$8,368,023 Taken, 6 Years Developed, Zero Game Delivered, Lawsuit Filed 

this guy is a visionary, he created a pay to win game but without the game part

the words “you can literrally do anything” is usually a red flag for me.

For a lot less money, one could buy an awesome knight cosplay costume, move to Elyria, Ohio and walk around the shit city dressed as a knight fighting off muggers, robbers, rapists, rabbid dogs and the occasional coyote while at the same time livestreaming the whole ordeal creating your own chronicle.

For anyone looking for an update: The lawsuit was just dismissed in court and will not be proceeding. There may be an attempt of an appeal, but for now it's unknown. Caspian called it a victory and another "phase of the heros journey" The lawsuit against xsolla will be going to court. The lack of information and transparency is what gets me. Backers kept in the dark while nothing gets done. I feel terrible for them.

Maybe the real Elyria was the class action lawsuits we made along the way.

When the idea starts with "the most ambitious" and "kickstarter", just turn back and run as fast as you can.

I don't understand how you can have $10,000 to spare and decide to pay for a kingdom in a video game that doesn't even exist yet

If anyone was curious, Caspian in his most recently blog post has stated that Kingdoms of Elyria: Settlements will release in 2023.

Here’s the lesson: if a studio that has never put out a game before is trying to crowdfund a AAA game, assume it’s a scam.

This guy started a Kickstarter >collected 8mil >made the game > played by himself only > shut down the game. This guy is not a scammer, This guy is what every scammer dreams to become

After seeing this, just imagine a guy who made Kenshi. 12 years of development, 6 years alone with little funding and he made one of the best RPG game

The graphics downgrade is actually shocking. Devs spent years promising Skyrim, and released a video of old school RuneScape.

If I ever end up Kickstarting a game, I'm going to make a $10k tier that gives people a copy of the game with a completed save file. You don't even have to play the game. You already won. Congrats.

Damn that "playable alpha" compared to the original screenshots hurt my feelings and I didn't even give them any money

Did they really expect us not to notice that the swordfighting "gameplay" is just the sword fight between Inigo and Westley in The Princess Bride? 9:15

What do we learn from this? *As Game devs:* - DON'T try to be a revolutionizer immediately - If something doesn't exist yet, maybe it's because even big studios with all the money and recourses in the world couldn't figure it out. Not because they didn't want to, but because it's not doable, so far - If you're unknown, start with a simple game, that's cheap, but also easy to produce, that is fun to play though. And once you made it, aim for ever growing projects afterwards. Or to say it in gaming terms: Don't try to beat the final boss, before you even played the tutorial level for the first time. *As donaters:* - Don't stop using your brain, when you donate money - If an unknown developer offers something "too good to be true", it usually isn't true - Don't spend more money than you can afford to throw in the trash, in case the game won't deliver

Announcing that your game is going into Development Hell by relating it to the Hero’s Journey is an absolutely hilarious decision

This dude literally LARPed as a game studio for six years, writing production logs like he was Peter Jackson posting updates about the Hobbit, whilst in reality, he had a handful of rookie programmers in a room somewhere trying to figure out how to texture a model without it looking like it was made in 2002.

Has anyone noticed that one of the game play videos is a recreation of a scene from "The Princess Bride." It even includes the flip off the high beam. “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”

You don't get to DECIDE that your game is going to change everything and revolutionize the genre, that's something OTHER people decide AFTER playing your game.

If only people held their politicians as responsible as their game developers, the world would probably be a much better place.

I didn’t even know about this game but damn do I feel like I needed a refund after watching this.

People that give money to these Kickstarters may as well be playing the slots.

I like how graphic in the footages progressively got worse and worse

Chronicles of Elyria was the first mobile game ad before mobile games ads even existed

When they said they were having trouble finding the proper engineers for their idea, it should have been a massive red flag, tbh. It's literally them saying "So, we can't actually make the game we promised you unless we hire someone to do it for us"

Pretty sure the parkour demo was just that free template thing

See this is why I keep my projects inside of development communities. Because every time I feel I'm close to finishing something I realize I need to go 5 steps back to make 6 steps forward. Doing Solo Game Dev is even harder. I am at a point with my current project that I am very nearly at the 1/6th mark of the game and even then I wouldn't start posting about it much less asking for support while developing it. Maybe when I get 2/3rd done where all that's left is some cleaning up before Alpha then sure. If I knew I could hit alpha in like 5 months then yeah. But that means I have a functioning game already.

Bro WHAT?! I've never heard of this game and seeing how they casually tried to play off decently nice graphics and world to going to 2006 Runescape is absolutely mind-blowing. What a time to be alive

when it switched from trailer to updated gameplay I literally spit out all my food laughing.

I've only recently found - and subscribed - to your channel. Your documentaries on the history of games being developed are extremely well made and edited. They are very fascinating since you clearly do a lot of research to incorporate into your videos. I think you should have millions of subscribers.

Excellent video, great editing for your first time!

EA is gonna hire this guy asap

12:45 They really claimed that their developers, who were JUST laid off, would be "willing" to do the same job they used to get _paid_ for in their *"spare time?!"* 🤣🤣🤣

I'm not big into mmorpgs so I didn't know the details of the situation but definitely heard the name thrown around over the years as almost a campfire horror story. Thanks for the comprehensive look, you did a great job

My favorite bit is them creating the term "prelyria", then explaining that it was their clever shorthand for "Pre-Elyria". Thanks for shortening up the read for us, fellas.

I had a mate who worked as a project lead on Skyrim. He pissed himself laughing when he heard that people were funding this game. Knowing what Skyrim cost he says that the promises made for Elyria are literally impossible to meet based on the money raised unless it were made with 2D sprites and such.

I remember when this came across Kickstarter. I read the goals and the supposed release dates and went, "Nope, that's never happening." Seems I chose wisely.

As an aspiring game developer, I'll take this as a chapter of the book "What not to do when developing your game".

Just watched this video for the first time after following Kira for the past year or so, including Kingdoms of Deleria vids. It is excellent. Explained the whole sad drama so clearly.

While you all condemn and criticize this man, Ubisoft, EA, and Activision praises him highly! 8 million USD raised with no game!? That's like the holy grail for those companies, lol

the last "Pre-Alpha Footage" had me dead

This is an incredible video! Straight up I don’t know if this game ever existed but if it did I’d bet money it wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling as the story you just told. Well done

This was a great video bro. I know it was a lot of work and I damn sure appreciate it! 👍🏻👍🏻✌🏼

Me: grinding every day so I can lvl up my character. Character: Dies of old age.

How do people ignore THAT many red flags though? It's incredible

Well done. In depth, expansive overview of this sad saga

Ah I love coming back to this and any of the COE videos. I can't wait for Caspian to get done. Great content Kira.

We once dreamt about making our own game, but after doing some maths and realising the amount of money it would cost us we instead decided to create a series of short stories that we publish on the web for people to read for free.

(30 years have passed) -Finally get your copy of The Chronicles of Elyria. -Game Boots Up. -Hear horse carriage though a black screen. -"At last! The game we've all been waiting for!" -Your main character wakes up in a back of a horse carriage. -The NPC next to you notices "Hey, You're Finally Awake." -SKYRIM -"Gosh damn it Todd Howard! You clever bastard! You got us to buy Skyrim for 8 Million Dollars!" THE END

Great video man. Didn’t knew abt this until today. Good job.

Even if it wasn't a scam, the devs should have known not to promise more than they could deliver.

Who would even support this game in the first place, even the previous " Gameplay " footage looked like one of those LVL 30 Gang boss ads for android.

That snipet of the duel gameplay, is just a computer rendering of the duel in The princess bride.

was there any further updates from this?

thank you for all these entertaining videos! Love your channel

Hail, and well met Elyrians! Your generous donation of $1,750 will secure you a Demon Soul and a Saddled Great Beast (both theoretical ideas not yet worked on) . Ride around (possibly) with Honor , with Respect , and defeat your enemies (we're working on creating). With one more small donation of $3,500 you will (maybe) secure your stronghold for your Guild (if anybody plays) and your place in Elyrian history (once we render a world) will be solidified. In just 6 more months (maybe years) you will set forth on your epic journey and explore our possible ideas in an exhilarating text-based format complete with 800×600 images of your purchases!

"where was the game we were promised and paid for!" That's the magic of this. You actually aren't promised anything. You fund their "attempt" to make a game...whether it happens? That's another story.

Thanks for showing the definition of shutting it stopped me from having to leave the video to look up my self

As an indie dev working on a game project myself for 3 years, this is just insane. How can you build small bad amateurish looking scenes with marketplace (mostly free) assets on a free game engine (I guess it's Unity), record some videos and raise 8 million for this? There's so many RU-vid videos of 3D environments made by non professionals in UE4, CryEngine or Unity that looks wayyyyy more serious than this crap. Who will believe in other projects after this?

I am a Unity game developer I can confirm that the footages and the videos used by this company as a demo of their game are just demos of assets from the Unity asset store, I counted about 10-20 of them, each one costs about 100$-300$, soo basically all these videos cost less than 5K$

Such a great video, thanks for your hard work.

0:14 Predator Rabbits is a cool concept ngl and that Rhino Buffalo in the next pic looks badass

Producing a modern MMO, especially one like this, could never be done for $9M. We're in the age of $100M+ games when it comes to games with scope like this. $9M is barely enough to employ a small team of game developers for a year at this point.

The worst part is that... there could be a legit amazing team of developers who will never get funding because of the tainted history of crowd funding :(

The gameplay they showed (08:55, 10:55) looked like it came straight out of some OpenGL Udemy 20 hours course. Lol. Can’t believe it took 6 years to put that out.

Is there an update on this one? Would love to hear how the court case went?

These kickstarters, especially with MMO genre, shows how little people realize what it requires to create an MMO, the years it'll take, and the money, along with upkeep for it. Sad to see these giant scams going around, but I doubt they're going anywhere

I backed this on Kickstarter way back in 2016. I am still getting emails from Soulbound Studios about the progress of the game (last email arrived a couple of days ago). What I hate is the constant cash grab posts about buying unique items in the game, instead of just focusing on getting out a playable alpha. Truthfully, I think that the developer is just posting out these so-called updates to make it look like the game is still in production. It also keeps the wolves from the door when somebody questions 'where's my money and where's the game.' He can just say it's still being made, despite the fact that we all know its BS!

I've only ever backed one game. And that game was Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I strongly recommend to give that game a play through. The game turned out quite good IMO. Had a rough launch but the developers at Warhorse Studios did their very best to make the game enjoyable and they did an amazing job at that.

Renegade Line, it was on kickstarter, project funded fully, they developed it a bit, played like a closed alpha. It was like Battlefield Heroes, hence why I liked it. a while later, the devs said they're pausing development as it was a passion project or something, don't remember the details exactly, and then they disappeared and it's been years since we heard a peep. The Kickstarter I don't regret paying was the for the game UBOAT, I love that game, some of the best indie devs out there.

This was a scam, and the backers were victims. But, I mean, how can you be naive enough to see a tiny team claiming that they can make an entire MMORPG with revolutionary features and no experience for well under $10M and decide it's smart to put money into it?? It couldn't have been more obvious it was a fraud than if the game was called "Chronicles of the Scam: Take Your Money and Run".

Interesting to compare this car crash to 'The Long Dark'. A tiny company (Hinterland), using seed funding and kickstarter, made a basic game in 2012 which people loved, and then regularly added more content since. 5.5 million copies now sold, 91% positive reviews on Steam. The lesson must surely be; start small and with limited ambition, and build up slowly.

Going back to your older videos makes me appreciate how much better you’ve gotten at music choices and mixing. This shit was SO LOUD

I remember this when one of my coworkers prompted me to jump on the train while we can. I thought about it and told him I will wait and buy it for whatever price it may be if they ever deliver. This was some years ago and I actually forgot about it. Thanks to this video I remember this title now and I can´t wait to get to work tomorow and ask him whatever happened to his round about 300$. This is sad to all the backers but at some point I cannot do anything else but gringe....sry and my coworker will feel it too hahahaha

"Dude what should we name our startup?" "Improbable." "Yeah, that instills such confidence!"

I was expecting a joke because of the date. Instead I got a documentary. Oh wait... CoE is the joke!

Does anybody recognize that the fight scene going on in the game play is actually an exact copy of the princess bride

This was recommended to me and I ended up watching the whole thing. Thank you good sir

Kira is on his Stephen Spielberg production I see

Wow. This was a nightmare but you have done an amazing job describing what happened here.

The problem with the crowd founding campaigns, no matter if for games or hardware or any other project is that people are asking for money to work on an idea prior to verifying whether this concept is even realizable and they are rarely held accountable in case it turns out it isn't. In the normal business world, if you ask for money, you must convince investors and investors will insist on a proof of concept and they will surely hold you accountable in case of a total failure. E.g. a lot of crowd founding campaigns come up with an idea that sounds great but the reason why nobody has ever done that is not that nobody has ever thought of it but that it is physically impossible, which some people had to find out the hard way, yet their failure never went public, so people don't know that this concept has been tried hundreds of times already and has failed every single time. When you imagine the game of your dreams, you may have an idea what the game should look like, but when you start working on it, you may realize, that your game requires a minimum of 128 GB RAM to run as planned. That isn't reasonable. The majority of computers simply don't have that much RAM and people won't buy that much RAM just to play your game. So you need to downscale it to something more reasonable, like 8 GB of RAM. However, then you game cannot look and function the way you imagined it. It won't be the game you've promised as the game you've promised cannot be done with today's hardware and that's why such a game does not exist and not because existing game designers are not creative enough to come up with such a genius game idea. In other case the game could have been made, sure, but not with such a tiny team, not in such a short time span, and not with such a ridiculous little budget. If you are realistic, you need a team of 50+ people, the game will take 8 years to be done and it will cost many, many millions of dollars - which means the game will never pay off, as you cannot ever sell enough copies or raise the price high enough to ever get that money back. Again, that's the reason why the big game studies have not made such a game yet and not the fact that they are stupid or unwilling to make such a game but the fact that they have to make profit from what they are doing. I don't think most failed crowd foundings had malicious intend, I think that those people really believed in their idea/product but they didn't really invest enough time upfront to check if anything of that is really doable. Quite often there is not even the shadow of a prototype in sight or a realistic proof of concept on paper. There aren't even calculations or a business plan, there is just an idea and some people are naive enough to believe that "When you can think it, you can build it", yet that isn't the case. You can think of Perpetual Motion Machines but you cannot build them.

I literary choked with my coffee when I saw the early gorgeous footage of the game and then the alpha version which looked like something from the 80's.

I think most crowdfunding is a scam, but in defense of game developers. You'd be surprised just how hard it is to make a game. Most indie games fail due to overly ambition game devs not having the technical ability to finish their project. I would argue a successful indie game is an exception, not the norm.

This reminds me of the game that is now Strong Heroes of Heldenhaar, it’s that game started out kinda like this but it got bought out by a different developer and now it’s actually a sick game and super popular

If an earth shattering mmo could be built for just $9m.. let alone $900k.. it would already exist. Not sure who was dreaming, the dev, the crowd funders, or both.. but they were certainly dreaming.

Can't help noticing the clip shows the sword fight scene from The Princess Bride.

I love how they created a game which could be easily made with 2 people moderately familiar with game dev and 5-20k US dollars and 1-2 months of development. That's insane.

please keep us updated, subing for future updates

The gritty fallout of the lack of knowledge about "No pics, no clicks"

Crowd funding is great for projects that are about halfway finished. Most of these projects are from inexperienced developers who will have a steep learning curve. A developer should spend the first couple of years working on it in their spare time. This is how they will learn. Expecting to learn game development in the first three months of your funded project is unrealistic. The inexperienced always under estimate the learning curve. Star Citizen was developed by an industry legend and it still had growing pains.

Kickstarter may begin implementing genre based checkpoints in the near future; whether game, movie, album, or art, you'd need to meet certain brief critera and release testable progress in order to unlock new funding opportunities. Right until the finish line.

Kickstarter devs really need to think small. If you think small then you'll avoid feature creep. I notice a lot of kickstarters will NEED money, so they'll ADD a goal, and when they match that goal they'll also NEED MORE MONEY so they can fufill the promise of their new goal. So they'll add another goal to generate more money... but now they have MORE work to do.

Reminds me of the game 7 Days to Die which to my knowledge is STILL in the alpha stages despite being released almost 10 years ago which ended up being Minecraft in HD, it was just survival and building for several years with no real story or quest system. The difference being The Fun Pimps actually GAVE us something instead of just promising something even if it was fairly basic and ended up being developed as time went on. I think the moral here is it's great to have an ambitious idea but game dev companies need to be realistic with their backers and players as well as themselves, I for one would rather a company deliver i rudimentary version of the game and take the time to work towards the finished product than have a team promise a never before seen kind of game one day 1 only to deliver a POS or nothing at all. Devs, please consider what your team is capable of before promising a game, and the backers and players need to be patient with developers as some dev teams could be as few as 10 people or even just 1, not all dev teams have the capital to hire 50 people each for graphics,programming, storyboards and more. Even if we want more the developers can only give us what they're capable of giving

I laughed when he said less than a 20 man team and 18 months

OH MY GOD THE GRAPHICS IN THE VIDEO THEY FINALLY RELEASED AFTER A BIG SILENCE.. LMFAO

"The black death" is similar, had like 3 re-runs and it barely gets anywhere. But for me it was actually enjoyable for quite some time

9:34 just realized these are scenes from The Princess Bride, nice.

When you think about it, there's no real surprise that these Indie kickstarters often fail. We often seen Triple A titles struggle to live up to expectations. The baseline is that a lot of videogame companies lack competent project management. This is why we often see poor quality, missed deadlines, etc. Most of these indie developers have no experience in management (let alone project management) let alone business finance and accounting. So it's really no shock that you see so many run over budget, waste money, miss deadlines and ultimately be unable to deliver their products. Most gamers can come up with an amazing concept for a game. It takes not just good programmers, but also great management (technical, project, general and financial) to actually make a project into reality. I'd never invest in one of these unless I could see the education and work experience backgrounds of the team involved.

Do they call it Soulbound Studios because of Mr. Walsh's Soulpatch 🤔