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 Grot 6 wrote:
Am I to understand it that there is still more from the KS to be released from Super Dungeon Explore?

Nothing from the Super Dungeon Explore: Legends KS has been delivered. Nothing.

And from the looks of it, nothing will ever be delivered. A $1.2M failure.

All of this news makes me wonder what went on behind the scenes back with the RRT KS and how much ND screwed things up there - not that blissful ignorant Kevin would have done any better, but just how much ND’s bungles added to the pile.

I'm sure a lot. We know for a fact that ND convinced Kevin to go with multipart even though he didn't want to due to cost (they had to resculpt everything for it for one). That alone is probably the largest factor that caused the games failure.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I'm sure a lot. We know for a fact that ND convinced Kevin to go with multipart even though he didn't want to due to cost (they had to resculpt everything for it for one). That alone is probably the largest factor that caused the games failure.

As a licensed property, there's also licensor approval - they could also have weighed in on whether multi-part would have been required.

So Harmony Gold?

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I'm sure a lot. We know for a fact that ND convinced Kevin to go with multipart even though he didn't want to due to cost (they had to resculpt everything for it for one). That alone is probably the largest factor that caused the games failure.

I followed the Robotech KS very closely (as some of the folks posting in this thread can attest to) and I never saw anything like that ever posted by a principle party either in the facebook group, the KS comments, here on dakka, on the palladium forums, the weekly newsletters, official updates, etc. It's possible that I somehow missed something mindblowingly important like that (and apparently the entirety of the discussion afterwards on multiple sites across the internet) but it's not likely. I've seen Palladium sycophants like NMI hint at it in an attempt to desperately deflect as much blame as possible from Palladium but, judging from the outright lies he has told in the past regarding anything Robotech, I wouldn't trust that type of source as "a fact".

Don't get me wrong... I fully agree that ND likely played an important role in the failure and their subsequent failures sans Palladium back up that impression of their incompetence but Palladium was the company that cashed the checks and bragged about approving every little nook and cranny of the designs after hours of studious attention. Even after ND left the picture four years ago, Palladium continued to mislead and screw up for years until they lost the license. I'm sorry but all the info we have indicate Palladium was probably the largest factor that caused the game's failure.

 warboss wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I'm sure a lot. We know for a fact that ND convinced Kevin to go with multipart even though he didn't want to due to cost (they had to resculpt everything for it for one). That alone is probably the largest factor that caused the games failure.

I followed the Robotech KS very closely (as some of the folks posting in this thread can attest to) and I never saw anything like that ever posted by a principle party either in the facebook group, the KS comments, here on dakka, on the palladium forums, the weekly newsletters, official updates, etc. It's possible that I somehow missed something mindblowingly important like that (and apparently the entirety of the discussion afterwards on multiple sites across the internet) but it's not likely. I've seen Palladium sycophants like NMI hint at it in an attempt to desperately deflect as much blame as possible from Palladium but, judging from the outright lies he has told in the past regarding anything Robotech, I wouldn't trust that type of source as "a fact".

Don't get me wrong... I fully agree that ND likely played an important role in the failure and their subsequent failures sans Palladium back up that impression of their incompetence but Palladium was the company that cashed the checks and bragged about approving every little nook and cranny of the designs after hours of studious attention. Even after ND left the picture four years ago, Palladium continued to mislead and screw up for years until they lost the license. I'm sorry but all the info we have indicate Palladium was probably the largest factor that caused the game's failure.

I'm not trying to absolve palladium of the failures where they had failures but I explicitly remember an email from Kevin, outside of the KSer I believe, where he talked about the move to multi-part and being convinced by ND that it would be the bees knees--this was shortly after the KSer closed so if it was deflection he knew years ago that it was a poor decision. I stated that this was what caused it to fail as it was the first domino so to speak. Kevin could have stopped the cascade many times but didn't but this was what kicked off things as the multipart was a failure in terms of cost, delivery and wrong crowd.

 Monkeysloth wrote:

I'm not trying to absolve palladium of the failures where they had failures but I explicitly remember an email from Kevin, outside of the KSer I believe, where he talked about the move to multi-part and being convinced by ND that it would be the bees knees--this was shortly after the KSer closed so if it was deflection he knew years ago that it was a poor decision. I stated that this was what caused it to fail as it was the first domino so to speak. Kevin could have stopped the cascade many times but didn't but this was what kicked off things as the multipart was a failure in terms of cost, delivery and wrong crowd.

An email to you? If you still have it, a screenshot would be great given how little actual honest discussion Palladium engaged in for 5 years regarding the project.

No it was a mailing list from palladium.

 LunarSol wrote:

 jake wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Hm. I'm actually happy with the first RK kickstarter. Sure, at the time it was annoying that it was a year late and some minis were poor, but it was the first generation of tabletop kickstarters and it later turned out this was the norm for all KS projects. The game itself was good and innovative and everything promised was actually delivered. Soda Pop even replaced one of the exclusive Penny Arcade promos for me that was missing an arm eventhough I complained more than a year after delivery.

You may have been lucky. A lot of backers go really poor quality miniatures. we were stuck with over $1000 worth of stuff that looked like it had been melted with a hair dryer.

It REALLY varied depending on the faction. Early, soft, PVC, so a lot of mold shrinkage meant that bigger models held up better than the smaller ones and some of their scaling was iffy. I got the pirates, knights, and some of the student stuff. The students were generally small and lacked detail, particularly on the faces. Some were hilariously tiny but SPM fixed that. The base knight unit was a mess of tons of tiny parts and were why I gave up on assembly rather quickly. The pirates were overall pretty good though, with really only Squall being a notably poor figure. A few suffer from being obviously beginner sculpts (never daring to cross into the 3rd dimension) but even the small based stuff was pretty good. I focused on these guys when we recently started playing and.... not too bad really. The spec ops and Noh were also fine from what I played against. Haven't seen much of the racers in person.

It actually varied a lot from customer to customer. It seemed to vary by waves. Some customers (like you, I guess) got models that were mostly fine. Some customers got models that, as I said before, looked like they had been melted by a hairdryer. My friends and i got every model from every faction, and about 80% of them were like that. Malformed limbs, no details, no faces, sometimes completely smooth bodies. Hands that never fully formed, parts that were just globs of plastic. Quite a few backers complained about this, but there were always other people who said their models were fine, and for some reason assumed this was also the case for everyone else despite many complaints. Eventually the "The models are not amazing, but they're fine" people drowned out the "Our models are melted and totally unsuable people.

We eventually had to just throw away our stuff. It was unplayable and unsellable. I'd glad that wasn't the case for you, but it was definitely the case for a lot of us.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Hm. I'm actually happy with the first RK kickstarter.

FWIW, I know the RK1 stuff is a little OT, but we backed for mercs, ogres, bikers and more, and quality was generally par for the time - the models basically met expectations. OTOH, the game itself was very CCG-like and the color/shape selection was poorly distinguished. Building was bad, due to the fibrous material (same as Sedition Wars, ugh!). We sold basically everything almost immediately, only keeping a few models because "cool!" and were very glad just to get our money back.

> It seemed to vary by waves.

Not surprised. The quality of a resin miniature depends on the skill of the person casting it, and this includes Q&A of the figure and mold itself.So if you have more skilled casters on some waves and less skilled on others, the other waves are more likely to have poorly casted figures. IIRC, Finecast failed in part because they didn't have enough trained casters. Also, of course, you can outsource casting to different companies, so can have different results.

I remember the email, or maybe it was one of Kevin's updates on the palladium site that talked about being talked in to multi-part. It's been a while... but I do remember that as well.

For Relic Knights, my group got every faction as well. It was very mixed. The Noh were all great. Sharp details, nice figures. The rest, not so much. Doctrine and Speed circuite being the worst offenders. Almost all had no faces... the Robots/ bikes etc were fine... but the people!!

My Noh were only serviceable. The detail wasn't great, but due to the size I was able to at least discern what was what.
All my Doctrine got tossed as I couldn't tell what I was looking at.

I wasn't even a Kickstarter backer!

I would say most (if not all) RK1 human sized models were.... not that great...quite far from it actually.

It seemed to me that the worst models in RK1 were, qualitywise, those models that were metal before the KS.

The metal models were transferred into plastics and the shrinkage was really bad.

The RK1 was my second big disapointment in KS (the first one was Seduction Wars: battle for Alabama or whatever it was...)

So I didn't take part in RK2 (yay for me?)

I did take part in SDE: Forgotten king and was happy with what I received, so in my head the RK1 failure was separate from SDE success. So I had no misgivings on taking part in SDE: Legends.

Turns out, SDE: Legends seems to be the first KS that will not deliver that I've backed. I've backed some duds like RK1, but even that did deliver. So this is the first non-delivery for me.

Relic knights 2 will be the second non funded kickstarter I took part in. The first one I lost around $100... Relic Knights was well over $400. It hurts but it was a lesson learned about kickstarter in general.

Since then I have not backed another kickstarter. I went from backing 1-2 a month to not backing any over the last 4 months or so. Honestly I don't think I will again. It would take a lot to even get me interested in going on the site again.

angel of death 007 wrote:
I went from backing 1-2 a month to not backing any over the last 4 months or so. Honestly I don't think I will again. It would take a lot to even get me interested in going on the site again.

1 or 2 each month? How much stuff did you get? With that kind of volume, I am sure you would have "enough" pretty quickly as things come in. Then you would naturally be more selective going forward.

How long do we keep two seperate threads on this topic going?

With spikeybits promoting Prodos/Archon's AVP again on youtube, I was curious if any backers here on dakka got the remainder of their pledges since Jan 2018 when Prodos admitted that only 20% of their 2013 AVP kickstarter backers had gotten their pledges in full.

Hopefully we eventually get some news on how Prodos/Archon plans to dispose of the miniatures they've already cast here.

skarsol wrote:
Hopefully we eventually get some news on how Prodos/Archon plans to dispose of the miniatures they've already cast here.

Unless they come to some agreement, the only thing they can unfortunately do is destroy them. They can't even sell what they manufactured to recoup costs without an agreement from the main license holder. Even if they could, that would leave a bad taste because it basically becomes a wash for them. For a business they would usually destroy them, then claim it as a business loss which would be a better benefit to the company... not to those wanting the models unfortunately.

 warboss wrote:
With spikeybits promoting Prodos/Archon's AVP again on youtube, I was curious if any backers here on dakka got the remainder of their pledges since Jan 2018 when Prodos admitted that only 20% of their 2013 AVP kickstarter backers had gotten their pledges in full.

I did. I could not find a third party retailer selling Atillas, so I ordered one from Prodos store when they were cutting the line and got my female Predators and Youngbloods along with it.

 warboss wrote:
With spikeybits promoting Prodos/Archon's AVP again on youtube, I was curious if any backers here on dakka got the remainder of their pledges since Jan 2018 when Prodos admitted that only 20% of their 2013 AVP kickstarter backers had gotten their pledges in full.

I received everything from my pledge, Real Aliens Ain't From Mars level. The main core box I picked up from GenCon, the other extras shipped later. I also received my Wave 2 and 3 items, twice even.

Note: For Wave 2 I did take advantage of ordering other items from them when they offered. I ordered Warzone Resurrection miniatures, using my coupons and credits from them. They shipped the first wave 2 items with that order.

They appeared to have an issue with their PM because I got an email notification that wave 2 had shipped, a few months later after already receiving them. Other Kickstarters have had similar issues when they went to audit their mail lists. I just thought it was a hiccup in the system and it was them updating their records that it had shipped since it was combined with an order. A couple weeks later though Wave 2 stuff came again. I had a similar thing happen with Wave 3 shipment items as well.

I did not order terrain and took a credit for the clear predators during wave 2 when they offered credits.

 Dark Severance wrote:

skarsol wrote:
Hopefully we eventually get some news on how Prodos/Archon plans to dispose of the miniatures they've already cast here.

Unless they come to some agreement, the only thing they can unfortunately do is destroy them. They can't even sell what they manufactured to recoup costs without an agreement from the main license holder. Even if they could, that would leave a bad taste because it basically becomes a wash for them. For a business they would usually destroy them, then claim it as a business loss which would be a better benefit to the company... not to those wanting the models unfortunately.

Yes, it's significantly cheaper and easier to trash the product than it is to invest more time and energy doing one-off sales and delivery. Unless someone is willing to purchase a bulk lot of, say, $50k worth of product in one order, I don't see any of it making its way to end-users.

I believe Prodos/Archon can liquidate the product to a third party, but the problem is doing so as generic SF figures means their value drops from $500k worth of Officially-licensed Starfinder miniatures down to $100k worth of generic sci-fi models. I'm not sure how that works, accounting-wise, and whether that would be preferable from a business standpoint, though I assume getting pennies on the dollar is better than paying pennies on the dollar.

OTOH, I'm pretty sure that Prodos/Archon doesn't want to see SPM/ND purchase the $500k worth of stuff for pennies on the dollar, either. Hence the reason that this stuff tends to get trashed.

The Starfinder stuff can go in the bin for all I care. ~

Was Starfinder any good? Will anything of value be lost?

I’m curious too about the Starfinder minis. I’ve seen some ship minis in the local FLGS, was there supposed to be a big line of ships and/or characters?

 Stormonu wrote:
I’m curious too about the Starfinder minis. I’ve seen some ship minis in the local FLGS, was there supposed to be a big line of ships and/or characters?

The ones you saw were probably the prepainteds. The ones here are something else.

 warboss wrote:
With spikeybits promoting Prodos/Archon's AVP again on youtube, I was curious if any backers here on dakka got the remainder of their pledges since Jan 2018 when Prodos admitted that only 20% of their 2013 AVP kickstarter backers had gotten their pledges in full.

Got mine, took a lot of emails but eventually got my stuff after the big post on beasts of war.