$1,892,628,+ Taken, 10 Years Developed, Totally DIFFERENT Game Delivered 

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I like how it went from "Savior of the JRPG" to "simple fun little game"

Man, if nothing else, I feel like Kickstarter has helped a lot of people learn how much it costs to make games.

A japanese court ruling in favor of a Japanese producer against a non Japanese employee, forcing the non Japanese employee to apologize. Wow, what are the odds.

As someone who has run Kickstarter that was only trying to raise money for a marketing budget, it kills me how many people pitched ridiculous dream projects and then just straight up not deliver.

It's pretty insane that this has so many similarities to the eventual disaster that was Mighty No. 9's fiasco of a development. At least MN9 was actually finished.

As someone who has been living in Japan for quite a while, this entitlement is more common than most people think, especially among this type of "business person". I've worked for a few of them. It's always *surprised Pikachu face* when you list the reasons of why they can expect nothing. It gives serious 'but mummy always said I was special' energy.

Man seeing Divinity/Divinity 2 on kickstarter. Good to see some breakouts came from the wild kickstarter west.

I was one of the backer of Under The Dog. This was the guy who almost single handedly destroyed the anime project. After months of silence, the studio made the right choice to part ways and gain full control of UTD.

One thing that caught my interest here is the "court ordered apology". I may have misunderstood it, but this is ordered by Japanese court. If this is in fact true, then that brings a lot of red flags. As those who've followed the whole Selen Tatsuki/Nijisanji situation might know, Japanese law has a different legal definition of defamation. In the USA, defamation is more akin to slander: saying things about others that you know are untrue in order to harm their reputation. BUT in Japanese law, it doesn't even matter if that statement is factually correct or not. You can be sexually abused by your manager, publically call out that manager for sexually abusing you, get sued by said manager for defamation and LOSE that court case because your factually correct statement damaged the reputation of that manager. But because a lot of people backing this project likely were not familiar with Japanese law around defamation, they interpreted it as being judged by USA standards of defamation. Thus the court ordering an apology for exposing the stuff going on behind the scenes would be interpreted by the public as a confirmation that it wasn't a factually correct exposé, when in reality it was merely a confirmation that it damaged the company. This is why you see vtubers almost always being so incredibly vague when talking about their experiences under a specific company, especially if said vtuber resides in Japan. And this is why in vtubing culture, it used to be the standard that your past identity would be treated as an entirely different person by everyone and it was taboo to talk about an identity being someone's past life. Because laws like this resulted in such strict contracts that you were in no way at all allowed to disclose ANYWHERE that you worked as a vtuber for any particular agency or disclose that you were a particular vtuber before or during your time at that agency. USA defamation law is focused on facts. Japanese defamation law is focused on reputation. I thought this was an important and interesting distinction to point out, because we've started seeing more blatant examples of Japanese companies with EN branches use Japanese law in ways that serve sort of like propaganda in the EN communities. So it's definitely important to be aware of these differences when analyzing scandals relating to companies in Japan

Wait, Divinity was a Kickstarter project? Jesus Christ. Kickstarter basically lead to BG3. All praise the crowdfunding process!

What a coincidence. I was just watching your backlog of Kickstarter To Court videos and wished there was a new one out! Might just be my lucky day 😀

I love how it's never enough. Scammers never just take their bag and disappear into the night. It's pathological.

the irony of making a video about misleading games and having raid as the sponsors

"It's just a demo" is my favorite game-backer copium.

As someone who have backed numerous projects on Kickstarter and having never been scammed like this I feel sad that a few bad apples destroy the credability for crowd-funding.

That sponsorship intro was fucking gold, great stuff as always man!

I love the transparent explanation of the sponsorship lmao, great content as always Kira, keep it up!

Man actually made away with the money. Today's sponsorship really fits the topic, well done 👏

Kinda related to that end segment with the court ordered stuff - In some cases in Japan, people can be ordered to either apologize or pay for things even if the content they posted was completely true, as long as its main intention was to damage the company/an individual or its financials. It's likely with half decent lawyers that dude could have made a case towards it just being a malicious attack on the company, and that's why they were ordered to apologize under court order.

I love that You made "from kickstarter to court" become a series 😁

Kira, you've helped us as gamers be more aware, as well as more skeptical of proposed games with absurd promises. You've helped form the mindset that if I were to back a project, gaming or otherwise, I'd have to approach it like a loan officer or banker. You've taught myself and others a nugget of financial wisdom. Thanks, and keep on keepin' on.

6:00 is spot on. I burn through 130k/month just for the team working on an (corporate) application which has been running for 4 years and with another year left.

I love the sponsorship ad! You know he had fun with this! 😅But I'm sorry Kira, I am never downloading that game

it's not an exaggeration to say that kickstarter back then is a literal sacrificial ground for unsuspecting backers for future backers to learn about budgeting in game development and to learn about not trusting some campaigns before doing research about the developers, gotta at least thank these poor unfortunate souls

To be fair, most Kickstarters are not funded by Kickstarter alone and the campaign could mostly exist as marketing and a pre-order service. Like, Pillars of Eternity pulled in some $4 million. But the actual cost of making the game was rumored to be about $15 million. So $11 million of the funding came from elsewhere. That does not mean that the Kickstarter was useless as it proved that there were a market for the game and created a lot of hype and free marketing for it.

I called out Tiny Metal on their Twitter years ago for this and they were very adamant that they had zero to do with Project Phoenix. I knew that was bs then as much as I know it now. Thank you for this retrospective.

Eventually, the only games left in the world are going to be FIFA and Raid: Shadow Legends, that's it.

How the heck did you not end this with" Maybe one day the phoenix will rise from its ashes?"

Take as many sponsorships as you need if it lets you keep making this cool content my man

Man I bought Tiny Metal because I'm a fan of the genre and it looked really good, I never knew it had such turbulent origins. They even released a second Tiny Metal as well. Crazy

$100,000 is the salary of one good developer for one year. That does not include hardware, software, art, frameworks, etc. etc. How could someone be so ignorant to think that any kind of game can be made with that kind of money? Maybe a card game, or a board game, but a top of the line video game? Yeah, it's blaming the victims, but it would take at least $10,000,000 to even have a decent chance. That's 100 times the kickstarter goal. ONE HUNDRED. It would take one hundred kickstarters to make the game they expected.

I was one of the backers for Under the Dog. Was recommended it by a friend who thought that it sounded interesting. I wasn't aware of it being a secondary project by someone who was developing a game at that time.

Most games I backed on Kickstarted were delivered (even if the end result was not what was promised) but I'm still upset about this one. I'm glad I 'only' lost $20 on it. I checked the Kickstarter page and the last update was in 2019 and nothing at all in the comments beyond angry backers. (and YES, I KNOW how Kickstarter works, nothing promised, blah blah blah. But as Kira points out in this video, this project at launch had a STRONG chance to come out, just like Richard Garriot's Kickstarted game as well, another I lost money on. That's why I never back something for more then $20 as that's the most I'm willing to lose. I'm just upset cause this could have been a GREAT game.)

Wow hearing about Project Phoenix reminded me I pledged $20 for this and at the time I was hyped about it. After a few years of waiting I figured it will never come and there was no hope for a refund and I cut my losses. It was one of the reasons I stop pledging any project for some time.

I'm a former game designer, developer, and studio owner. I've worked for large companies like EA and WB, as well as running my own studio making sports games for XBox and PlayStation consoles. $100,000 USD doesn't even get you a vertical slice, hell it would barely get you storyboards or concept art sketches. Also, 16:00 I've worked a lot in Unity, and never, not once, have I ever heard someone say "I'm switching to Unreal to reduce development time". Unity, for all its faults (and it has many), is by far the easier of the two engines to work with and going with Unity allowed me to ship games within a year that would have taken 2-3 if using Unreal. Switching to Unreal (mid development) would do exactly the opposite of helping you meet deadlines.

I really hope you never change your outro's background soundtrack, it's so characteristic of your videos and gives me chills each time. Great vid as always!

Kind of crazy to think about that we got Baldur's Gate 3 right now thanks to Kickstarter.

Must have been 10 years ago now but I remember Dan Geisler (Road Rash) wanting to put out a successor to it at one point but couldn't get funding and said that Kickstarter wasn't viable, guess he had a point... He is now working at Warner Brothers as a Game AI Software Engineer.

One of my favorite channels. You're going places, mate. This was a certified banger.

100k is more like a week or two for a small'ish studio now. Consdering they need all the hardware and software from day 1. Plus a team that actually works on more than just their main tasks, such as brainstorming, is really expensive.

I was looking up more information about Hiroaki Yura and this dude is just a violinist. He's not even really in game development. I can see why this shit failed. It's amazing how many people followed his every word knowing he's just someone that plays a musical instrument. Maybe it's just because he's Japanese and most JRPG fanboys from the west will look at him and think he's some kind of hardened game lead like Hideo Kojima.

No need to be apologetic on taking sponsorships. The more sponsorship you get, the more great material we receive. Its a win win for everyone🎉

I just know I'm going to be watching one of these videos about The Bazaar one day. Crowdfunded in 2018 and slated for release in 2021, then delayed and delayed until the current release date of 2024. Over time it completely changed genre from PvP deckbuilder to autobattler and (who would've guessed it) in 2021 they decided to add in crypto.

Frankly, I'm happy this is Raid 's sponsorship rather than betterhelp. That's how low my standards are now.

Glad to see this series back again!

Finally a new Kickstarter to court!!! Been waiting for a new one Lesssgo

Project Phoenix vs Yandere Simulator. Which game will be released first?

Blind upvote cuz I know this is gonna be fire

Can't be a RU-vidr that covers ethics in gaming without ALSO taking money from gotcha games that predate on kids and those without impulse control.

This is the first time I heard about this. So I googled the guy, and to my surprise most of his related stuff, his youtube videos, twitters, etc. remains highly positive. Like nothing wrong happened.

I know this is probably a dumb question, but if Project Pheonix raised half a million dollars, couldn't the director have just outsourced the entire game to an overseas game dev studio and made like a crappy mobile-style game? Then at least there'd be a game released. Couldn't they just pay some cheap mobile dev studio to reskin their own game into Project Pheonix or something? How does he waste almost two million dollars with almost nothing to show for it?

raid could fund entire games with what they're paying youtubers

Kickstarter to Court is such a good series! Never tire of them.

Might be an unpopular option, but I'm glad to see the sponsorship considering your luck with youtube monetization lately. You do great work. I hope you take more sponsorships in the future

Whenever I watch these kickstarter disaster videos, a large part of me feels more compelled to laugh at the idiots paying 10k pledges than actually feel disgust for the devs scamming them.

Whenever I hear the word "Kickstarter", ChronicLOL of Elyria always comes to my mind first.

Kickstarter where people have their money taken for pipe dreams. Look, i know there some legit devs on there but if someone is saying they make a game bigger then world of warcraft for 50k they are a scammer. AAA MMO cost millions to make. 50k or even a 100k is likely not covering monthly costs of development of AAA game. Make sure no one is selling you a pipe dream beyond what our current technology can create.

Disregarding the fact that $100k isn't enough to even fund half a game, you can kinda tell in the video the so-called dev is just reciting buzzwords. Idk how people didn't notice that at all.

The first minute is literally what pisses me off. Degenerates just took peoples money. Now you have big names like moist and asmon saying 'Don't put your money towards a game that's not out yet' which obviously sucks for games you wish to be made, but it's smart for the individual. Just annoying that no one ever deliveres.

I’ll be honest, I really enjoy when Kira gets a raid shadow legends sponsor because he does little skits, which is refreshing for him!

10:36 What a revolutionary gameplay 🤣

I think that at the time consumers were starting to get aware of the business side of games. If a game said it had a $10 million budget it meant at least half of it went into marketing. Extrapolating those numbers it didn't necessarily raise big flags when Kickstarter projects low balled the budget. No money towards marketing, retail releases and other corporate interference, so consumers wrongfully took it to the other extreme and believed you could make the next AAA game on a shoestring budget as long as there was passion. Personally I would've liked a breakdown of the budget. For instance a project's goal/ambition looks like a minimum of $500 000, purely dev side, but they're asking for $150 000. How? Government grants? Employing sweatshops in Buthan where children write the code for the game with the payment of one apple for 8 hours labor?

12:33 The two backers who pledged 10,000 dollars when they saw the initial game play reveal.

10:37 I had never seen this project before and the reveal made me chuckle 😂

A video about predatory game devs featuring a Raid Shadow Legends ad. Pure comedy.

Yeah I did got caught in this one, this was so sad to see unravel but it did teach me about pledging on sketchy projects without existing product or demo and about the cost of game development.

Seems like he has an ego problem, maybe a narcissist. Googling his name, he looks like an accomplished violinist and has won awards. He might have thought that he can do anything even without enough experience on game dev or producing anime.

people complains to buy 60-80$ games and have unrealistic expectations but then they spend 3000-10.000$ to buy a game which they didnt see a single gameplay😆

I love that Raid is totally fine with creators poking fun at how much they pay and how aggressive their advertising is😂

You're one of the few channels I'll willfully sit through a sponsor segment for because you deserve it.

I will never understand these kinds of backers. They see promises, corporate jargons, and people who speak like politicians. And chose to trust them? I mean, i know i myself am gullible but damn, I'm not even that gullible

Can't tell you how many times I start one of your vids intending to second screen it while I play a game on my other monitor, but then I just end up fully invested in the video. Thanks for another banger Kira! Never heard of this one either, crazy how much interesting stuff happened on Kickstarter.

Funny thing, most of them either stripped their LinkedIn of their involvement in this project, or more realistically, never were involved with this at all. Probably just sourced linkedIn to get some names and faces and plastered his Kickstarter campaign with them.

You know a game and creator I'd like to see on kick starter to court is yandere simulator and it's creator yandere dev. There are some pretty juicy stuff to talk about. From taking 9 years to develop the game. To yandere dev's shady past. The mistreatment of volunteers. And using and wasting people money for the game for his own uses. While many people have already talked about it and the drama continues go on as I speak. I think it would be fitting for this series.

Programmers generally make game studios more revenue than they make tech companies, and yet tech companies pay 2-3x as much and hence have all the best people. Game studios are an exercise in underpaying, overpromising, overworking, and ultimately underdelivering.

I'm impressed at your honesty with RSL. I normally get a little miffed when someone takes that kind of money, but you owned it and I'm okay with that. Just don't go picking up Established Titles or one of those "save the children" deals and we're good :)

The Jrpg scene has been decimated by gacha, there is no further need for Kickstarter scams today.

We need kiratv video about kiratv accepting raid shadow legend sponsorship😂

A strong reminder that you can defraud regular people and simply... get away with it. As long as you don't defraud institutional investors, nobody cares.

My favourite part of this debacle is them calling the only update in years - the one where they say “right, THIS time we are starting and will get it done!” - Gearing Up To Finish Project Phoenix ^^’ since then years without an update, though they logged into the Kickstarter account once a few months ago

16:29 ain't no way they let T-Posing Ogres make it to their Trailer. How did they break something that worked before? I know they changed engines, but geez the lack of desire to even TRY to give something even minutely presentable is appalling. I'm shocked any1 would hold onto any sliver of hope after that...

Holy crap, I clearly remember this project, and almost backed it back in the day. That's one bullet dodged.

Kira does such great work on the investigation, video and editing - I don't even mind the Raid ad!

Kickstarter could care less because they get a chunk of all donations 🤣

I remember Yusuke Kozaki the man himself was trying to get us to give money to Under the Dog at his panel at Otakon I think it was 2014? The artist for Fire Emblem Awakening-what better person to endorse? I was too young at the time to have any money but I would’ve donated at the time.

I wouldn't back a game unless it already has a good quality demo available.

Ahhhh yes! The kickstarter that turned into Tiny Metal, and then Tiny Metal 2. Which i still enjoy to this day....Sucks about Project Phoenix, though 😂😂😂 A friend of mine is still pissed about this to this day because he backed it and was mad about the Tiny Metal Reveal.

"A JRPG that is a squad-based RTS" Literally already raised my eyebrows from the first sentence

Tiny Metal was pretty good.

The reality that most people on Kickstarter don’t realize is that they’re not really donating, they’re investing. 80% of companies fail all together, even more underdeliver.

I love it. Dude finally did the RAID sponsorship we love so much to meme on lmao

I do believe most kickstarters are created for good reasons. We've all had that amazing game idea that nobody else has done and if we just had the money to do it we would make it. But ... reality kicks in, deadlines, online pressure, hate, backlash, impatience, realization of costs, time, working with a team and everything else happens and before you know it you've run out of money and have nothing to show for it.

"if this was the best foot of project phoenix it might need to be amputated" jeez that was savage 🤣

Your channel makes it more and more clear to me that I got super lucky when I helped fund Albion Online, that a game actually came out of it that's been going strong for like 8 years now. Though 100k to pay at least 6 wages for 2 years.. Surely people in 2013 could do basic arithmatic, there is some personal responsibility there. Not saying it's okay they got scammed, but at the point you can barely see the pitch through a sea of red flags, it is also partly the consumers fault.

the irony of having raid shadow legends as an ad for this video 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣

Saw the thumbnail and was like "noooo not uncle roger too"😂😂😂😂

I supported many projects on Kickstarter in the past and the ones that failed to deliver anything were mostly video games. I did get my Divinity: Original Sin 2 though.

Kickstarter rule number 1: Don’t donate any amount of money to a kickstarter campaign unless you’re comfortable with the possibility that you will receive nothing for it.

Again; man- great video. Well produced, well spoken and narrated. Well paced, researched. Blah blah, I just got off a 9 hr work shift and wanted to just sit down and make some veggies and ramen and you helped me calm down greatly and enjoy relaxing learning about a crazy story of crazy video game/ kickstarter bs . So I thank you and, Kira dude keep up the good work!!!