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You may or may not know that I'm part of the committee on the backer group sorting out a legal response to this gakfest.

If there are any backers reading this that don't do Facebook - we are currently looking for

CALIFORNIA based backers who DO NOT want to take PB's 'deal'. Nuff said. If that's you, get in touch, please.

cannonfodr wrote:

 Swabby wrote:
December makes sense to me because they started dropping RRT from their weekly update, but that is only circumstantial at best.

Didn't Kevin say at some point that they had to have a 2017 release? I can't find it in an update so now checking the weekly spam. Previously we all thought it was the usual hyperbole, but in light of the current information, it could indicate when they knew.

edit: found it. nov 23 2016 weekly update.

UPDATE: Robotech® RPG Tactics™ – 2017 release
For us, 2017 is a must release deadline for Wave Two. We are still waiting on a few new quotes before we can offer anything concrete. Working on a few new Robotech® books, too. Brand new stuff that would create new factions and fun, as well as plotting organized play. More when details are hammered out.

At the time I speculated that it was because HG was pressuring them to release the game or lose the license.

All this does is make the tight timeline they have set for their trade in deal look even worse. I have zero sympathy for whatever insanity is going on in that warehouse right now.

winterdyne wrote:
You may or may not know that I'm part of the committee on the backer group sorting out a legal response to this gakfest.

If there are any backers reading this that don't do Facebook - we are currently looking for

CALIFORNIA based backers who DO NOT want to take PB's 'deal'. Nuff said. If that's you, get in touch, please.

California has always been a favorite state to launch class action lawsuits from.

Unfortunately, I only piggybacked for this, so I'm not your man. I hope you find a good lead plaintiff

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Unfortunately, I only piggybacked for this, so I'm not your man. I hope you find a good lead plaintiff

I uh, don't know what you mean.

Oh, uh, sorry. Nevermind my rambling above.

So finally got a response from PB concerning my counter-offer. Looks to be a bog-standard form though. Anyways with regards to me requesting the prototypes instead of wave 2 or wave 1, here is their response:

Unfortunately, no we cannot release these. Robotech® is a licensed property. Palladium does not own the rights to exploit the characters, images and I.P.s of Robotech® in any way.

Not sure how this applies to the prototypes and if they can't sell those, how are they selling the RRT stuff? I guess Wayne or someone will 'gift' these to Kevin in recognition of all the hard work he's put in driving this project into the ground. I'm guessing they expect to sell these for a bit from Kev's ebay store later.

They probably thought you meant the files.

They may not have gotten licensor approval to sell them.

They will sit in Kevin’s personal collection of his “accomplishments”.

So uh, it's March 17, shouldn't the liquidation sale have been announced? maybe?

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
So uh, it's March 17, shouldn't the liquidation sale have been announced? maybe?

Nope. Not when you take the deadline into account.

They want to make sure they can sucker in every backer they can in the exchange, and lock them down, before they start the fire sale, and have to deal with people screaming that they are having to exchange at a similar if not higher price than the backers are getting.

EDIT : That's not to say there won't be screaming when that inevitably happens, and that's arguably justifiable. But forethought isn't something Kevin is known for, obviously.

Well sent my information to facebook group for the lawsuit.We shell see what come of it. I really like see a full disclosure of the Robotech Tactics Rpg KS and where did all money go. The only way will know is when they force it out Kev. The funny thing when the fire sale starts do you sell everything they have? I know when they did 50 % sale back in Dec 2017 , they only had about 100 sale from it.

DEZOAT wrote:
Well sent my information to facebook group for the lawsuit.We shell see what come of it. I really like see a full disclosure of the Robotech Tactics Rpg KS and where did all money go. The only way will know is when they force it out Kev. The funny thing when the fire sale starts do you sell everything they have? I know when they did 50 % sale back in Dec 2017 , they only had about 100 sale from it.

That's the thing. If there was no misappropriation, and all the money was expended on legitimate sources, and there's no money remaining, that'd arguably be a surefire way to head off any litigation, and would get any potential Michigan AG/FTC challenge.

That they refuse to do so (despite Kevin saying they had documentary evidence proving no misuse) isn't concrete proof, but it makes my bs detector go off the fething rails.

As I've said before, the numbers for production and importation costs don't make sense for the volume of backer rewards, but do make sense for the volume of backer rewards AND the retail contingent. I see this as a misappropriation, as it's gambling with backer funds on an auxillary product with no guarantee of return to fundraise for the completion of Wave 2, but I could see how they could argue against that in a courtroom. However, and this is only speculation, but it's not a hard reach for these donkey caves, if the money from the sales of the retail product went into general revenue, rather than back onto the Kickstarter ledger, that's fraud, plain and simple.

Also, as a side note, after the Wave split was announced, I recall someone from PB saying that Wave 2 shipping would be done at PB's expense (I unfortunately cannot find the source in the mound of bs that is PB's utterances). So as that's essentially what this exchange is, why aren't PB covering that cost? It doesn't matter that the Kickstarter is out of funds. It was never supposed to come from that funding anyway.

Which brings up a financial question, if anyone is familiar with banking practices. Is it within the rules of chargebacks that they can be used for expenses that the company has said they would waive? Would backers be able to make a chargeback on the shipping costs that PB said they would cover (if the documentation is found), or would paying said shipping costs be agreeing to a new set of terms? I know people are having trouble getting chargebacks on a failure to deliver the product, because of the timeframe, but this is a much more recent charge. This would allow international backers to not be as dicked as they currently are.

As to the final point DEZOAT said, I'd definitely be interested to see just how anemic sales of the cores were, when like they said, 100 sales at 50% off was considered a big thing, and they've opened up the sale to the general public, because they feel they can "cover" the backer exchanges regardless of public volume.

Another fun fact; wave 1 rewards sufficient to fulfil rewards were calculated at a shipping volume of 4 containers fairly early on.

9 containers of wave 1 product were shipped from china.

Where'd the cash come to pay for the extra 5?

Guys, it's no accident that PB is still sitting on 4 containers worth of Wave 1 product in their warehosue...

The other thing about the money... if Palladium paid full retail ($100) for each box to be made for each backer.. it would only come up to 500k.. about a third of the money..
Not saying there was other things evolved or some backers bought more or less.. but it seems that something is off with the math with all the money gone before
the end of wave one.



Edit.. bad math... i guess Kevin math.. but still you see the point of how much money is spent on the cost of each box at the manufacturing level

winterdyne wrote:
Another fun fact; wave 1 rewards sufficient to fulfil rewards were calculated at a shipping volume of 4 containers fairly early on.

9 containers of wave 1 product were shipped from china.

Where'd the cash come to pay for the extra 5?

I covered that a couple pages back.

PB claim they spent ~$220K on importation and backer shipping.
PB have stated Wave 1 backer shipping cost ~$150K.
Therefore ~$70K was spent on importation from China.

If that $70K was for all 9 containers, that's a fairly high, but in the bounds of realistic importation cost of just under ~$8K per container.
If that $70K was for the 4 backer containers, that's just under $18K per container, which is an absurd amount, and PB got royally hosed, and I'd want to see documentation to that before accepting it.

It also means at that rate, PB would have had to spend almost $90K of their own money just on importation of their own retail product. Which... yeah.

That's why I do not accept the numbers PB have provided as legitimate. They're fishier than a giant space tuna.

 Genoside07 wrote:
The other thing about the money... if Palladium paid full retail ($100) for each box to be made for each backer.. it would only come up to 500k.. about a third of the money..
Not saying there was other things evolved or some backers bought more or less.. but it seems that something is off with the math with all the money gone before
the end of wave one.

Yeah, that too. The numbers make a kind of sense if it accounts for the 17,500 core boxes ordered, but not if it only accounts for the 7K for backer rewards (that's the more likely number).

So PB appears to have used backer money to pay for their retail, but haven't accounted for that in their revenue totals. So either they have sold literally nothing, or that money didn't get put back into the Kickstarter.

PB claim that $1,583,451.03 was raised on this project. That includes the $1,442,312 raised on the initial pledge, the ~$120K they claim they raised in the Backerkit (they said it was a little more than the Kickstarter fees, which were according to the piechart, $110K and change), and the $60K they ponied up initially. Which totals $1.62M. So they've already taken $40K out of circulation. That's why I have MASSIVE issues with their costings.

Which brings up yet another fishy number. The pie chart lists 2% for Pledge Manager fees. Which equates to over $30K. I'm sorry, but I have to call bs on that. Even taking into account overheads, the pledge manager taking 25% of the money raised stinks.

I wonder what happened to the poor souls who ordered the painted RRT sets off the KS? Does anyone know if they even got their Wave 1 stuff?

Morgan, About the pledge manager fees, yeah, those are probably the only likely honest numbers here.

Backerkit has currently 3 different plans, the "essentials" plan is 2% of the campaign funds + 5% of the backerkit funds with 199$ setup fees, the "professional" plan is 3% of the campaign funds with 199$ setup fees, for the third you have to contact them.

https://www.backerkit.com/plans

I have no idea what the fees were back then, but considering what they are now, 2% is totally possible.

Other than that, yeah, none of the numbers add up to anything resembling sensible.

Koltoroc wrote:
Morgan, About the pledge manager fees, yeah, those are probably the only likely honest numbers here.

Backerkit has currently 3 different plans, the "essentials" plan is 2% of the campaign funds + 5% of the backerkit funds with 199$ setup fees, the "professional" plan is 3% of the campaign funds with 199$ setup fees, for the third you have to contact them.

https://www.backerkit.com/plans

I have no idea what the fees were back then, but considering what they are now, 2% is totally possible.

Other than that, yeah, none of the numbers add up to anything resembling sensible.

That just seems ridiculous! Having a fixed fee based on the complexity of service, and a portion of the money raised in the backerkit (as they have to do the processing) is reasonable. But 2% of the Kickstarter take as well? That's just obscene.

If PB's backers had added those funds during the campaign instead of the Pledge Manager, it'd mean PB would have lost money on the Pledge Manager.

I guess that's one of the reasons I'm not rich. Exploitation rackets are not my thing. That if both PB and DreamPod9 used the same pledge manager, PB would have paid $29,000, and DP9 $3,200, for the same service, plus a percentage of sales fees it has to process. At least with Kickstarter, Kickstarter has to host all the failures. But Backerkit by it's very nature, only has to deal with successive Kickstarters. I just don't get it.

Morgan Vening wrote:

Koltoroc wrote:
Morgan, About the pledge manager fees, yeah, those are probably the only likely honest numbers here.

Backerkit has currently 3 different plans, the "essentials" plan is 2% of the campaign funds + 5% of the backerkit funds with 199$ setup fees, the "professional" plan is 3% of the campaign funds with 199$ setup fees, for the third you have to contact them.

https://www.backerkit.com/plans

I have no idea what the fees were back then, but considering what they are now, 2% is totally possible.

Other than that, yeah, none of the numbers add up to anything resembling sensible.

That just seems ridiculous! Having a fixed fee based on the complexity of service, and a portion of the money raised in the backerkit (as they have to do the processing) is reasonable. But 2% of the Kickstarter take as well? That's just obscene.

If PB's backers had added those funds during the campaign instead of the Pledge Manager, it'd mean PB would have lost money on the Pledge Manager.

I guess that's one of the reasons I'm not rich. Exploitation rackets are not my thing. That if both PB and DreamPod9 used the same pledge manager, PB would have paid $29,000, and DP9 $3,200, for the same service, plus a percentage of sales fees it has to process. At least with Kickstarter, Kickstarter has to host all the failures. But Backerkit by it's very nature, only has to deal with successive Kickstarters. I just don't get it.

Likely someone sat down to figure out the costs associated with running the infrastructure and making sure it works and realized it would be in excess of what they would have to pay here, especially as most KS projects are not run by companies with the spare capital to employ an IT department and "entry-level" IT folks are around 40k/year in costs. You could make an argument you wouldn't need them for an entire year, but you also don't want "entry-level" people doing it so the lower-time and higher-skill/experience curves will likely even out to around the same overall cost.

That need for greater expertise is down to the fact pledge managers are *critical* to fulfillment of a project. If the interface is clunky or unclear that's a lot of support hours consumed helping people tell you why they gave you money (and most projects at a large scale are not creator-only, so those support people answering questions will need to be paid). Improper management can also cause enormous problems, as I suspect Hawk Wargames and Mantic both were bitten by database errors at different points where a fraction of pledges disappeared from view. This obviously has disastrous follow-ons in terms of ordering and fulfillment to discover you have X dozens of orders that weren't part of the plan nor stock order, to say nothing of the justified anger of backers that they did their part and now are waiting even longer.

So yeah, the sticker price can look a bit shocking, but compared to the cost and risks of doing it yourself and botching things it doesn't sound particularly egregious for the likely effort involved. If it was, there'd be other companies doing the same thing for less; competition and all that.

I await PB claiming that the excess stock was in case they overlooked their entire backer population on fullfillment, with a few for packages getting lost...just in case. It seems like the type of ham-fisted excuse they'd attempt to employ anyway.

This was directly stated by Kevin in update 217:

"In theory, by making and releasing the Wave One products to the retail market, we could sell enough of them to produce Wave Two rewards. Even if Palladium saw little or no initial profit from it, we figured we would make up for it with later sales as the game line grew and found its place in the market. Not ideal, but it seemed like our best choice at the time.

But after the initial release of Wave One products, for a variety of reasons, including the high piece count to make each miniature and the delay of Wave Two which would have improved the gaming experience, sales stalled. And with sales stagnating, our ability to produce Wave Two stalled with it."

They were absolutely banking on selling all that wave one stock to produce wave 2 and have admitted as such openly now.

Indeed.

This said, the two-step strategy is actually fairly sensible.

Executed properly, the kickstarter funds or recoups the majority of costs of tooling of BOTH waves and very minimal production of a first wave - enough for rewards, plus retail stock for the sale phase.

The first retail phase of orders fund production of second wave (backers and retail). Without the tooling lump sum hit this requires a smaller 'chunk' of cash and provides a tighter timescale for delivery. At this point, the kickstarter is effectively complete, but most likely operating a small to medium loss (partial production budget).

Optimally, second wave 'rewards' should be produced in the first delivery phase, and the second wave production is entirely retail stock.

The second retail phase is where the project should hit profit, recouping the production budget and starting to raise capital for another round of tooling to grow the product line.

One of the messups here is that tooling wasn't completed for everything in that first production promise for some reason, meaning that the retail phase had to produce a significant chunk of cash.

And honestly, I'm sure it's not an uncommon practice.

I love what Dwarven Forge does every year, they make incredible terrain bits that I use whenever I can find an excuse to do so. Do I assume that when they get their order in, they get a quote for (hypothetically) 100,000 floor tiles, and then pay for the 20,000 they need for backers with KS money, and the 80,000 with their own, for every single of the dozens or hundreds of tile types they produce each campaign?

Probably not, but aside from a quarter or two of backsliding in one or two of their campaigns so far, they also deliver an incredible product, usually about on time or even a little early. There's no demand to crack their books and get an accounting of every last penny, because they've earned trust that they'll do right by the backers, and usually in a shorter time frame than most Million+ campaigns manage to pull off.

That's not to justify the practice, simply to note that I wouldn't be surprised if it was fairly common for many of the big and regular names. It's even a running gag that some companies may or may not (or are proven to) run Campaign C to pay for B which was in part used to finish funding A. It's a dangerous game and can snowball out of control, but the clusterfeths are the ones that draw attention. The ones like Reaper and Dwarven Forge and CMON and whatnot that seem to basically run hot for the campaign and then 6-18 (or whatever) months later deliver don't get that kind of scrutiny because it isn't necessary.

To swing back around, that they did feth up so hard is what demands the extra attention. If they'd been up front with us over all these years, it might not command quite so much bandwidth from the community, but they didn't, and they've entirely brought this upon themselves.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
What I continue to find hilarious is that they asked for 100k to produce essentially the Core Box and a few expansions, got ~1.5m to do that plus so much more, and then failed to do much more (if any more) than the original goal. (I'm aware of differences, this is just a napkin math'd ballpark, things like Rick's LE figure were in from Day One and are MIA, so clearly it's not a perfect 1:1 contrast)

It also makes me wonder how this might have gone if they'd walked before they ran. Like, just gone with the Core contents and a handful of expansions, then come back a year or two later (ideally after completing that) for the extra stuff. It might well still have been a mess, and full of complaints about doubled mold costs and increasing shipping rates, and yes obviously we wouldn't have committed nearly as much money, but that in a way would've worked to their favour as well; less ire due to less 'skin in the game', that kind of thing.

It's an impossible to prove hypothetical, it might've even led to a swifter and more obvious implosion, but I've always pondered if they weren't a victim of their own success in many ways, and while I still feel they're culpable and have misled (if not defrauded on several levels) thousands of backers, in a way it's darkly funny that doing so well might have a massive impact on their business (if not its ability to stay in business).

Good points there!

I mean, when was the last time PB had a success this big, if ever?

Doesn't excuse them from anything here, and it certainly won't shield them from anything in a legal sense, but...anything in the 80's or 90's ever break this big for them?

Did they ever have a year with sales of $1.4M in it?

No.

Morgan you asked about Palladium and Ninja Division eating the extra shipping costs of wave 2 , it was in update 128, quote
"Splitting the Kickstarter shipments into two waves will cost us more money, but Palladium Books and Ninja Division are willing to eat those extra costs to get this great product into your hands. We are committed to Robotech® and you.".

Er,,,seems to beg a lie about being on the fumes of the kickstarter funds and being broke themselves?

Reading over these early updates makes interesting reading especially with hindsight. Prior to the update (the split) kevin was bemoaning delays but was stating ALL tooling was done - did he mean for the soon to be proposed wave 1 rather than everything? Even with the split there is never any mention of any issues , remember wave 2 was supposed to follow six months after wave 1.

So many times in these updates we get told all tooling has been done and they are only waiting to green light it, the tone jars very heavily with what they are saying now about being spent up.

I wonder if it was the postage cost that tripped Kevin up in his master plan, I mean he was not expecting the $150k plus it cost and I just wonder if that money was the money to get wave 2 rolliing, having gambled at least that probably more on the extra retail run using the kickstarter funding?

I am hoping that given Palladium do not own the Kickstarter page that they cannot get it deleted as there is an awful lot of damning evidence against Kevin and Palladium there, which I believe they would love to erase fro hisory, leaving them free to throw everyone else under the bus.

Don't worry, it's all been archived.