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Ok so after reading the latest events regarding the Robotech KS this morning and still seeing Prodos fething AvP backers around. I went to check my emails and had an update for WFG's Devils run 2nd kickstarter to see the following advising they have been let down and that some packages believed sent have not been by Wayland Games (just including the summary from the end for ease)

" So the conversation was interesting.

1. They have decided not to do fulfilment anymore, although negated to tell me.

2. they have closed their warehouse and stripped it as they refit/expand, meaning that any orders anyone places on their website will not get fulfilled in the next 2 week (best case)

3. they expect a backlog to clear in 6 weeks (best case)

4. Our stuff would be at the end of that.

Long and short, I will be driving to Southend tomorrow to pick up the parcels (weather permitting) and we will work over the weekend to get them out via Shippers such as Landmark or UPS. They will be tracked therefore. I will share screen grabs of all parcels affected on Monday.

I can assure you that we will not be working with Wayland Games again in any format (whether it be as them as distributor, sales outlet for us, or us as a caster for WWX etc.). Therefore do not order Devil's Run product from them unless it says it is in stock. 'Awaiting a restock' means they need to order from their supplier - this supplier will not be restocking them. If you do order anything from them expect to wait a considerable amount of time to get it (no matter what it is).

I am personally shocked at the arrogance of the higher management of Wayland Games and the big boy tactics they are currently using in the industry. I will be boycotting their products including Wild West Exodus and all they acquired from the failure of Spartan Games, all of which are being sold under the banner "Warcradle Studios'.

I'm really sorry about this, but I guess Word Forge Games has been lucky to this point, with its choice of partners. People often warned me they were poor at service, but I always felt they looked after us, and I think my contact did.

Mark "

So my initial take away is if you have pre orders with Wayland for any new releases for the next couple of weeks good luck and while I am not sure about the volume of WWX stuff wfg made for them you probably don't want to be ordering out of stock stuff in the short term.

I then though as per the title we seem to be plagued by companies even the larger ones, not just start ups who seem to lack the morals of an ally cat and why. I think it's partly a customer thing as there are people who have to have there shinnies even if they know there is "history" with a company for example Mierce,CMON and Archon being prime examples.(I am not implying what Wayland did is as bad as these guys but they are obviously the biggest examples that people may have heard of.)

But then you have stuff that has happened not to customers but with the way Companies have acted to each other or there staff, such as TTCombats frankly shoddy treatment of Hawk staff, Prodos fething over White Dragon Minatures for whom they were supposed to be mold making and producing stuff or Mealstrom/Mierce nearly taking down one of the UK distributors to fund there future plans.

At the extreme end you also have "Tony Reddy" and his ilk of actual outright fraudsters and the delightful Paolo Parente and his shaddy as feth business dealings and I keep remembering more it's actually worse than I thought when I started writing this.

Now you have Wayland trying to throw there weight around and the ever faithful GW after nearly 3 decades still "forgetting" to send independents there new release stock.

So seriously are we easy marks as wargamers or is there just something that attracts them other than Kickstarter I know there is a a big difference to sharp practices and border line fraud but we seem to have examples of the whole range just in the last decade or less that seems out of proportion to other hobbies/businesses I have dealt with.

No. It's a poor market to exploit and there are way better ways to make a lot of money at the expense of others. I'd argue its more the opposite. It's a market that attracts dreamers with big ideas and impractical understandings of how businesses run. They're often smart, but not really educated in investment and tend to over promise and get in over their head. From there you see all sorts of flailings, from egos that can't admit they were wrong to breakdowns over the pressure of failure. I think the outright scam, take the money and run, narrative is very very rare overall.

Edited for now.

No, it's just the small scale of the industry as a whole makes it easier to keep track and become aware of, and the fact that it personally matters to people because it's a hobby many invest not only cash but a great deal of time and mental energy into.

The only other industry in my lifetime I've even had half as much knowledge of not just the companies but the individuals behind those names would be mobile phones, which represents the overwhelming majority of my working life to this point. Consequently if any of those entities or individuals do anything shady, I'm much more likely to take notice and express an interest.

If some bloke somewhere is doing something untoward in the supply of aeroplane phalanges, it isn't going to really register.

 LunarSol wrote:
No. It's a poor market to exploit and there are way better ways to make a lot of money at the expense of others. I'd argue its more the opposite. It's a market that attracts dreamers with big ideas and impractical understandings of how businesses run. They're often smart, but not really educated in investment and tend to over promise and get in over their head. From there you see all sorts of flailings, from egos that can't admit they were wrong to breakdowns over the pressure of failure. I think the outright scam, take the money and run, narrative is very very rare overall.

Pretty much this, and whilst 'easy mark' is a bit of a stretch gamers do appear to be inexplicably trusting of 'fellow gamers'

There are many more occupations where the morally challenged really flock. Insurance, banking, politics...

SeanDrake wrote:
I think it's partly a customer thing as there are people who have to have there shinnies even if they know there is "history" with a company for example Mierce,CMON and Archon being prime examples.(I am not implying what Wayland did is as bad as these guys but they are obviously the biggest examples that people may have heard of.)

I definitely think this is a major aspect of why there are so many bad actors in the community. Prodos is a good example, even when they were freshly screwing over their AvP backers with the release of 2nd edition, people were still going crazy for their miniatures, putting quality over business practices. And the gorilla in the room, GW, basically used its fan base as toilet paper for the better part of a decade and people still bought the new shinnies. I am guilty of doing that with GW, so not pointing fingers, but our community attention spans sometimes seem limited purely to the lag between releases. I think those short memories give companies the opportunity to continue their bad practices. Why change if people will still line up and buy your stuff?

It is frustrating, because obviously there are some really cool items put out by horribly managed companies. Even when you know the company making something you want is gak, sometimes that thing is still enjoyable and fun. So do you boycott? Or hold your nose and buy anyway knowing you are essentially condoning said company's bad practices? And let's be honest, boycotting doesn't always feel effective, especially if the company/product you are boycotting is popular it can definitely become a lonely endeavor. It often feels like a no-win situation from a consumer stand point.

 LunarSol wrote:
No. It's a poor market to exploit and there are way better ways to make a lot of money at the expense of others. I'd argue its more the opposite. It's a market that attracts dreamers with big ideas and impractical understandings of how businesses run. They're often smart, but not really educated in investment and tend to over promise and get in over their head. From there you see all sorts of flailings, from egos that can't admit they were wrong to breakdowns over the pressure of failure. I think the outright scam, take the money and run, narrative is very very rare overall.

I think this is another big factor. More so with Kickstarter or opening a LGS, but this "shoot for the stars" naivety leads to a lot of problems and heartache.

Another factor are the support industries that help make these games. The people/companies in those industries are often as screwed up as the game companies themselves. I am talking about artists, writers, sculptors, casters, etc. who contribute to the creation of gaming products. Specifically those people who are contracted by a company to produce an element of a game. This aspect is especially problematic with Kickstarter. A campaign can easily go off the rails because a caster can't get their gak together and do the work you paid them for. Or you can't get a sculptor to sit down and sculpt the gak you paid them for. Or an artist can't finish the cover or interior work you paid them for. Basically, a lot of people not doing what you paid them to do, and giving excuse after excuse that you have to pass on to your customers.

And why does this happen? Because, as LunarSol stated, these people aren't necessarily business minded. They are artists, or artisans, and they don't always operate the way "traditional" businesses operate (money isn't always a motivating factor for these folks, and deadlines are merely suggestions). They are also often doing the work as a side gig, which further draws out the timelines and increases the likelihood of something being done half-assed, or not at all.

Ultimately, there are a lot of people fighting over a very niche market, trying to bring products to market with limited resources and often more hope than sense.

I'd add that wargaming is a lot closer to their customer than most products as well. Customers talk about the company, upcoming products, help fund kickstarters.

If you examine any other product as closely, you'd probably find much worse behaviour.

Ie: theres a brand of cheese I always buy. It has a nice re-zippable bag. A few months ago they started making bags with crappy zippers that wouldn't close. However, I don't follow them on facebook or talk about their product and upcoming cheeses online, and I can buy another brand pretty easily. If there was a community based around this cheese company like there are wargames, people would be throwing a fit and claiming their lives were destroyed by their dysfunctional zipper.

Nope, successful business men tend to get that way buy thinking of themselves first and others second,

big companies often act badly towards their smaller suppliers (do you buy discounted stuff 0 in the su0permarket? Guess who pays for it, the supplier and if they won't play ball and cut the price when the supermarket suggests it they get dropped or moved to the 'bad' bit of the shelves meaning their sales fall)

big companies tend to insist on paying for stuff 90 days after it's delivered (and often drag their heels on that too) which is enough of a burden that the government even considered making them pay interest on these forced 'loans' before giving up

we see it more here as we're looking closer at things,

we also see more people starting new businesses, and that means people who don't really understand business (so get stuff wrong, and then scramble to avoid folding so if they then fail it's very noticibly wrong)

Ever hear of Hanlon's Razor?

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Some of these people really have no business running a company.

Thing is, there are genuine examples of outright deception, whether it was the original intent or came after the fact to try and cover up an error, so that doesn't universally apply here.

Someone like Daniel Mandelbaum might be stupid, but there's no way one could argue that he wasn't deliberately trying to con people.

No. If you think the various scams in the wargaming industry rank anywhere near the top on the overall scale, well, you clearly aren't paying much attention to anything outside of the hobby.

That said, unless you're already in a very good spot, this industry is difficult, niche, yet highly saturated despite its niche.

More of the failures start as failures of stupidity rather than malice, but business being business, you try to cover your butts and it turns into varying levels of malice.

That statement is not accurate. There will be an update from Word Forged later.

I think you need to hire a PR guy, Wayland Games Bro.

Your retort doesn't come across anywhere near as convincing as the evidence against you, you just sound like your typical angry poster.

Plus I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be bickering about it on an open forum. Makes you look really bad. Just some friendly pointers before this gets locked.

Just my personal observations-

No, not a higher percentage. As mentioned before, Wall Street, real estate, politicians, etc are all equally or much worse. Look at contractors once.......................

As a person with some limited interactions within the industry I think kick starter contributes to the ease of failing. What other business can flood you with life changing money before you even have a product or means of production? In the past a business had to EARN your money. Now they get it first. And you are left counting on them to come through for you.

I do not think intentions are to defraud, but in the end the result is the same to the person harmed.

I have decided to limit or simply refuse to do business with any kick starter based companies. Simply put, I am tired of waiting and hoping to get paid. I do not attribute this to intentional wrong.


Interesting post, thanks for bringing this up.

Kickstarters only rarely fail because of intentional fraud. Much more frequently they fail because the people running them are either unprepared for success or made massive errors when calculating their expected costs. If you wanted to make a run of 500 copies of a boardgame you designed you could probably figure it out and maybe only be off by a few months if the factories in China screw something up. If you plan for 500 and suddenly get a couple thousand kickstarer backers that need fulfillment, things can go right out the window. You might not even have made enough money from the kickstarter to cover costs.

Delays make things worse. Every month delayed is another month in which you have to pay salaries of employees/contractors without making any money.

I've been part of a few failing kickstarters unfortunately. Looking down the list, common failure scenarios:

1) Failure to anticipate costs (even the successful ones often cite this)
2) Delays leading to dissolution/bankruptcy (some of these companies seem to only be able to operate a couple months past their expected turnaround date)
3) Stretch goals. (sadly, many try to meet them anyway sinking the entire project instead of just the stretch goal stuff)
4) Legal/Drama. I did have at least two die an ugly death because either a key contractor (like an artist) or a partner decided to sink the entire thing in a bunch of legal drama over profits or personality conflicts.

rich1231 wrote:
That statement is not accurate. There will be an update from Word Forged later.

That may well be the case, but I note there's currently a post on the UK X-Wing FB group about Wayland's bad online service which has a lot of negative comments about Wayland. In that context it's hard not to give a little bit of credence to what Word Forge are saying. That post appeared in the last 24 hours. No smoke without fire and all that.

As far as the OP is concerned, the obvious answer is "no". However, I will say that gaming seems to attract a lot of people who think they can run a business because they're knowledgeable/enthusiastic about the hobby. It probably doesn't help that, IME, the average gamer is on the more intelligent side of the population. So you have someone intelligent and enthusiastic who thinks that's all you need to succeed. What most of these owners tend to lack is business skills or professionalism. In some cases you may have morally challenged people, but I think mostly it's just people who are unable to separate hobby from business. It's also true to say gaming seems to attract a certain percentage of people with, shall we say, questionable social skills? If they end up running or working for a business that can be a problem. You also need to consider that once a person's livelihood is tied to their hobby-business enterprise that can change their attitude to what is and isn't acceptable.

 Ghaz wrote:
Ever hear of Hanlon's Razor?

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Some of these people really have no business running a company.

This.

It looks easy to run a business much like it looks easy to play drums. A lot of times people get in too deep and have no skill in customer service causing them to react in ways that appear shady.

One thing about smart people is that they're not good at noticing that they're not good at everything. Kind of like everyone else, except they're good at something so they feel justified in feeling like they would be good at something else.

I'm trying to get a game produced right now, and it's certainly a learning experience.

Not to contradict myself, but I wanted to mention that some industry folks are less than honest. Fraud? Not so sure.

It is pretty common for people to exaggerate a bit on a resume, or an online profile. In fact some might go as far as to say people are delusional when painting a picture of themselves.

You can bet that there are a lot of things behind the scenes that are NOT mentioned in the kick starter you are thinking of backing.

Is it fraud to not mention certain facts that might make backers have second thoughts? Would you like to know that the company behind a kick starter has massive debts? Or perhaps is involved in legal issues with licensing or any such other matters? Well that will not be mentioned. At best you will get some vague disclaimer about the Chinese New Year as a possible cause of a tiny delay.

I am not an industry insider by any means. (almost a recluse at this point). The tiny bits of rumors I hear should not be taken as indicative of the industry as a whole. I do think the majority of people are honest and simply bite off more than they can chew.

BUT- there are some people who really are deceptive. I wanted to clarify my previous comments so folks do not think everyone in the industry is a cherub with a bit of bad luck. Some are bad apples.

I would encourage everyone to post warnings and do what you can to police the hobby. The community can put a stop to repeat offenders and it really is a service to others. You may have lost out, but tell the world so others do not.

SeanDrake wrote:
At the extreme end you also have "Tony Reddy" and his ilk of actual outright fraudsters and the delightful Paolo Parente and his shaddy as feth business dealings and I keep remembering more it's actually worse than I thought when I started writing this.

What is the story with Paolo? Not that I don't believe it, just that nothing springs to mind like all the other examples. Considering the companies he has been involved with, there is certainly potential.

Presumably the Dust KS and related issues

I'm like many others in this hobby. I tried Wayland a couple of times, and ended up with products not delivered, regular lies from customer service and eventually gave up.

They are without doubt the single worst wargaming company I've had the misfortune of dealing with, and I make it a personal rule to not order from them at all now, and actively try to dissuade people from doing likewise.

You reap what you sow, and Wayland drags the names of other excellent firms down with it.

Not up on the Kickstarter side of things, but in truth I honestly can’t think of anyone I know with a good thing to say about Wayland as a third party seller.

Regularly hear of difficulties getting orders fulfilled.

Kevin Siembieda and Palladium were over promising and under delivering long before Kickstarter was a gleam in anyone's monitor, so it's like nothing has changed, really. This just gave them another platform to exploit, at least once anyway. But Palladium has had a vile reputation years; people just chose to ignore it for the Robotech Kickstarter. Now that Robotech is belly up, they'll need to find a new scam to keep the lights on there.

people just chose to ignore it for the Robotech Kickstarter

To be fair it was supposed to be a joint project with Ninja Division, it only went sideways when PB decided they could do cheaper and dropped Ninja Division. So it wasn't "those foolish backers" it was people going in with the understanding a competent miniatures company would be handling it.

Just puts me off Kickstarters in general. I know this debacle isn’t representative of the whole, but I’m squeamish about stuff with no oversight or recourse.

And that’s as someone well versed in such things as Section 75 and Chargebacks. The timescales alone will wreck many chargebacks. And as I’m rarely if ever paying the vendor directly, the necessary chain for a Section 75 claim is broken. (As does using PayPal for a transaction online)

Man why would you intentionally go into the tabletop business to be shady, so much of this hobby is built off creating a strong community and getting word of mouth around, you'd be better off just going into banking and putting people into debt they can never pay off.

 ScarletRose wrote:


To be fair it was supposed to be a joint project with Ninja Division, it only went sideways when PB decided they could do cheaper and dropped Ninja Division. So it wasn't "those foolish backers" it was people going in with the understanding a competent miniatures company would be handling it.

Don't 'fake quote' me. I never called the backers foolish. However, trying to hide under Ninja Division's skirt is no excuse for not being wary of this project. Even if they were working with GW or FFG, Palladium should not be trusted. The campaign failed because of Palladium, and its incompetence. This was a Palladium show, for their IP license, regardless of who was making the minis. Why people expected Siembieda to be another animal than the weasel he is stretches credulity.