Online support has nothing to do with coding. In other words its a smokescreen and they think that by using dev jargon they will be able to distract the customers from their failures.
I just love how they constantly repeat, "If you have any questions" get in touch, etc. Have they ever given an actual answer to anything? Anything at all? You should email them and see what their copy-paste "non-answer" says.
Also, you can rush a prototype of a game in around 2 months with sufficient manpower hours, you can play this prototype with even cubes or basic poly-models, no need for animations, just a proof of concept and by the looks of it, they don't even have that. Code will always outpace graphic departments but if they really intended to make their players feel secure, they would've shown a gameplay loop already. Scammer, that's what that guy is.
Typical for amateur developers. I'm not a game developer, but I create software for a living, and I've seen many newcomers to the business spending 90 % of the time on making the user interface of the program shiny and pretty, and then get really low on time for the actual functionality. I guess the same goes for game development as well. Many forget to make a game in the process of making all the art and thinking of all the cool stuff they are going to make.
The salary he paid himself from milking the fund for years (achieving nothin at all) is absolutely grotesque. Hope the community can win this class action lawsuit, he is obviously trying to fake development now to use it as defense in the case 🤮
Wouldnt it be a gigantic twist if Xsolla was the true villain the whole time and Caspian just made for a good fall guy because of incompetence? Its not like we could ever be sure of that, but it would make for a good twist in the story.
@@KiraTV1 Oh I know, just wishful thinking. Id like to believe people are malicious, but I know better. At least the bit about seeing more wasnt a total lie. Whether he shows it, or the lawsuit does, people WILL be seeing more soon enough.
Feel so sorry for the people who at first thought he was been honest so out of their good hearts gave them more because they just wanted to see it happen
Nah Jeromy Walsh is narcissistic dumbass he burnt through all that money not accomplishing anything, moron had zero clue about game development, his “talent” was selling his delusions to others.
Dev here. The real bottlenecks for games to progress is either artists or game designers that cant wrap their heads around a concept and stick to it but rather keep iterating 1,000 ideas because they have no Idea what they want to do with the project.
Fuck COE I was a fan boy for the longest time because I never really read into what they were saying , I just ate up the hype of a “do anything you want” mmo set in medieval times ... oh well , at least I didn’t spend $10K like some did .
Personally, I still don't think the whole fiasco started as a deliberate scam. I think there's just an astounding level of incompetence from a delusional dreamer who staffed his team with inexperienced, incapable workers. Somewhere along the way, however, it quite obviously turned into them just stringing people along for more money. So, at some point it clearly became deliberate misrepresentation. So, I guess it turned into scamming when they realized the project was impossible for their team.
They lied in the kickstarter, so it must have been pretty early on if it wasn't started with that intention. Either way it doesn't super matter but we'll find out during the lawsuit if it goes as far as it should
Good to see the public fighting back i hope this works out for all you backers. i hate the thought of a few scammers making 3 or 4 game content videos then becoming millionaires. if they cant show 8 mill worth of game you should all get your money back
I don't have high hopes here, but I have a dutchy, two counties (and because of that two cities too). So hoping that the game does end up showing up eventually...
I honestly just don't understand how he possibly thinks the game can continue? Most of the people who purchased titles are never going to play this game (assuming it ever gets released, ha!). What's he going to do with all the titles? All the land? Stick AI into roles people paid money for? That would hardly be ethical, or legal, I'm sure. This is just going to be one huge clusterfuck. He should've stopped when he assumed the fetal position last year~
I can’t help but feel like it comes from a place of malevolence. If they truly cared about the project and its supporters I feel they would be apologizing for letting them down and addressing people’s actual concerns rather than glossing over them and pretending everything is fine.
It's like hiring a contractor to do work on your house and if he keeps asking you for more money and we keep giving them more why would they ever want to finish?
The only way I can imagine any body experiencing the full game is if they get isekai'd (transported to realistic alternate/game world) Especially now with "changed deliverables" it is highly unlikely we'll get what we all hoped for. Maybe if Jeromy asked Hello Games who delivered more than they promised in the end. Edit: I'd guess the excuse for making side-apps like the fine tuning of social tools for the community to engage is that it would be implemented into the main game, but who knows.
I feel like it's neither a case of pure incompetence or malevolence. It was most likely a combination of both. Most likely the entire project started out as a dream, a dream that was simply too much. Therefor it started off as incompetence. Their (read: caspian's) dreams were simply too big. After a while it started to shift into malevolence. Nothing was getting done. And SBS started selling land in order to get as much money before announcing the "retirement" of their studio. While announcing the fall of the studio they probably didn't expect the backlash (even though people literally paid them thousands of dollars) which is why they try to make their "in the abyss" post seem like it was "worded incorrecty" All of this is simply because they want to win the lawsuit. While I don't know the full details, I wouldn't be suprised if they simply cancel developtment completely after they won the lawsuit. The awkward "update" a few weeks back and these posts where they claim to have made "progress" were probably made by Caspian based on advise of his lawyer. The fact that alot of people that believed in the project are basically paying for Caspian's lawyer fees is absolutely disgusting to me. I wish Jeremy Walsh the absolute worst for what he has done.
They were lying to people in the kickstarter. So even if they started as a dream before he raised a penny for the game it's not really relevant to the project and the case of consumers. I don't think he had the intention of it going badly but he definitely lied to get to the stage he could even have a project to fail which is where the issue is.
@@KiraTV1 I hadn't heard of this game/drama before watching your vids today and maybe you talk about this in-depth in next videos, but to me the most puzzling part is that they got something done, but SO little that it's worthless. I mean, to me it seems like if it was an outright scam, they wouldn't have gone through the trouble of actually making some sort of game-like thingamajig. THEN AGAIN, what I've seen so far seems like something you put together with your buddies over a couple summer months when you're bored. It's not something 10+ full-time devs put out in 4 fuckin years. 4 years!! so like, what the fuck were they doing? I mean, if Caspian is to be believed and that audit said the company spent the money reasonably, then it means people (20 people?) came to work, full-time. What the fuck did they do at the office? Sat with their thumbs up their asses for 8 hours each day for 4 years? I think if you put 10 devs in an office for 4 years without any objective and told them they can do whatever, you'd have a better result. So either A) he's lying, the money wasn't spent reasonably; or B) he hired some of the most incompetent people in the world who couldn't agree on ways to do stuff (or maybe he kept changing the goals) so they kept developing shit and then discarding it, for 4 years. I have no other explanation. If you actually had ~20 people working on a game for 4 years, even if they spent 3 of those years cruising the world, doing champagne and drinking coke, you'd still get something more reasonable than THAT. it boggles the mind, really. I dunno, maybe you talk about all of this and it becomes clear in the remainder of the videos, I just had to take a break and vent my frustrations even tho I only found out about this shit today lmao
Game when released is gonna be a visual novel, MUD, or RPG Maker game lol. Then he will say see, we made a game! (Nothing wrong with those, but those were not what was promised, and take far less time to make)
It sounded like you were suggesting that Xsolla helped tank the game, but I know you can't say too much. Anyway, I think the smartest thing Jeremy could do at this point is to sell his IP to a competent publisher if he really does have any assets, or honestly give it away at this point.
COE news is like a good tv show, you've got the lame episodes with not a lot of meat, but then it comes back with a grand finale. I'll be waiting.... xD
I am just glad that I didn't invest anymore into this thing. I did buy into it initially, but I waited for something playable and fun before considering putting anything more into it. I am glad that i didn't. The game that they originally promised would have been amazing. I liked the idea of characters growing older and needing an heir to continue my legacy. It's a shame it was all a big scam to flood Walsh's wallet. That parkour demo was such a huge red flag when it released too. It was garbage, pointless and in most of their promotional material up to that point they kept showing off parkour stuff and nothing about crafting, or combat etc.
Justice will be had, I'm tired of Tripple A kicking the MMORPG community. Indi devs now have a sour taste with how many fail or never get made. We are the dog who gets its legs broken before needing to fetch a stick up a hill during a rainstorm then get kicked before we get a treat. I'm at my wits end trying to find a Good Mmo, dumping hundreds of dollars if not a few thousand at this point. Reject New Games, Embrace private servers and Mods for good games.
I agree with a lot here, but I would point out that letting employees go while you wait to receive the loan, then bringing people back as you can is not at all unusual. You don’t get the loan overnight.
The employees in large part moved onto a new company already together. I can't exactly remember the wording he used but he is looking for new hires as far as I remember. Bear in mind the company is in a very expensive part of the world and the loan is for less than 300k where average salaries in his area are 100k for a single developer. So even if that was the case, he has 3 devs for a single year yo make a game he failed to make with close to 20 employees , 4 years and 8 million dollars.
Love this saga. Nice coverage mate. Guys please keep being succesful irl, earn lot of money and throw it on another fraud kick starter so I can have some drama to entertain me during this dark covid times. Cheers.
@@YayaBeanz I did sadly, not like we are handling the pandemic better , we are fucked here... just you guys have the addition of civil unrest and a divided populace due to politics also.
People can read it man. I increased it by like 30%, I've checked it on two phone screen sizes and 3 monitors. I'm sorry brother but this is as big as its ever going to get. I'm sitting right upfront of my monitor reading it as it's live, I'm not putting it to where it reads like I have bifocals on. I have zero issues reading it and you're one of 2 people who have ever asked that in millions of views. Links are always in the description for every single video. Go follow the link if you can't read it in the video. In videos where I do any form of editing the text is always huge. For these , best suggestion I can give you is follow the link and read along.
Glad I never pledged to this one. Everytime I looked the game up and checked it out something kept telling me not to make the leap. Happy I listened to my intuition
You'd think they'd at least be able to get the kickstarter money, or what's left. They lied about being able to finish the game with the kickstarter funds. Turned out they were just using that to attract more investment.
I was looking forward to this game, luckily I didn't buy into it. It seemed a bit in the blue, and I wanted to see something more finished before putting money in it.
I just don't know wtf they were doing during the development of the game, were they just playing fucking air hockey in the company lounge for four years? lol
The fact that the UI in all the "newer" footage looks like trash shows that it's not just so they don't have to work with production level assets, it's that they don't have any assets to work with at all. You could birth a child and train them to create a better looking UI in the same time it took CoE to slap that garbage together
This crap keeps happening. How many games out there have never even got to the beta stage from kickstarter now? How many are still out there that could potentially go this way? I'm following patheon and ashes of creation hoping one of them makes it but wow are they taking forever.
Back then it looked like next big thing pre alpha footage had great graphics and interesting ideas such as needing a heir to continue characters legacy
@@fortnitelazerfps186 no it really didnt, if u looked into it u could see it was a scam considering they never showed us anything, all good devs know that they have to have stuff somewhat working all the time to keep hype and interest up, they just stalled the whole time, typical scam... cmon.
@@KiraTV1 All they have to do is release the game as is. You got what you "paid" for. I say "paid" did anyone actually pay for a product or was it a donation?
Had a quick look into Xsolla, they come across as shady as fuck. Russian ceo was threatening someone to the extent they reported him to the authorities. And that was just a quick google, fuck knows what you would find if you really dig.
I understand people want refunds, but where is this money going to come from? He most likely did spend all the money on dev and there probably wasn't malicious plans to be used with it, realistically he is probably just a bad businessman and had a bad dev plan and wasted all the money in dev hell. I mean one of his last videos literally said he made like 3 different clients, all in different graphical styles. That's probably where 80% of the money went.
He lied to obtain funding and failed to deliver on promised goods. So they are attempting to get restitution. It isn't for us to decide if he has money to do so or if he is liable for that. That's what a court is for and its your right to find out , which is what they are doing. It isn't anyone's problem if he has the funds to return or not. He was responsible and the court will decide what happens beyond that.
@KIraTV : why do you say there were no alpha tests ? I see some outlets on Google reporting about past tests. Just a question. READ: I do not support the owner of CoE, and how he flushed his employees and artists, and his shady/bullshit responses. It does seem like he gave himself a generous personal revenue for many years and I understand the backer lawsuit.
Not defending the developers here. But in general Kickstarter isn't a pre-order site. You shouldn't have the presumption that A you will receive anything B that nothing will change. Games changes all the time in early development and mmo even after release. It's not like Iam asking my money back from the Red Cross foundation because I haven't seen a shit happen. I just chose to continue or not with sanctions.
They're 100% full of shit. As a co-founder of a game development company, most of what they're saying is basically nonsense. For example, how did they manage to burn all that money in 4 years? About 70%-80% of companies expenses go to salaries, it means they gave themselves salaries of CEOs even though the company was small, otherwise, there's no way in hell that 8m$ would go out like that in 4 years on 8 workers. Here's quick math: Founders of startup companies don't take more than 3-4k$ a month, let's say they had 4 developers each taking 8-9k$ a month, one animator 6k$ a month, and two 3D modelers/other kinds of artists (it doesn't really matter) each taking another 6k$ a month... TRRR TRRR CALCULATION IN PROCESSING, that's (at worst) 700k a year. NOW, that should be around 70% of their expenses, BUT let's make it 50%, LETS SAY, they spent ALOT on marketing (which isn't true, but meh) that's 1.4m a year... X4... 5.6M for 4 years development. (In reality, the salaries would be even much lower due to stock options, etc.) So yea, it would be fine if they didn't deliver because of poor management, but the fact is, that they lived like kings with YOUR money doing basically nothing (otherwise he would've shown some amazing progress). They should DEFINITELY get sued for this. Also, what they're doing there isn't "Gray box assets", they probably realized mid-way that their 3D modelers aren't experienced enough to make what they have shown in the Kickstarter campaign. "Gray box assets" usually are stuff that you can make in around 1 min.
My fear with the lawsuit is that Caspian knows what he is doing enough to be purposely saying these things and putting out these videos/news posts lately as a way to show he is "doing the right thing" and "making progress as a normal game studio". We all know it's BS but that BS debate is what is harder to prove in court. I think it'd be a different story if like, he took 8 million and never once posted a news update in 5 years, no communication whatsoever. Having these dribbles of "we're making progress" posts I think he is just trying to save his butt and show that he made a "good faith effort however the pandemic hurt business and we really tried guys but it just didnt work out but we still want to try for the future to make progress". As for the development, I wouldn't be surprised if there actually is a decent amount of conceptual code for systems, engine, etc. It seems like they went the route of "do all the things at once until completion" rather than trying to get something basic but playable working, and then building off of that to add features, polish, etc.
Thing is that it's civil court. They have enough proof of him provably lying to get to discovery and then once the finances and code gets turned over to experts it doesn't matter what he says and does, if there's anything amiss he will lose.
He only made those update videos to see if enough people would believe him & back out of the class action lawsuit. They’re going to deliver a game that looks like play dough & call it a day,
I feel they start a project they couldn't finish. because it was too big and they want to add so much to it. I invested my money into it I'm hoping there. Is a game behind all this.
There isn't. This guy had big hopes of making an mmo but had no idea the amount of work that goes into making one so he paid himself a huge salary for the kickstarter funds and then proceeded to squander the rest. When he realized he couldn't complete the game, instead of being transparent - he continued feeding people lies and selling digital goods to a game he didn't have any intention of completing. He needs to be held responsible for fraud.
When people send in well wishes, as you know, people like to support others. I’ve always asked why people give support to youtubers. If something could let me know why people give money to youtubers.
Because they enjoy watching their content and likely have watched a lot of it for a long time entirely free ? We are humans that have to live and eat too you know.
Uhh,why not? What's so impossible conceptually about a randomly made character that you take control of once your main character dies/the kids grow up? I assume the child npc's just stay at home like the Skyrim kids.
Not really. It would be damn difficult, but not impossible. Playing as your kids would be like the kid being structured like a PC, data wise, but controlled by AI, until you die. And when you die, you are assigned that character to play. As to growing old, I am still a novice programmer, and have even less knowledge about 3D modelling and animations, so I have no idea how you would do that, but I don't think it's impossible
Mount and blade bannerlord has a system where once your pc dies you play as your kin. Not impossible in the slightest. Now if we were to go back to the fable game generation yes it was impossible for that engine. As much as I thought of it being a cool idea it just wasnt there.
Chronicles of Elyria might be able to kill WoW, it's a very ambitious project backed by a dedicated studio who put their heart and soul into the project
I really like your analysis of what's going on, but c'mon man we can read! I had to skip over half your video because it was just you reading the article!
CoE funding might have been another Oath, one who ran Oath KS funded one Fiesta Online Private Server (not going to specifics) so i bet this guy helped Mortal Online 2 devs because they were going bankrupt until some mysterious funder appeared.
Maybe, but I would like to think that many of these cases, the intention was to make a great game, but then reality set in that the team has neither the skills or the resources to produce anything close to the scale that was promised. The team panics, "OMG now we have all this money but we don't know what to do", and they bumble their way through development, scraps one prototype after another, prioritize totally wrong (because many people won't have the project management skills or experience to handle such big projects), and starts to hide their mistakes instead of coming clear to the backers and at least release something instead of nothing.
This guy is just bullshitting, he doesn't want to convince the players, he wants to convince the judge that he didn't do nothing wrong and invalidate the lawsuit
You are 100% correct, once discovery happens, in any lawsuit, that’s when things get really really juicy. Great vid thumbs up.
Cheers
"We can't offer online support because we need to develop Roleplay procedures first."
What?
Priorities.
Online support has nothing to do with coding. In other words its a smokescreen and they think that by using dev jargon they will be able to distract the customers from their failures.
lol what is a roleplay procedure
I just love how they constantly repeat, "If you have any questions" get in touch, etc. Have they ever given an actual answer to anything? Anything at all? You should email them and see what their copy-paste "non-answer" says.
"we are changing the deliverables"
In other words, we are changing from delivering you a game, to delivering you a bunch of BS.
I would love to see what the art team has done during these years. What we see in the "demo" is basically 2 days of work for a beginner designer.
Hopefully we will soon
That's exactly what they've done in the last 4 years. 2 days of work.
I hope they will release his deposition transcripts. I imagine it will be so entertaining to read lol.
I hope so , I've followed this for so long I need the story to continue
Also, you can rush a prototype of a game in around 2 months with sufficient manpower hours, you can play this prototype with even cubes or basic poly-models, no need for animations, just a proof of concept and by the looks of it, they don't even have that. Code will always outpace graphic departments but if they really intended to make their players feel secure, they would've shown a gameplay loop already. Scammer, that's what that guy is.
Typical for amateur developers. I'm not a game developer, but I create software for a living, and I've seen many newcomers to the business spending 90 % of the time on making the user interface of the program shiny and pretty, and then get really low on time for the actual functionality. I guess the same goes for game development as well. Many forget to make a game in the process of making all the art and thinking of all the cool stuff they are going to make.
I can probably say this. Kira produced and delivered more content from Elyria than Caspian did to his PAYING customers at this point in time.
Easy
*"See you in Court"*
*grabbing Popcorn for this one.*
😄
I expected nothing from them since the beginning, and... I got it.
The salary he paid himself from milking the fund for years (achieving nothin at all) is absolutely grotesque. Hope the community can win this class action lawsuit, he is obviously trying to fake development now to use it as defense in the case 🤮
When you say it's grotesque, how much was it?
Wouldnt it be a gigantic twist if Xsolla was the true villain the whole time and Caspian just made for a good fall guy because of incompetence? Its not like we could ever be sure of that, but it would make for a good twist in the story.
That definitely isn't the case haha. Xsolla are villains also , but caspian is firmly single handedly to blame for elyria
@@KiraTV1 Oh I know, just wishful thinking. Id like to believe people are malicious, but I know better. At least the bit about seeing more wasnt a total lie. Whether he shows it, or the lawsuit does, people WILL be seeing more soon enough.
Feel so sorry for the people who at first thought he was been honest so out of their good hearts gave them more because they just wanted to see it happen
Facts , real sad.
i paid 250 dollars for a bloodline package and they have no way on thier site how to ask for a refund . anyone figured out how to get money back?
There isn't a way to get a refund. That's why they're being taken to court.
And so it begins!
I'd pay to see an inside elyria reality show lol This is my kardashians
See you in court scrub Lord!
This just made my day
Damn he's now a millionaire. Nicely done!
:D
Nah Jeromy Walsh is narcissistic dumbass he burnt through all that money not accomplishing anything, moron had zero clue about game development, his “talent” was selling his delusions to others.
Not for so long, we hope
@@Cardan011 He paid himself around a million dollars in salary over the 4 years.
anyone have the discord link for the Class action server? i need to get into that
massivelyop.com/2021/01/07/chronicles-of-elyria-clarifies-art-and-comms-as-players-vow-their-lawsuit-will-go-forward/
@@KiraTV1 Thank you, really appreciate you doing these vids
@@gavinpaulsen3419 Anytime
Dev here. The real bottlenecks for games to progress is either artists or game designers that cant wrap their heads around a concept and stick to it but rather keep iterating 1,000 ideas because they have no Idea what they want to do with the project.
Fuck COE I was a fan boy for the longest time because I never really read into what they were saying , I just ate up the hype of a “do anything you want” mmo set in medieval times ... oh well , at least I didn’t spend $10K like some did .
I'd say a silly boy
Sorry to hear man
Personally, I still don't think the whole fiasco started as a deliberate scam. I think there's just an astounding level of incompetence from a delusional dreamer who staffed his team with inexperienced, incapable workers. Somewhere along the way, however, it quite obviously turned into them just stringing people along for more money. So, at some point it clearly became deliberate misrepresentation. So, I guess it turned into scamming when they realized the project was impossible for their team.
They lied in the kickstarter, so it must have been pretty early on if it wasn't started with that intention. Either way it doesn't super matter but we'll find out during the lawsuit if it goes as far as it should
That Caspian dude is hilarious!
Good to see the public fighting back i hope this works out for all you backers.
i hate the thought of a few scammers making 3 or 4 game content videos then becoming millionaires. if they cant show 8 mill worth of game you should all get your money back
It's great how you find this stuff that the common man knows nothing about, keep people in the know on these scams
I don't have high hopes here, but I have a dutchy, two counties (and because of that two cities too).
So hoping that the game does end up showing up eventually...
Good luck bro
I honestly just don't understand how he possibly thinks the game can continue? Most of the people who purchased titles are never going to play this game (assuming it ever gets released, ha!). What's he going to do with all the titles? All the land? Stick AI into roles people paid money for? That would hardly be ethical, or legal, I'm sure. This is just going to be one huge clusterfuck. He should've stopped when he assumed the fetal position last year~
I can’t help but feel like it comes from a place of malevolence. If they truly cared about the project and its supporters I feel they would be apologizing for letting them down and addressing people’s actual concerns rather than glossing over them and pretending everything is fine.
It's like hiring a contractor to do work on your house and if he keeps asking you for more money and we keep giving them more why would they ever want to finish?
The only way I can imagine any body experiencing the full game is if they get isekai'd (transported to realistic alternate/game world)
Especially now with "changed deliverables" it is highly unlikely we'll get what we all hoped for. Maybe if Jeromy asked Hello Games who delivered more than they promised in the end.
Edit: I'd guess the excuse for making side-apps like the fine tuning of social tools for the community to engage is that it would be implemented into the main game, but who knows.
Imagine getting isekai'd to an unfinished world that doesn't even work lmao
Hi Kira! Can you please let me know what's the name of the outro song?
Harris heller ambient gold
@@KiraTV1 I love you man! Thanks a lot!!
@@KiraTV1 Thanks! It's a really nice song.
I feel like it's neither a case of pure incompetence or malevolence. It was most likely a combination of both. Most likely the entire project started out as a dream, a dream that was simply too much. Therefor it started off as incompetence. Their (read: caspian's) dreams were simply too big.
After a while it started to shift into malevolence. Nothing was getting done. And SBS started selling land in order to get as much money before announcing the "retirement" of their studio. While announcing the fall of the studio they probably didn't expect the backlash (even though people literally paid them thousands of dollars) which is why they try to make their "in the abyss" post seem like it was "worded incorrecty"
All of this is simply because they want to win the lawsuit. While I don't know the full details, I wouldn't be suprised if they simply cancel developtment completely after they won the lawsuit. The awkward "update" a few weeks back and these posts where they claim to have made "progress" were probably made by Caspian based on advise of his lawyer.
The fact that alot of people that believed in the project are basically paying for Caspian's lawyer fees is absolutely disgusting to me. I wish Jeremy Walsh the absolute worst for what he has done.
No. It was clearly a scam from the start.
They were lying to people in the kickstarter. So even if they started as a dream before he raised a penny for the game it's not really relevant to the project and the case of consumers. I don't think he had the intention of it going badly but he definitely lied to get to the stage he could even have a project to fail which is where the issue is.
@@KiraTV1 I hadn't heard of this game/drama before watching your vids today and maybe you talk about this in-depth in next videos, but to me the most puzzling part is that they got something done, but SO little that it's worthless.
I mean, to me it seems like if it was an outright scam, they wouldn't have gone through the trouble of actually making some sort of game-like thingamajig.
THEN AGAIN, what I've seen so far seems like something you put together with your buddies over a couple summer months when you're bored. It's not something 10+ full-time devs put out in 4 fuckin years. 4 years!!
so like, what the fuck were they doing? I mean, if Caspian is to be believed and that audit said the company spent the money reasonably, then it means people (20 people?) came to work, full-time. What the fuck did they do at the office? Sat with their thumbs up their asses for 8 hours each day for 4 years? I think if you put 10 devs in an office for 4 years without any objective and told them they can do whatever, you'd have a better result. So either A) he's lying, the money wasn't spent reasonably; or B) he hired some of the most incompetent people in the world who couldn't agree on ways to do stuff (or maybe he kept changing the goals) so they kept developing shit and then discarding it, for 4 years. I have no other explanation. If you actually had ~20 people working on a game for 4 years, even if they spent 3 of those years cruising the world, doing champagne and drinking coke, you'd still get something more reasonable than THAT.
it boggles the mind, really. I dunno, maybe you talk about all of this and it becomes clear in the remainder of the videos, I just had to take a break and vent my frustrations even tho I only found out about this shit today lmao
Game when released is gonna be a visual novel, MUD, or RPG Maker game lol. Then he will say see, we made a game! (Nothing wrong with those, but those were not what was promised, and take far less time to make)
It sounded like you were suggesting that Xsolla helped tank the game, but I know you can't say too much. Anyway, I think the smartest thing Jeremy could do at this point is to sell his IP to a competent publisher if he really does have any assets, or honestly give it away at this point.
I guess their is no game. Seems like he’s just bullshiitiing to buy time and fob off the lawsuit. Amazing.
There has to be something, just how much is the question
He's probably banking on the suits not being able to tell an asset dump clusterfuck from a real game
COE news is like a good tv show, you've got the lame episodes with not a lot of meat, but then it comes back with a grand finale. I'll be waiting.... xD
:D
I'd say it's more like one of those shows that is so bad it's good. I can't wait for the grand finale, I'm sure it's going to be a real mess.
"Reveal your sources, William."
I am just glad that I didn't invest anymore into this thing. I did buy into it initially, but I waited for something playable and fun before considering putting anything more into it. I am glad that i didn't. The game that they originally promised would have been amazing. I liked the idea of characters growing older and needing an heir to continue my legacy.
It's a shame it was all a big scam to flood Walsh's wallet. That parkour demo was such a huge red flag when it released too. It was garbage, pointless and in most of their promotional material up to that point they kept showing off parkour stuff and nothing about crafting, or combat etc.
**grabs popcorn**
Me: Orders a double cheeseburger, pays for it.
Burger Person: Gives me an empty bag.
Audience: (Applauds)
This, only I didn't even get an empty bag.
What discord was that? Yours?
The coe lawsuit discord
@@KiraTV1 Link?
Wow, I backed this long ago for 25$ I thought thy were still working on it as i still got updates now and then.
Justice will be had, I'm tired of Tripple A kicking the MMORPG community. Indi devs now have a sour taste with how many fail or never get made.
We are the dog who gets its legs broken before needing to fetch a stick up a hill during a rainstorm then get kicked before we get a treat.
I'm at my wits end trying to find a Good Mmo, dumping hundreds of dollars if not a few thousand at this point.
Reject New Games, Embrace private servers and Mods for good games.
Holy hell, this is still going?
I agree with a lot here, but I would point out that letting employees go while you wait to receive the loan, then bringing people back as you can is not at all unusual. You don’t get the loan overnight.
The employees in large part moved onto a new company already together. I can't exactly remember the wording he used but he is looking for new hires as far as I remember. Bear in mind the company is in a very expensive part of the world and the loan is for less than 300k where average salaries in his area are 100k for a single developer. So even if that was the case, he has 3 devs for a single year yo make a game he failed to make with close to 20 employees , 4 years and 8 million dollars.
See you in court edition pretty much lol
Love this saga. Nice coverage mate. Guys please keep being succesful irl, earn lot of money and throw it on another fraud kick starter so I can have some drama to entertain me during this dark covid times. Cheers.
Nice! Now do one for Star Citizen! Sheet physics!!!
SBS - Soulbound Studios
SBS - Small Brain Syndrome
I'll let you decide which one is more accurate
The prosecution could call you as a witness.
Good luck to them , no way I'm travelling to the US during a pandemic 😄
@@KiraTV1 This whole Covid thing is quite overblown
@@georgeblair3894 No it isn't.
@@KiraTV1 Not to mention we're handling the pandemic like complete utter muppets. Did you hear about our Capitol? It's all going to shit here.
@@YayaBeanz I did sadly, not like we are handling the pandemic better , we are fucked here... just you guys have the addition of civil unrest and a divided populace due to politics also.
website text too tiny :/
👍
@@KiraTV1 Kira, can you please increase the site size, people also want to read on what you are talking about please
People can read it man. I increased it by like 30%, I've checked it on two phone screen sizes and 3 monitors. I'm sorry brother but this is as big as its ever going to get. I'm sitting right upfront of my monitor reading it as it's live, I'm not putting it to where it reads like I have bifocals on.
I have zero issues reading it and you're one of 2 people who have ever asked that in millions of views.
Links are always in the description for every single video. Go follow the link if you can't read it in the video.
In videos where I do any form of editing the text is always huge. For these , best suggestion I can give you is follow the link and read along.
@@KiraTV1 Okay, Cheers Kira
I see Kira video I like
Legend
oooh another episode of my favorite soap opera; chronicles of ILIEria 😆
This video didn't show up in my subscriptions. :(
Glad I never pledged to this one. Everytime I looked the game up and checked it out something kept telling me not to make the leap. Happy I listened to my intuition
Bullet definitely dodged
You'd think they'd at least be able to get the kickstarter money, or what's left. They lied about being able to finish the game with the kickstarter funds. Turned out they were just using that to attract more investment.
I was looking forward to this game, luckily I didn't buy into it. It seemed a bit in the blue, and I wanted to see something more finished before putting money in it.
I just don't know wtf they were doing during the development of the game, were they just playing fucking air hockey in the company lounge for four years? lol
Spending that 8 million dollars in everything but the game probably 😂
@@CadisEtramaDiRaizelHexion Probably, lmao. "I WoRKed On A TrAIlER 3 YEarS aGo, I DesERvE A yacHT." kind of mentality.
i'm just going to keep moding Skyrim SE cause thats a real game :P
Can't wait for this game to come out, so excited!
The fact that the UI in all the "newer" footage looks like trash shows that it's not just so they don't have to work with production level assets, it's that they don't have any assets to work with at all. You could birth a child and train them to create a better looking UI in the same time it took CoE to slap that garbage together
Kickstarter was a mistake.
:(
There are some good ones but most of them are not imo.
This crap keeps happening. How many games out there have never even got to the beta stage from kickstarter now? How many are still out there that could potentially go this way? I'm following patheon and ashes of creation hoping one of them makes it but wow are they taking forever.
AoC seems to be doing fine.
The Lazy Peon has some videos on it.
Honest to god I was on the verge of buying land in the sell off for land....I'm so glad to god I didn't bother at the time.....
I did pay for the kickstarter but only 40$ (still want that back xD) but I still cant believe that people bought and paid 1000+$ on virtual "land"
Back then it looked like next big thing pre alpha footage had great graphics and interesting ideas such as needing a heir to continue characters legacy
@@fortnitelazerfps186 no it really didnt, if u looked into it u could see it was a scam considering they never showed us anything, all good devs know that they have to have stuff somewhat working all the time to keep hype and interest up, they just stalled the whole time, typical scam... cmon.
In case he'll flee to other country like russia? Will he still be arrested?
It isn't a criminal case , so he won't get arrested regardless.
Bro, this suit will get tossed.
Based on what ?
@@KiraTV1 All they have to do is release the game as is. You got what you "paid" for. I say "paid" did anyone actually pay for a product or was it a donation?
That isn't how the law works mate. That definitely isn't all they have to do, luckily.
I agree with you dude, this is an absolute shit show. I'm just not sure this is going to work out how you want it to.
Had a quick look into Xsolla, they come across as shady as fuck. Russian ceo was threatening someone to the extent they reported him to the authorities. And that was just a quick google, fuck knows what you would find if you really dig.
I understand people want refunds, but where is this money going to come from?
He most likely did spend all the money on dev and there probably wasn't malicious plans to be used with it, realistically he is probably just a bad businessman and had a bad dev plan and wasted all the money in dev hell.
I mean one of his last videos literally said he made like 3 different clients, all in different graphical styles. That's probably where 80% of the money went.
He lied to obtain funding and failed to deliver on promised goods. So they are attempting to get restitution. It isn't for us to decide if he has money to do so or if he is liable for that. That's what a court is for and its your right to find out , which is what they are doing.
It isn't anyone's problem if he has the funds to return or not. He was responsible and the court will decide what happens beyond that.
@KIraTV : why do you say there were no alpha tests ? I see some outlets on Google reporting about past tests. Just a question. READ: I do not support the owner of CoE, and how he flushed his employees and artists, and his shady/bullshit responses. It does seem like he gave himself a generous personal revenue for many years and I understand the backer lawsuit.
Not defending the developers here. But in general Kickstarter isn't a pre-order site. You shouldn't have the presumption that A you will receive anything B that nothing will change.
Games changes all the time in early development and mmo even after release.
It's not like Iam asking my money back from the Red Cross foundation because I haven't seen a shit happen. I just chose to continue or not with sanctions.
Not the same thing though is it ?
Kickstarter isn't a "give me money for false promises" site either.
They're 100% full of shit.
As a co-founder of a game development company, most of what they're saying is basically nonsense.
For example, how did they manage to burn all that money in 4 years? About 70%-80% of companies expenses go to salaries,
it means they gave themselves salaries of CEOs even though the company was small, otherwise, there's no way in hell that 8m$ would go out like that in 4 years on 8 workers.
Here's quick math:
Founders of startup companies don't take more than 3-4k$ a month, let's say they had 4 developers each taking 8-9k$ a month, one animator 6k$ a month, and two 3D modelers/other kinds of artists (it doesn't really matter) each taking another 6k$ a month... TRRR TRRR CALCULATION IN PROCESSING, that's (at worst) 700k a year. NOW, that should be around 70% of their expenses, BUT let's make it 50%, LETS SAY, they spent ALOT on marketing (which isn't true, but meh) that's 1.4m a year... X4... 5.6M for 4 years development. (In reality, the salaries would be even much lower due to stock options, etc.)
So yea, it would be fine if they didn't deliver because of poor management, but the fact is, that they lived like kings with YOUR money doing basically nothing (otherwise he would've shown some amazing progress). They should DEFINITELY get sued for this.
Also, what they're doing there isn't "Gray box assets", they probably realized mid-way that their 3D modelers aren't experienced enough to make what they have shown in the Kickstarter campaign.
"Gray box assets" usually are stuff that you can make in around 1 min.
If he fired all his emplyees he has to give it back it was to help pay for the employees wages hopefuly the Govt. knows.
😎👍
My fear with the lawsuit is that Caspian knows what he is doing enough to be purposely saying these things and putting out these videos/news posts lately as a way to show he is "doing the right thing" and "making progress as a normal game studio". We all know it's BS but that BS debate is what is harder to prove in court. I think it'd be a different story if like, he took 8 million and never once posted a news update in 5 years, no communication whatsoever. Having these dribbles of "we're making progress" posts I think he is just trying to save his butt and show that he made a "good faith effort however the pandemic hurt business and we really tried guys but it just didnt work out but we still want to try for the future to make progress".
As for the development, I wouldn't be surprised if there actually is a decent amount of conceptual code for systems, engine, etc. It seems like they went the route of "do all the things at once until completion" rather than trying to get something basic but playable working, and then building off of that to add features, polish, etc.
Thing is that it's civil court. They have enough proof of him provably lying to get to discovery and then once the finances and code gets turned over to experts it doesn't matter what he says and does, if there's anything amiss he will lose.
Sounds like he's taking a page from Illfonic and a game called "Revival".......If you give them something you can say you tried and they cant sue.
Class action lawsuits are always garbage. You end up with $1.00. The lawyer will walk away with $100,000+
Its not so much about the money.
@@KiraTV1 fair enough
He only made those update videos to see if enough people would believe him & back out of the class action lawsuit. They’re going to deliver a game that looks like play dough & call it a day,
i called this out like 2 years ago, u all just hated on me thou, hahaha
🙃
are there people out there that they really think that a game will be coming out of this sink hole of a studio?
discord return hahahahahahah
I feel they start a project they couldn't finish. because it was too big and they want to add so much to it. I invested my money into it I'm hoping there. Is a game behind all this.
There isn't.
This guy had big hopes of making an mmo but had no idea the amount of work that goes into making one so he paid himself a huge salary for the kickstarter funds and then proceeded to squander the rest. When he realized he couldn't complete the game, instead of being transparent - he continued feeding people lies and selling digital goods to a game he didn't have any intention of completing.
He needs to be held responsible for fraud.
Camelot Unchained is Next
When people send in well wishes, as you know, people like to support others. I’ve always asked why people give support to youtubers. If something could let me know why people give money to youtubers.
Because they enjoy watching their content and likely have watched a lot of it for a long time entirely free ? We are humans that have to live and eat too you know.
The court case against them will result in nothing...
Oh yeah ?
some of ideas of the game is impossible to implement imo like the one where you get married and grow up and die and play as your kids
Uhh,why not? What's so impossible conceptually about a randomly made character that you take control of once your main character dies/the kids grow up? I assume the child npc's just stay at home like the Skyrim kids.
Not really. It would be damn difficult, but not impossible. Playing as your kids would be like the kid being structured like a PC, data wise, but controlled by AI, until you die. And when you die, you are assigned that character to play.
As to growing old, I am still a novice programmer, and have even less knowledge about 3D modelling and animations, so I have no idea how you would do that, but I don't think it's impossible
Mount and blade bannerlord has a system where once your pc dies you play as your kin. Not impossible in the slightest. Now if we were to go back to the fable game generation yes it was impossible for that engine. As much as I thought of it being a cool idea it just wasnt there.
Guess you never played Sims Medieval back in the day...
Chronicles of Elyria might be able to kill WoW, it's a very ambitious project backed by a dedicated studio who put their heart and soul into the project
Nope. There are no WoW killers. Its been proven time and time again.
He's kidding mate.
@@KiraTV1 :)
@@agentriot For some reason i though u were talking about Ashes of Creation lol
I really like your analysis of what's going on, but c'mon man we can read! I had to skip over half your video because it was just you reading the article!
Yeah almost like that's what the video was supposed to be.
Wow this is crazy lol
CoE funding might have been another Oath, one who ran Oath KS funded one Fiesta Online Private Server (not going to specifics) so i bet this guy helped Mortal Online 2 devs because they were going bankrupt until some mysterious funder appeared.
How did you manage to drag other random unrelated games into this mate ? You got some kind of evidence for that ?
Há Há lol
Alpha Games LOL for the TRUE ALPHA xDDDD
sounds petty tbh
?
it was probably a scam from day 1
Maybe, but I would like to think that many of these cases, the intention was to make a great game, but then reality set in that the team has neither the skills or the resources to produce anything close to the scale that was promised. The team panics, "OMG now we have all this money but we don't know what to do", and they bumble their way through development, scraps one prototype after another, prioritize totally wrong (because many people won't have the project management skills or experience to handle such big projects), and starts to hide their mistakes instead of coming clear to the backers and at least release something instead of nothing.
This guy is just bullshitting, he doesn't want to convince the players, he wants to convince the judge that he didn't do nothing wrong and invalidate the lawsuit
I know Caspian's a scammer and had it all coming, but I still kind of feel sorry for him...
Why?
@@KiraTV1 I don't know, excessive empathy I guess
E-lie-ria
:D
this scam again hahaha