry backers who never got a system.

Consumer? Absolutely! You guys got over it pretty quick once you realized it was a SNES Jnr in a box, bar disbelief that someone could be that stupid. There's always a few true believers but I think that comes down to how much you trust someone, and if you've experienced a swindle before. Games press....no. Speaking as someone who's been very critical of games press over the past 2 years. Any outlet that operates remotely near San Francisco is hired for reasons other than actually knowing much about games. Polygon just the other day wrote an article where they called "Link" of the Zelda series - "The fairy elf hero ZELDA" The current gaming giants are dying breeds, and more of them are more interested in pushing news out asap, or focusing on people they want to promote. Than they are willing to put time in to dig stories like this up and properly chronicle them. In some cases may not even cover a story at all because it might involve covering someone they like in a negative light. Note that even in this situation, where are you getting the most info on this story? Youtubers and podcasters (as well as people in this thread) - no journalist at Toyfair would of reported this is someone hadn't watched one of the videos and gone "wait a second..." You make your own funding site ; ) That's what DoubleFine did for Psychonauts 2 as they set up Fig themselves. DangerousAnalysis also did a rather illuminating video on that topic that basically reveals they played the rules so they can walk away with peoples $$ without any consequence as well.

Before I get into the main reason I made an account. Thanks for this thread, it's been an amazing and educational read! Also a laugh riot, though I feel bad for guys like Piko and hope better things come for those who got duped by Mike. The retro community deserves way better than nonsense like this. anyway lets get to the crux of why I felt inclined to sign up. Haha small world, Steve Tom Sawyer is a total cad and con artist. He also set up Revue Labs and tried to crowdfund that, then attempted to appeal to #gamergate in 2014 with how his gaming site was going to be super ethical (it wasn't). Then claimed he was attacked by women for being pro-gamergate - when really he was being attacked because he had forced himself into a girls place after a date or two, and was squatting there. It also turned out Revue Labs was getting paid under the table to promote games as well. He's posting here as @rageofthemage so beware his crocodile tears about how he didn't intend any of this. http://theralphretort.com/ethics-steve-tom-sawyer-doesnt-have-any/ http://theralphretort.com/side-story-steve-tom-sawyer-faces-music/ Oh hey look! Mike Kennedy owned a 1% stake in Revue Labs and was an "Executive Advisor" for this venture too! Funny that...it's almost like it's a pattern for them to set up shitty half baked ventures and then cry and throw everyone under the bus but themselves when it inevitably goes wrong.