This Kickstarter MMO Was Promising...

Well this is one WILD story about the kickstarter TitanReach, a tale of a crowdfunded MMO "saved" by the wrong money...

00:00 Intro
00:23 The Story - The Crowdfunded (Sca)MMO
05:26 The Cryptic - An Angelic Twist Of Fate
08:23 The Gambler - Dev With Self-Destructive Greed
12:48 The Analysis - Good Deeds Left Unrewarded

[KiraTV]

This was a pleasant surprise to get linked to, great breakdown as always guys!

[psyjinx]

I hope you've been documenting your processes and hurdles for your game. Would be extremely interesting and valuable for new devs.

[ThunderChanter]

When Kira made the video about this, I remember thinking "If the crypto element is jsut 'there for people who want it and isnt actually tied to any meaningful gameplay, isnt most of your player base is jsut gonna be bot farmers right?" this really felt like a dude who wanted way more than he was capable of

[Wesmadon]

I really appreciate you guys. I'm someone who's been strongly interested in business from a young age, taught myself business accounting when I was 16, and when I got my first job I was shocked about how bad business philosophy in US is. To have intelligent folks say really reasonable things like "underpaying staff by extreme amounts is very short sighted" and "you have to understand business and budgeting to make a game" is honestly refreshing and makes me feel a little less crazy.

[evanulven]

How are they bad at predicting cash flow? Because it's never taught. All forms of income management, from checking accounts to running a business, were either removed outright from school curriculums or pared down to a single already overworked teacher running a halfassed "accounting" class nearly 20 years ago. Was seen as both unimportant and something parents were supposed to teach their kids. You can imagine how well that's gone. But hey, at least the athletics department got more weight rooms and new jerseys!

[exmaarmaca]

Probably those 200k for 8 months could work in places like Latinamerica, but sadly there is almost none videogame dev in this area since almost none of the universities has study programs for that. As an example 200k USD would be like 4M MXN so it would be like 500k MXN per month, for 14 employee's you could pay them like 25k-30k MXN per month and could be still a reasonable wage.

[mmogaddict]

KiraTV had an excellent video on this story.

[mattf]

Straight up, Asset Packs are perfectly fine if you use them in such a way that people can't immediately recognise them as an Asset Pack. I don't care if the enemy's I'm fighting take half their AI and collisions from an Asset Pack if they then have uniquely made attacks and textures.

[unowenwasholo]

It's important to highlight that Kira verified that the DeFi angel investor was explicit that there was 0 need to integrate crypto or really do anything other than complete Titan Reach. The story is too good to be true, so all there is is KiraTV's word that everything was on the up-and-up with Andre along with the receipts he shows in his video including those of people on the Titan Reach team describing their experiences with Unravel. From what Kira said, this is all 100% on Unravel and his poor management and abuse of funds. Andre was *not* the reason Unravel did anything with crypto.

Unravel ironically put out a statement when first receiving the donation that the kind of money Andre gave him is life changing and that some people would up and run away with it and never look back. I always thought that was a strange thing to highlight, and it appears it's because it's something that he was considering more heavily than a passing thought. Apparently he was okay with misappropriating the funds instead.

[kaleiohu]

This is also the same reason mobile and f2p games design and target for whales. There is a funding imbalance which most players do not understand the scale of and has gotten way worse over time. A small niche of people with a radically different value structure that are playing the same games as everyone else. In the traditional business model every player pays the same amount for a game, but now people pay what they're willing to and that is a much wider spectrum. Modern game design is adapting and designing for that imbalance which almost by definition results in a lesser play experience for most players. (basic example: WoW store mount. Since they can get extra money from a few players it is not accessible content within the game for all players.)

[defaulted]

I felt bad for Kira and Andre for having to personally deal with this.
But the amount of trust lost and just the expenses Andre casually dealt with this is just ungodly or he has an entire Wall Street to gamble with.

[DumboDelight]

MMOs are really on the brink and have been for the past decade or so. Curious to see if Ashes, Pantheon, or others can carve a considerable part of the market.

[rainfoxhound]

Asset packs are fine as is reusing animations / skeletons it's your content and how your game plays that matters, Look at Elden ring the game reuses a ton of animations, several enemies are straight out of bloodborne / sekiro / DS III animation wise I just killed a miniboss who was straight up the dancer of the boreal valley but with ice rather than fire. All that time saved allows thwm to create new shit and produce what is probably already the GOTY.

[kevinizatt]

As an accountant, this problem is in no way exclusive to the video game industry. There are time I wonder if there should be legally required classes for anyone to start a business. And I hate red tape, the problem is that bad.

[javonyounger]

This guy had a once in a life time chance and threw it away.

[DiabloDBS]

I think the angel investor isn'T one of those that made their money from bitcoin etc. ..
Afaik he is a big name in DeFi and someone involved in the developement and implementation of the technology rather than (i believe) someone who gambles on it.

I think he even warned Unravel not to invest any of his (unravels) money into crypto.
And i believe a meaningless implementation of crypto into the game just to use it as a buzz word for marketing would've also not made him so happy...

[gregoryolenovich]

Hearing you guys talk about crypto millionaires like this breaks my heart because I had a few Bitcoin laying around on a hard drive some where from when a few Bitcoin all together didn't equal a dollar. I still have that hard drive but it's been formatted several times and I never saved the wallet because I thought it would always be worthless

[johnwrath]

Great example of how asset packs can be used to make a great game. BPM. Lots of the enemies in that game are clearly from some asset store, but the core gameplay of rhythm action shooting is absolutely superb, highly polished, and incredibly fun. Tiny team. Wouldn’t have had the budget to make a full project from the ground up. But BPM is one of the most fun rogue likes I’ve ever played. Check it out if you haven’t. Bangin soundtrack.

[SchizoidMan]

The thing about Kickstarter is that for every Undertale, for every A Hat in Time, there are at least three games that are either unremarkable or are duds. People find that development is harder and more expensive than developers let on. Didn't take that long for me to be disenchanted with crowdfunding.

[mightylink]

People always caught up in the hype of the latest trend but you never hear about the stories of when people lose it all which happens WAY more often than the good stories. This is the thing, jumping onto a new trend like cypto currency only works if you do it before it becomes mainstream, once millions of other people start doing it the success rate plummets and very few people out of millions will turn a profit from it. The key to investing is to get in on it before anyone else knows what your investing into, you have to get your money in BEFORE the spike.