Man that's crazy. chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/3... Watch me on twitch: / kiraonttv Sub to my patreon: / kirayt Sub to my main youtube channel: / kiratv1 #chroniclesofelyria #kickstarter #2023
"I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS! I AM GOOD WITH DEALING WITH PEOPLE! WHY CAN'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!" _Office Space_ will never stop being relevant.
idk, that last one where he just talks about his daily routine and books he's reading for ages was one of the most boring things I've ever tried to sit through.
Caspian should be making the game! Not reading stupid books. Can you imagine turning up for work and saying you aren’t doing any work today because you feel sad and want to read books? You would be sacked on the spot. He did this after wasting peoples money
In the US, although it's not known by most people, it is illegal to tell your employees not to share information about their compensation and threaten them with punishment if they do. So if your company/boss has told you this, or it is in your contract, contact your states labor department and lodge a complaint. It is possible that you will receive monetary compensation for doing so.
It's not that easy, if the boss just tells you this verbally, it'll be your word against theirs. I'm sure you need some evidence else everyone would be filling this complaint all the time for the money.
@@juances The labor department isn't as stupid as you'd think, they can tell there's a link between someone sharing information and suddenly them being punished "for no reason." Really, if it wasn't for hesitancy, businesses wouldn't get away with this so much.
@@crazyinsane500 Yeah I am also highly skeptical about this. I feel like if this was real it would happen more often because I do you know for sure a lot of people have their wages taken their tips help by their boss and this stuff as well happening. Not being able to talk about your wages.
I'm at 21 minutes and my only thought is this dude is incapable of completing a project. The amount of time he spent writing all of this, which is largely useless, shows an inability to manage a project. This is a person who has no idea how to manage priority. I've worked with people like this. People who spend five hours picking the perfect shade of red, I'm not exaggerating, for a in-house company picnic flier, and let important deadlines slide by even as e-mails are pouring in begging for deliverables. If scenes like this didn't play out at his company, I'd be shocked.
Completely agreed. Project management is less about ordering people around and more deciding what is and isn't worth your manpower, resources, and time. No deliverables, no money--either from investors or bank draws. Caspian clearly didn't learn that lesson.
Ehh, personally I could knock out a post like this and all the relevant details in full as Caspian did it in a day or two, tops. MAYBE a week if I wasn't dedicating hours per day to it. And once it's done, it's done and released. Over the scope of years of development, a week's time isn't something to worry over. Caspian's other worries are a greater priority, however. Not sure he HAS a week to spend on this kind of stuff, unlike my unemployed Grad student arse....
@@boomkruncher325zzshred5 Caspian has all the time in the world for this kind of bullshit right now. Pretending to be making a game, and attempting to rescue his public image through PR and blog posts full of lies is his full time job.
Let's be honest, if there was anything to show, he would have shown it. The man was ecstatic about his fog of war in the game nobody asked for. If he had anything at all, he would be shouting from the rooftops. The way I see it, C/KoE is an unintentional piece of performance art that I highly enjoy and other people paid for on kickstarter.
@@byst33 There are no NDAs going over three or more years after you have been let go for that kind of position. They're not nuclear scientists or holding state secrets. Most of them were animators, software devs, junior devs, etc. They could easily speak up; no NDA would be enforceable for that long in the USA (or Canada and I presume Europe but I only do commercial/corporate law in Canada). I doubt anyone from that team wants to step forward to say "yeah, we were fucking incompetent, the place was a shitshow, we didn't produce anything that can be even streamed, but we still took the money for years because why not". They're likely still in the field.
I love that Kira's go to reference for music on the charts is Pearl Jam, it's that level of awareness on the cutting edge of culture that keeps me coming back
Two biggest takeaways I got out of this is that 1. Caspian started spending as if he were making a AAA studio when he really should have went the indie route and 2. He hired too many employees which meant lower average wages and attracted entry level talent.
he also "claims" what he payed himself but showed no paycheck. a bit sus CONSIDERING HE HAS TO HAVE PAYCHECKS. its illegal to pay anyone let alone yourself without paychecks because the goverment wants to have acount on wtf is happening.
I mean. If this guy had spent even a 10th of the time in actual game development that he's spent writing journals, there might actually be some sort of a playable game by now. Jesus.
It doesn't take that long to write stuff like this. Couple hours at most. The fake outrage is what's most annoying about gamers. As if there's not enough real stuff to complain about you'll complain about the stuff that doesn't need it.
I’m honestly quite jealous. I’m over here with a writer’s block. He could’ve been a literature professor. But nope, decides to be a incompetent game dev.
There's definitely money missing. The studio was "shuttered" due to lack of funds in March of 2020. Implying that all the $9m+($1.3m from Kickstarter and $7.7m afterwards) was gone at this point. So, from June 3rd of of 2016, which is when the funds were released from Kickstarter, to March of 2020, $9m was spent. 7 months in 2016. 12 months in 2017, 2018, and 2019. 3 months in 2020. 46 months total. That's $195,000 per month, or $2,347,000 per 12 month period. Correct me if my math is wrong, but that shows a lot of money missing, no? It seems to me Caspian is lying/hiding something. This does NOT include any money that Caspian received from the government during C*vid OR the LOANS that he claims to have taken to cover "month to month" expenses. If, and this is a serious if, we believe everything Caspian has given us, that leaves $2,155,639 unaccounted for. Spread across the 7 months in 2016 and the 3 months in 2020 that's $215,564 per month. Which would be roughly in line with what Caspian has told us, so we can regard the 3 months in 2020 as 'normal'. That leaves the 7 months in 2016. Which is where part of the discrepancy lies. He claims he wasn't paying himself a salary until the last 3 months in 2016 and there were fewer employs during 2016 due to the fact that they "were still building the studio". This leaves me with 3 questions. What was the $1,508,948 in 2016 spent on? How much were the loans that Caspian claims to have taken to help the studio month to month and where did that money go? What happened to the C*vid money from the government after 2020?
Well, that means there'll also be updates on this, because while online backers may be swindled at your leisure legally or almost-legally, the government is quite adept at the 'f*ck around and find out' game when you take their money and embezzle it. May take a couple years, but there will be hellfire rained on him.
@@nvelsen1975 Many of these PPP loans and other COVID assistance debs were forgiven for businesses. Remember when all those Republican (a few Democrats too) congresspeople were decrying student debt forgiveness, shouting about how Jesus said debts always had to be repaid? Then it came to light that those same politicians had millions of dollars in PPP debts which had forgiven. Basically as long as the business can show the loans were spent on retaining employees, the debt is forgiven. "If borrowers use at least 60% of the loan to cover payroll within 8 or 24 weeks after receiving the loan, they can submit an application to have the loan forgiven. Our data shows that approximately 97% of PPP loans were used for payrolls." www.pandemicoversight.gov/data-interactive-tools/data-stories/how-many-paycheck-protection-program-loans-have-been-forgiven What doesn't make sense is that Caspian claimed to have 15 employees in April 2020 when his loan was approved. This was after he publicly announced he had "shuttered" the studio and fired all his employees. He may have partly changed his mind about that when he found out these loans were available. www.federalpay.org/paycheck-protection-program/soulbound-studios-llc-issaquah-wa
200k a month, can get eaten pretty fast paying the salary of multiple programmers and digital artists plus I bet Caspian took a salary as well despite him saying he didn't take a salary....you see this on shows like kitchen nightmare where you have people who open a restaurant and claim they aren't taking a salary but then it comes out they were taking money each money "to cover living expenses" aka they see taking a salary
I'm a fiber designer for a commercial ISP, and I've done work with basically every major US telecom company. I've never seen an area where residential has access to higher speeds than commercial. Yes, virtually all tiers of service are more expensive than residential, because for commercial contracts you are obligated to provide the advertised speed, instead of the "up to" residential customers get, as well as having an obligation to maintain a certain level of uptime and a maximum time to repair, but nobody offers residential customers higher speeds than commercial, it's almost always the reverse. For example, my company's lowest tier for commercial is the highest tier available to residential, 10 Gb/s.
@@TikkiNikkidepends on the area and company. If your area only has 5 Gb/s lines that is your maximum regardless of what you want. Same if the company you want does not have lines to your area.
Bellevue is an expensive Seattle area tech city, there's no way he didn't have access to extremely fast internet. He was near Valve, Microsoft, Nintendo, Amazon, and other such giants.
Gamers used to get t1 lines direct wired to their house back in the late 90's. Where there's money, there's a way. Assuming they have it to provide of course.
Also adding that even if what you're buying for a small business is essentially residential service with a commercial skin on it (like Comcast for business) the way it's billed and supported is usually through an account rep, so you have a specific person you can complain to. And usually you get access to stuff like static IPs as part of the package to make things like inbound VPNs possible.
I bought a $200ish CoE pack sometime in 2016. At that time, Caspian was presenting the trailer (basically the only footage we've ever seen) as if it was part of the actual game. He was also making videos with some of the devs in a studio and writing very detailed and frequent dev blogs and framing it as if it was work they were currently doing or had finished. This dev post he just made makes it sound like he was just starting the studio during that time frame. That is far from what he was telling the backers at the time and I doubt anyone would have supported him if he had be transparent about it.
the 96k and 120k difference is because he is talking about pre tax and post tax income. The company paid him 120k but he paid taxes on it. The 96k is post tax so his net income.
Checked and washington doesn't have a state income tax unless you make 100k or more a year (22.9%). Anything over 100k is taxed at 31.7%. That is pretty nasty.
About the "I paid myself 120K" : I think it is related to the definition of the term "salary". So a person can have a literal salary of 50K, yet she might get a premium pay and other benefits worth an extra 10K for example. See the category "Health Insurance Premiums" for example (very USA). CEOs will often just show you a strict concept of their "salary", which does not represent their total revenue or benefits.
96k was for 3 years and 120k was average for all 5 years I believe, so It would depend on whether or not he took those 3/4 of a year without pay in average. If not, then if those first two years he's taken the same salary, it woould be about 156k, otherwise it would be aboout 230k.
I think you are incorrect. It's very simple he received both $96k in salary AND $120k in distributions per year (both subject to different tax rates). I own an S-Corp in the US and this is how it usually works. There's the amount you pay yourself as a salary and the amount distribute to all the owners (which may just be yourself). Additional "pay" in health insurance etc. can also be covered by the company.
26:30 this serves as a reminder that people like DarkSydePhil exist, who on a 2-person household bought a "business class" Internet not knowing it's slower and not meant for "gaming" or "streaming" and only offers better customer support, while costing 2-3 times more than normal connection.
For the record Kira, how internet tends to work here in the USA is that you have two kinds. Business and Residential. Business costs more, but any downtime is subtracted from what you owe at the end of your billing period. So if your internet is down for 50% of the time, your bill will only be half what it should be. It's also slower on download, but much faster on upload. The reason for this is because more channels are dedicated to sending data back up. Residential internet has been, generally speaking, 90% down and 10% up. Side note, there's long been a belief that part of why is to discourage piracy by throttling upload bandwidth, but a lot of it has more to do with the fact that a residence hasn't needed the ability to upload until fairly recently.
I live in Washington not far from Bellevue, and lemme tell you, Bellevue is INCREDIBLY high end. That city doesn't even feel real when you go to it. It is completely pristine and clean, with tons of high end shops and car dealerships selling Lamborghinis and Aston Martins. No joke, Bellevue is ridiculous. That salary is laughable for that area, and nobody in their right mind would work there if they were paid that. Not to mention just logistically, you wouldn't in any way be able to afford to live anywhere close to Bellevue with that kind of salary.
"Studio" should have been someone's finished basement. I ran a retail store out of a finish barn for a year, and only purchased a commercial property when the non-HOA HOA neighbors complained there was too many delivery trucks coming to our house at a townhall. We then moved into a very small location. Only after 3 years of profitability have we decided to buy our own dedicated commercial property at $300k. It also has residential modular homes on the property that we will rent out. I don't understand how people make such clearly stupid financial decisions like leasing an expensive commercial location when your entire business is digital...
I love how generous Caspian makes himself sound with employee salary with money that was not his, in a game that has never been shown, and a project he mismanaged in every possible way into the ground.
Their struggle find "high" quality engineers makes sense now considering they are surrounded by a ton of companies that pay college grads 120k per year base.
The difference between the 120k and 96k for the different sections is because he said the 96k was the take home pay, whereas I would assume the 120k is the gross wages.
@@absi49 it makes Kira illiterate. If your base assumption is that everything in the post is a lie, then there’s no point in even discussing the figures
The reason business class internet is slower and more expensive is that it comes with service-level agreements (SLAs) -- guaranteed uptime percentage against a guaranteed refund/credit if it falls short. You also get actual real customer service instead of what your residential provider provides. Some residential providers will threaten to cancel residential service if a work-from-home or business user on residential service tells customer service "our business" or "my job" depends on reliable service. "You need commercial internet then. It's in your terms of service that we're not responsible for business losses on a residential connection. Pay up." And in the US, generally, it is *illegal* to tell employees they can't talk to each other about their pay. Lots of employers don't know this or don't care, but an employer can be fined for enforcing a rule like that. There are exceptions -- doesn't apply to contractors or executives, for example. But the rank and file have a right to talk about their pay. Even telling them "you can't discuss it on company time" is illegal.
you should really put 'supposed' in front of the "actual real customer service" etc. not that they'd be responsible for business losses then either. just get multiple lines if you can and wireless, if a tornado blows the lines they ain't paying up for any losses. one difference that's been a thing in many locales for a while now is that consumer line no longer gets it's own ip, it's just natted.
@@lasskinn474 What's covered and what make-goods are available to the customer would be spelled out in the SLA. Point is, residential service doens't have much in the way of SLA.
@@grayaj23 and the sla has clauses to get fucked by most reasons except basically them doing something on purpose to cut it and covers just the service costs anyway typically, it's not like it's a business insurance. look, hp's, lenovos etc's pro support is same way nowadays. "3 day onsite" in practical terms is "get fucked 3 weeks bickering if the monitor broke due to the battery or not". none of that stuff is actually worth it nowadays, not hp's, not anybodys. only place the sla works out is in a datacenter and if the center gets flooded they're still flooded no matter what sla you had. just have a plan b.
@@lasskinn474 I get same-day service and rebates/discounts from my ISP when they exceed the SLA for downtime. I also get text messages with updates on when things are going to be working again. Your mileage (and contract terms) may vary. At any rate, I was just answering a specific question about why commercial internet service costs more for less bandwidth. I wasn't making any substantive claims about whether it's worth the cost. IDK how HP and Lenovo got brought into this.
@Kira, you are correct. I paid around $80 for a "plot of land" during that last crowd funding round. Never saw a penny returned. I asked SoulBound and Xsolla and was denied. It wasn't even a month after purchase
@@xxkillbotxx7553 I read the journal so, yes :D Still a poor last minute excuse to years of "no money to me" Wonder what his wife got as she was an employee and a shareholder too
@@xxkillbotxx7553 Yeah but where there is smoke there is fire. Caspian is the same guy who "shuttered the studio" then said wait its not closed where did you get that crazy idea once he found out he could get sued. He also claims the game has been in a state where it should be showable but no one has ever seen this game played. He also farms for sympathy constantly in these journals about how rough he has had it despite the fact that he is the one that ripped people off and didnt deliver what he promised even in a bad state. I wouldn't believe Caspian on anything at this point.
IF everything was above board, hes seriously gone so far out of his way to make people suspicious, you'd swear he was actively trying to build the reputation of a scammer.
I looked up their address, because my office is next to Valve's building. They weren't located near Valve by a long shot, but they were located adjacent to a botanical garden. My area is an extremely expensive place to work/live in, their area was still expensive, but definitely "in the middle of nothing" (aka no close amenities, so their rent would have been significantly lower than where I am/Valve is). They definitely went too hard on expenses and probably too many work amenities too. They aren't allowed to have residential internet due to the building they were in. Either way, I'm glad I was never financially invested in this garbage pile of a game. They would have saved money just renting out a WeWork space or just working full-remote. And not paying first/business class on everything on their travel related expenses.
I don't understand why the average salary cost would be lowered if Caspian didn't receive a salary. It would be easy for him to exclude himself from the calculation.
My favorite line: "Be prepared for that" - that you have to pay taxes and med insurance on your employees. (37:47) If this takes you offguard when planning your business.... oh boi....
I live in Washington around the Seattle/Bellevue area. Bellevue is a very high end area to live. A lot of local celebrities/sports athletes live in Bellevue. It's also very close to Microsoft and Nintendo of America's headquarters. And yes, Valve is headquartered in Bellevue. If their employees lived in Bellevue, $70ish k per year is very low and definitely below cost of living for most people for that area. It is obscenely expensive right now to live there.
Yeah, the high end office and equipment makes it seem like our buddy Caspian was more into the image of looking like a legit big time studio rather than doing the work. Once again, this stuff is meaningless and Caspian loves to tell and now show. Utter dribble. Caspian needs to show what was accomplished in the time period he had people's money. Zero percent of this has been done.
I never received a refund for what I purchased during that final crowdfunding push. I've said it before, but I dropped more than $2K on the fever dream that was CoE. I regret it, and have learned since to be very cautious (largely thanks to your channel and others, like SidAlpha) of crowdfunded projects.
@@ppsarrakisIt was small purchases over time, atop larger ones. The FOMO was strong with this project, and I'd never been exposed to that sort of thing. Learn from my mistake.
It's a shame you lost your money mate. At least you learnt something. There's no such thing as a mistake so long as you learnt something. Good luck mate
These blog posts are so entertaining. I can't believe someone like Caspian raised so much money when he seemingly has zero idea how to spend time and money and keep an actual studio running. The fact that he spends so much time and effort into making all of these blog posts (essentially saying "I investigated myself and I found I did no wrongdoing") instead of doing anything else that is productive... this guy is missing an opportunity to be some corporate blogger for some company (but then he wouldn't get to talk about himself)
I live in Seattle, across the lake from Bellevue. $68k is fucking madness. You couldn’t even afford to live in Bellevue for that money; you’d have to go farther out, which means a hellish commute and expensive gas. A couple weeks ago, I saw a job ad for a lead at Bungie, which is also located in Bellevue, for upwards of $200k. However, I pay around $1200 a year for 1 gig internet, so I can absolutely buy that they paid $6000. It’s exploitatively expensive.
I refuse to accept that someone could be so incompetent in every way as Caspian seems to be. I have followed this saga from Kira's very first video on the game, but I didn't catch until now that Caspian worked as a software developer before. That makes it even more strange. I'm a software developer too who are dipping his toes in game development. Game development isn't _that_ much different from other types of software development. Even if he hadn't made a single game before he started, and even if he worked all by himself in his spare time after work, and learned game development from scratch, a software developer should definitely have some type of working game to show for it after almost a decade (if I understand the blog post correctly, he started working on the game in 2015). Certainly not as ambitious a project as Chronicles of Elyria, but at least something more than long and convoluted blog posts. It's almost as if he's purposefully incompetent, stepping on landmine after landmine. If he had rolled the dice for every decision, he and the game would probably be in a better position. In a way, it's admirable. If it wasn't for other people's money, time and hopes he poured down the drain, it would be funny.
The most incredible thing is that being a software developer, he could not understand that it could take more than 100 years to develop an MMORPG alone or with a small team of non-professionals.
What you're thinking about is: is it likely that guy X is this dumb? But what you should be thinking about is: is it likely that out of a thousand CEOs, one of them is this dumb? And to that, the answer is "yes." (And the one-out-of-a-thousand dumb guys is the one who gets videos made about him.)
@@argylemanni280 That's true. It takes completely different skillsets. But the point I was trying to make was more like even if he weren't an entrepeneur, if he had skipped starting a company, hiring people etc., he would have been able to produce a game in this time. Not the product he claimed to be making, but at least a working game, maybe even a good game.
@@lightworker2956 bro your passion to try to defend Caspian using the argument "but people out there did worse" or "but people out there did the same" in dozens of comments in this video is quite something else LOL, im pretty sure the people that lost thousand of dollars that will not get refunded bcs dude was incopetent as bricks will GLADLY agree with you!!!!
I'm far more interested to, one day, hear actual firsthand reports from ex-employees about what it was like to work for him. I bet it was a nightmare of stress and indecision. I remember him throwing his people under the bus even in his old blogs.
A professional game dev would not work on an indie game unless it was their own game. Those professionals would rather go to an established studio or go independent.
I've actually been loving these read-throughs. Definitely seems like he's just a guy with ambitions that are much bigger than his experience can handle... But with 8 million dollars to throw at it.
The saddest part about this is he never intended to be scammer, at least not at the beginning. The game was just a classical case of something being way, way too big in scope and hookwinking people with pre renders. At the end though, he took PPP loans when he fired the entire studio and was taking money from the public days or hours (forget which one) before closing the studio due to lack of funds.
There's a saying that people shouldn't be educated beyond their intelligence. Caspian proves that you shouldn't be funded beyond your competence. Leaf: I don't think he's more narcissistic than the average guy. I think the average guy here wouldn't say "yeah my bad I wasted 8M because I was stupid." We might want him to say that, but most people in his shoes wouldn't, especially because that might get him sued.
He said the salaries were net. And that the taxes for the salaries were a separate category. So for the last part, he probably added what he got in both net and taxes
The fact that his studio had facilities for motion capturing is telling to me. In my opinion it shows that he definetly didnt have his priorities right. It also wouldnt be the first company trying to do something "fancy" like motion capturing while completely failing to focus on and deliver the basics. And even if the motion capture wasnt used, the facility was still paid for.
This is truly a fascinating tale of how one man, the legend of Caspian managed to piss away so much money and time with so little to show for it. A true egima of what the man is thinking, was it a scam? was it delusion? was it incompetence? was it really about the friends we made along the way?
When PPP loans/grants started one way to prove your financials was to show figures from the prior 2 years. I know some info from the loan and application was considered public info. So I wonder if thats why he chose to share his financials from just 2017-2019. He might have thought the info was already "out there" so there was no harm in disclosing it.
Caspian earned the following salary: Year 1: $156k Year 2: $156k Year 3: $96k Year 4: $96k Year 5: $96k That ticks the box for the $96k over the 3 years and the $120k of the 5 years
Seems like Kira got really lost in the sauce with the math at 31:21. Basically, the claim goes as follows: The project lead pays himself a WAGE that is X. However, his company generated revenue (from crowdfunding), and the claim is that because he owns the business, he must pay BUSINESS TAX Y for being the owner of a profitable business - out of his own pocket. So, if he was not to basically give himself money from the business, he would be paying for this tax out of pocket, making his not amazing wage potentially not even be a living wage. So, the claim goes that he paid himself WAGE X, and at the end of the fiscal year (or quarter, unclear) he then transfers Y to himself, where Y is the exact amount needed to pay for the profitable business tax. Hence, while the total amount transferred to his bank account is higher than his wage, unless he's dodging taxes, the excess goes directly from his bank account to the IRS. That is the claim as I read it. I don't know if it's legitimate, I run a business but it's not even on the same continent as this man and the rules are just completely different here. It sounds sort of legitimate, a bit of a bullshit tax but hey, the business world is nothing if not full of these.
I just want to say that my experience with business internet in the US is about right with what this dude said. The providers won't let you get residential internet in a business setting, for obvious reasons. It's "commercial" internet and it's insanely marked up.
26:48 If you live near the coasts in the US, internet is pretty great with plenty of choices since the submarine internet cables generally terminate in NYC, Virginia, Washington state, and California. The closer you get to the rural areas or toward the middle of the US, the harder it is to find competitive choices at fair prices. Starlink is starting to change that I hear.
I scrolled through the entire post and it's mostly a realistic picture of the financials, with some suspect expenses but nothing major. But redditors have to get outraged, hit the outrage button, make the outrage post, like the outrage posts, all before they even know what's going on.
The company I work for in the UK is a small business that pays for a designated internet line. We are charged £360/month by BT, that’s around $460/month - or around $5,500 a year.
That is a huge difference between costs. I mean look at Software vs PC Hardware. So they made their employees bring their own workstations? Heck, even the Internet listing is a step higher. *Edit So they said they built all their PCs and barely updated them. Perhaps that was also one reason why the demo was not good. Tech limits while building.
depends what updates , i actualy had 2 year course about software development and testing , one of first few things you do when you start new project is turn updates off on almost everything if not everything your project will use, why? well , ever played videogame , booted up windows or used any program who broke something? now imagine that in software dev that 6 months into project , adobe you used fuckedup most assets becouse artist did update , compatibility is something done much later down the line i could write more and in bigger detail but...im just chilling drinking tea.
@@VarenvelDarakus it depends somewhat how the development is ran. we run multiple sw development projects and if we don't update it's due to some component not being compatible and we try to make it compatible or look for an alternative. you'd still want faster compiles and shit though. it's not like you couldn't develop on an old computer though or that you couldn't develop the mmo engine itself on a computer frozen in time or the whole game - the big parts that matter which is the architecture and how it actually works, it's just really strange use of money for a company, that's all, not upgrading and making the employees feel better with bigger monitors and everything. especially the licensing costs still being high as fuck for every sort of software.
tech limits while building? really? they have no demo, there is no game these posts are buying him time so people forget because nobody is getting aggressive enough to take him down
In the last code update dude showed of a server setup of 8 ancient 4790k quad core cpu's running his trash server code. He could buy a single thread ripper system and get double the cores and faster clockspeeds. He has no money, he got those PC's in a dumpster of an electronic shop, then wasted weeks setting them up with servers and making them communicate together for something that will never be used in the final game lmao
Modders have worked remotely forever and that's how they can sometimes make total conversion mods for no pay and in their freetime. Imagine what people can do if actually employed. Renting and office and forcing people to waste money on a shitty apartment is overrated
They will have bought most of the hardware in the time he didn't calculate here, the hardware he mentions wasn't that expensive at the time either, I thought he would have spent a lot more on this tbh. His software and licensing costs are wayyyy below what I would expect even for a business that small, somethings a bit off there.
in a lot of countries (and I think most American states) it's illegal for employers to stop you talking about your salary, so check the laws in your area
I can kind of understand why Caspian didn't include all of the numbers. It seems like he's telling a story and trying to make a point, in this case the financial workings of game development. Including costs from when he shrank the company to just himself and one or two employees would fog the point he's trying to make. That being said, it would be nice to have all of the numbers so people could make their own conclusions, but again, that's not part of the story Caspian is trying to convey. Still not a fan of Caspian, but the finance stuff is interesting to me.
TL;DR: Business Internet is more expensive as essentially you're paying for a guaranteed service with an SLA. Business vs. Residential Internet: "Residential" is typically marketed in speed tiers, _can_ be asymmetrical (i.e. your download speed is much faster than your upload speed), and importantly typically does not come with a guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA). "Business" tiers are typically offer symmetrical (e.g. the same) download & upload speed, but usually offer enhanced support options and where you *may* be able to claim back money for an outage or any downtime is guaranteed to a minimum stated amount.
Business internet is considerably more expensive than residential. This is mostly due to SLA's if something goes wrong. Quite important for businesses and they get charged through the nose accordingly. Not sure if what is stated is reasonable or not, though.
well there is 2.2 M unaccounted for in his math which would of been from the year 2016 as the kickstart funds released with initial funds from the website. Since he put 500k of his own money to start the company he probably paid himself back after the kickstarter, leaving the 1.7M to fund the company in 2016
You do NOT give yourself a paycheck while taking distributions. Your taxes are based on income. You have personal income tax and business tax. If you "lucky" like here, we also pay a personal property tax based on equipment and furniture. Expenses are how you deal with taxes. And you only take distributions. Then you pay your pressman income tax from that. Also, a good CPA should have been able to tell him he was spending money in unnecessary areas.
Doing quick math, he would've had to pay himself ~156k for the 2 years missing if the 3 year avr is 96k and the 5 year total is 600k (120k/year for 5 years).
@kira based on your question if we got refunded for the extra domains we bought a few days before. i can personnaly tell you i bought my new duchy a few days before he posted the message we didnt give him enough money. that part im the maddest about as thats really just a cash and grab moment
Ditto. And they worked hard on getting all of the available land sold, and all those assets package. How much time was used on the game store and kingdom selection, and how much did they work on the actual game?....right up to when he shut down the whole thing.
Again I agree with wanting the specifics... but you would never get that, from any dev. ever. NDA, PI, privacy, these are legal blocks to him telling you those specifics, and could literally mean lawsuits against him if he released that information. Don't get mad at me, that is just the law man. I still agree with you though. Wish it were not that way. As for $150k for a lead dev, there is clearly, absolutely room for that to have happened, for multiple people. Remember, earlier on, he didn't have the same devs/level of talent he did later. There could have been, for example, as many as five people making that in the final year, with plenty of room for the previous two years with either few people/less pay. Makes sense to me. And yes, I can personally attest to that cost for ISP for a business. 100% and then some. Again, not defending, just using basic reasoning and facts - you're still right, he has failed thus far, and I do wish we could have more specifics on money distribution.
Ok so about the internet costs I will say I don't know if it's different in the US but as someone who worked for an internet provider I can certainly say that (at least in the UK) business packages are not automatically slower and 3 times as expensive as the norm. They're normally built to handle large businesses having 50-100 computers working at a time so they're generally superior to residential services. They will be a bit more expensive but come with bonuses like compensation if your service is out for a long time and a much quicker response time. A funny thing that happened a few times would be having residential customers threaten to sue us for having to wait more than a day for a repair because they ran a business at home. When we then pointed out they were defrauding the company by not declaring that they suddenly didn't want to have lawsuits involved lol.
FTC, DOJ and IRS should look into this guy. When this all explodes all this narcissistic doubling and tripling down is only going to make the court case worse for him. You know the whole train crash in slow motion saying.
Is paying developers to develop not also a development expense? Now the problem is they were developing marketing material to try to bring in investors not a game.
@@dekulruno Only half true. Paying employees to make them able to work is a project contribution, however, game dev needs alot of stuff to pay like like computer upgrades and maintainance, electricity, marketing and fee to have approval on whatever the platforms you are gonna sell your game on. This is why if you are an indie dev, never spend money on stuff like expensive headquarters, fancy office chairs and parties like Caspian did.
Since the average tax rate in that area is fairly high, reporting the salaries as only being net after tax pay makes the average salary look way lower than it would have been in reality. If the average net salary was $64k than the actual average salary would have been more like ~$90k. Still probably on the lower end for the area conscidering Valve is accross the street, but still some funny math going on there. I'm an executive director of a small comany and nobody I know reports salaries like this.
I never once thought Caspian straight up stole money or the project was a planned scam. Its simple though, they blew through all the money while basically accomplishing nothing. I dont care about the money just show us WHAT was done in the game. How many assets were created, how much of the map was finished etc. At the end how much of the game was playable? 10%? 25% 50% ??? The money went to salaries, rent, software etc. I have no doubt. BUT WHAT WAS DONE IN THAT TIME???? My guess is not much and its simply a case of gross mismanagment and became negligence bordering on fraud when they continued accepting money when they knew nothing was getting done. In any case the people who gave money and got nothing in return are the only victims here.
"Had we continued in 2020 our expenses would have..." I'm sorry, I don't want to hit a man when they're down, but nobody cares about what expenses could have been occurred? "If I'd hired super models to scan in to our game, we could have spent so much more, so really we saved money!"
Kira you joked about what lessons you could learn about this and here is what I learned: If you are going to start a game think of the budget and time, then triple both values. If you manage to finish under budget congrats you made it; If you still go over budget/time mistakes were made.
No offense, but if you make your estimations this accurately, don't even bother to start the project, since you probably don't have a clue what is waiting for you, like old Caspian here. Seemingly from this, he was even surprised he had to pay taxes and med insurances for employees. You can, and should make a quite accurate plan beforehand, with proportional reserves. Just randomly multiply things, because you may not know something, is not the fruitful start imo. I'm a scientist, making multiple research plans with cost estimations per year. I see this attitude from some of my collegaues, they don't have a clue what will be the expenses usually, so again, no offense to you, but don't start without know-how.
@@AquaCoalaNest The point I was making is to assume that it is going to be more expensive than you initially think. Also, my point is regardless of how the budget stimation was done. If the original amount calculated was X double or triple it. Its also a much more fruitful start it seems than what ever Caspian did.
These ARE the Chronicles. The joke's on us, Kira. We're playing the game ALL THE TIME.
Sounds like a bad TV show
The real Chronicles were the lawsuits we filed along the way.
@@morriswyrm6756chronicles of e-lawyeria: eclectic boogaloo
And just like the plan for the original game, we will all die off, and our kids will continue to love the tales of Caspian
It continues to subvert expectations 😌
Caspian is the kind of guy who spends more time and effort on arguing why he's a valuable employee than actually doing his job
Not even a an employee, why he's a valuable manager!
"I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS! I AM GOOD WITH DEALING WITH PEOPLE! WHY CAN'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!"
_Office Space_ will never stop being relevant.
Agreed. And yet it's mostly those people who keep their jobs against all odds. Because flabberghasting does work and impress ... somehow.
@@medievaldoctor Somebody's got a case of the Mondays!
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426No. No man. Shit no.....I believe you'd get your ass kicked saying something like that....
The true Chronicles/Kingdoms of Elyria are the development blogs we got along the way.
This got my upvote.
Be a great mod for the next Elder Scrolls game. A book on the shelf called 'The true Chronicles/Kingdoms of Elyria' and its just these blog posts
@@sadhappy8860 this made chuckle lol
The Chronicles of Caspian never fails to entertain
idk, that last one where he just talks about his daily routine and books he's reading for ages was one of the most boring things I've ever tried to sit through.
I've been keeping up with the Kaspians for a while now
they never fail to fail as well
I believe the full title is "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian"
Caspian should be making the game! Not reading stupid books. Can you imagine turning up for work and saying you aren’t doing any work today because you feel sad and want to read books? You would be sacked on the spot. He did this after wasting peoples money
In the US, although it's not known by most people, it is illegal to tell your employees not to share information about their compensation and threaten them with punishment if they do. So if your company/boss has told you this, or it is in your contract, contact your states labor department and lodge a complaint. It is possible that you will receive monetary compensation for doing so.
It's not that easy, if the boss just tells you this verbally, it'll be your word against theirs. I'm sure you need some evidence else everyone would be filling this complaint all the time for the money.
@@juances It's more like you're legally entitled to share that with who you like, and so if there's repercussions you have a case.
@@juances The labor department isn't as stupid as you'd think, they can tell there's a link between someone sharing information and suddenly them being punished "for no reason."
Really, if it wasn't for hesitancy, businesses wouldn't get away with this so much.
@@AnonymaxUK till they lie
@@crazyinsane500 Yeah I am also highly skeptical about this. I feel like if this was real it would happen more often because I do you know for sure a lot of people have their wages taken their tips help by their boss and this stuff as well happening. Not being able to talk about your wages.
I'm at 21 minutes and my only thought is this dude is incapable of completing a project. The amount of time he spent writing all of this, which is largely useless, shows an inability to manage a project. This is a person who has no idea how to manage priority. I've worked with people like this. People who spend five hours picking the perfect shade of red, I'm not exaggerating, for a in-house company picnic flier, and let important deadlines slide by even as e-mails are pouring in begging for deliverables. If scenes like this didn't play out at his company, I'd be shocked.
I can only imagine how hellish it was to have this dude as a boss.
Completely agreed. Project management is less about ordering people around and more deciding what is and isn't worth your manpower, resources, and time.
No deliverables, no money--either from investors or bank draws. Caspian clearly didn't learn that lesson.
Ehh, personally I could knock out a post like this and all the relevant details in full as Caspian did it in a day or two, tops. MAYBE a week if I wasn't dedicating hours per day to it. And once it's done, it's done and released. Over the scope of years of development, a week's time isn't something to worry over.
Caspian's other worries are a greater priority, however. Not sure he HAS a week to spend on this kind of stuff, unlike my unemployed Grad student arse....
@@boomkruncher325zzshred5 Caspian has all the time in the world for this kind of bullshit right now. Pretending to be making a game, and attempting to rescue his public image through PR and blog posts full of lies is his full time job.
Let's be honest, if there was anything to show, he would have shown it. The man was ecstatic about his fog of war in the game nobody asked for. If he had anything at all, he would be shouting from the rooftops. The way I see it, C/KoE is an unintentional piece of performance art that I highly enjoy and other people paid for on kickstarter.
Has anyone who worked at southbound came out? I've always felt like this was all just Caspian. Like where did anything made by his teams go?
@@Frostbytedigital they probably signed an NDA I'm guessing
@@byst33 There are no NDAs going over three or more years after you have been let go for that kind of position. They're not nuclear scientists or holding state secrets. Most of them were animators, software devs, junior devs, etc. They could easily speak up; no NDA would be enforceable for that long in the USA (or Canada and I presume Europe but I only do commercial/corporate law in Canada).
I doubt anyone from that team wants to step forward to say "yeah, we were fucking incompetent, the place was a shitshow, we didn't produce anything that can be even streamed, but we still took the money for years because why not". They're likely still in the field.
They had some 2D pencil sketches and a few animated characters walking, that's about it. They never had much of anything to show for all that money.
@@FrostbytedigitalSoulbound i think
I love that Kira's go to reference for music on the charts is Pearl Jam, it's that level of awareness on the cutting edge of culture that keeps me coming back
So many of PJ's tunes could apply to the Elyria saga ... "Alive" and "Rooster" seem some stand-outs. ;)
@@mr.frolicyoutube Aw man, how'd I foul that ... Forgive me, Layne! Good call, cheers man.
Two biggest takeaways I got out of this is that 1. Caspian started spending as if he were making a AAA studio when he really should have went the indie route and 2. He hired too many employees which meant lower average wages and attracted entry level talent.
Don't forgot new house, cars, drugs and prostitutes.
he also "claims" what he payed himself but showed no paycheck. a bit sus CONSIDERING HE HAS TO HAVE PAYCHECKS. its illegal to pay anyone let alone yourself without paychecks because the goverment wants to have acount on wtf is happening.
I mean. If this guy had spent even a 10th of the time in actual game development that he's spent writing journals, there might actually be some sort of a playable game by now. Jesus.
He'd need to learn how game development works first though
IMO there's never been a game. This waffle is all to cover that up.
It doesn't take that long to write stuff like this. Couple hours at most. The fake outrage is what's most annoying about gamers. As if there's not enough real stuff to complain about you'll complain about the stuff that doesn't need it.
@@argylemanni280 True, but there's years' worth of this stuff, hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of online journaling.
Jesus christ he writes SO MUCH. I struggle writing pages for assignments, but this dude churning out novels every week lmao
I feel Caspian. I am able to express my true artistic self when I am running away from problems that need solving
@@TheAbortionWhoLived fr my way of procrastinating is watching TH-cam but this dude is procrastinating by writing his dairy 💀
I’m honestly quite jealous. I’m over here with a writer’s block. He could’ve been a literature professor. But nope, decides to be a incompetent game dev.
Writing a lot isn't difficult if all you are writing is BS
I wish GRRM wrote as often as him.
There's definitely money missing. The studio was "shuttered" due to lack of funds in March of 2020. Implying that all the $9m+($1.3m from Kickstarter and $7.7m afterwards) was gone at this point. So, from June 3rd of of 2016, which is when the funds were released from Kickstarter, to March of 2020, $9m was spent.
7 months in 2016.
12 months in 2017, 2018, and 2019.
3 months in 2020.
46 months total.
That's $195,000 per month, or $2,347,000 per 12 month period.
Correct me if my math is wrong, but that shows a lot of money missing, no?
It seems to me Caspian is lying/hiding something.
This does NOT include any money that Caspian received from the government during C*vid OR the LOANS that he claims to have taken to cover "month to month" expenses.
If, and this is a serious if, we believe everything Caspian has given us, that leaves $2,155,639 unaccounted for. Spread across the 7 months in 2016 and the 3 months in 2020 that's $215,564 per month. Which would be roughly in line with what Caspian has told us, so we can regard the 3 months in 2020 as 'normal'. That leaves the 7 months in 2016. Which is where part of the discrepancy lies. He claims he wasn't paying himself a salary until the last 3 months in 2016 and there were fewer employs during 2016 due to the fact that they "were still building the studio".
This leaves me with 3 questions.
What was the $1,508,948 in 2016 spent on?
How much were the loans that Caspian claims to have taken to help the studio month to month and where did that money go?
What happened to the C*vid money from the government after 2020?
good sum for a nice house i expect
He clearly imbezzled it.
Well, that means there'll also be updates on this, because while online backers may be swindled at your leisure legally or almost-legally, the government is quite adept at the 'f*ck around and find out' game when you take their money and embezzle it.
May take a couple years, but there will be hellfire rained on him.
@@nvelsen1975 Many of these PPP loans and other COVID assistance debs were forgiven for businesses. Remember when all those Republican (a few Democrats too) congresspeople were decrying student debt forgiveness, shouting about how Jesus said debts always had to be repaid? Then it came to light that those same politicians had millions of dollars in PPP debts which had forgiven.
Basically as long as the business can show the loans were spent on retaining employees, the debt is forgiven. "If borrowers use at least 60% of the loan to cover payroll within 8 or 24 weeks after receiving the loan, they can submit an application to have the loan forgiven. Our data shows that approximately 97% of PPP loans were used for payrolls." www.pandemicoversight.gov/data-interactive-tools/data-stories/how-many-paycheck-protection-program-loans-have-been-forgiven
What doesn't make sense is that Caspian claimed to have 15 employees in April 2020 when his loan was approved. This was after he publicly announced he had "shuttered" the studio and fired all his employees. He may have partly changed his mind about that when he found out these loans were available.
www.federalpay.org/paycheck-protection-program/soulbound-studios-llc-issaquah-wa
200k a month, can get eaten pretty fast paying the salary of multiple programmers and digital artists plus I bet Caspian took a salary as well despite him saying he didn't take a salary....you see this on shows like kitchen nightmare where you have people who open a restaurant and claim they aren't taking a salary but then it comes out they were taking money each money "to cover living expenses" aka they see taking a salary
I'm a fiber designer for a commercial ISP, and I've done work with basically every major US telecom company. I've never seen an area where residential has access to higher speeds than commercial. Yes, virtually all tiers of service are more expensive than residential, because for commercial contracts you are obligated to provide the advertised speed, instead of the "up to" residential customers get, as well as having an obligation to maintain a certain level of uptime and a maximum time to repair, but nobody offers residential customers higher speeds than commercial, it's almost always the reverse.
For example, my company's lowest tier for commercial is the highest tier available to residential, 10 Gb/s.
Genuinely curious: if a streamer calls to get commercial speeds at his house as his job is streaming, is that possible?
@@TikkiNikkidepends on the area and company. If your area only has 5 Gb/s lines that is your maximum regardless of what you want. Same if the company you want does not have lines to your area.
Bellevue is an expensive Seattle area tech city, there's no way he didn't have access to extremely fast internet. He was near Valve, Microsoft, Nintendo, Amazon, and other such giants.
Gamers used to get t1 lines direct wired to their house back in the late 90's. Where there's money, there's a way. Assuming they have it to provide of course.
Also adding that even if what you're buying for a small business is essentially residential service with a commercial skin on it (like Comcast for business) the way it's billed and supported is usually through an account rep, so you have a specific person you can complain to. And usually you get access to stuff like static IPs as part of the package to make things like inbound VPNs possible.
"These journals aren't about [...] these are about ME"
Yeah this isn't narcissistic at all
So far these journals have been about nothing but him, lol.
I bought a $200ish CoE pack sometime in 2016. At that time, Caspian was presenting the trailer (basically the only footage we've ever seen) as if it was part of the actual game. He was also making videos with some of the devs in a studio and writing very detailed and frequent dev blogs and framing it as if it was work they were currently doing or had finished. This dev post he just made makes it sound like he was just starting the studio during that time frame. That is far from what he was telling the backers at the time and I doubt anyone would have supported him if he had be transparent about it.
/facepalm
And what did you learn? How many games have you preordered since then?
It’s ok, you were tricked like many many people
Can I have $200? I need it more than him, I promise I will get street tacos every Friday as long as it lasts me. You can actually trust me on this
@@jordand5555Dude you want that $200 make a scam and get it honestly, don't just e-beg. At least have the self respect a Kardashian does.
the 96k and 120k difference is because he is talking about pre tax and post tax income. The company paid him 120k but he paid taxes on it. The 96k is post tax so his net income.
Checked and washington doesn't have a state income tax unless you make 100k or more a year (22.9%). Anything over 100k is taxed at 31.7%. That is pretty nasty.
@@justice_1337that's not nasty. It's reasonable. I live in the south and get almost 2k taken out of every paycheck.
@EddieDubs I live in NYS and I lose around 2.5k in taxes per biweekly pay period, it's absolute insanity (its roughly 1/3rd of my total earnings)
@@philronholm6264 Seems reasonable to me at this kind of income.
That was my thought too. 120 pretax could potentially be 96k post tax. He said the wages earlier were post tax
He makes 24hr Parliament TV look exciting!
About the "I paid myself 120K" : I think it is related to the definition of the term "salary". So a person can have a literal salary of 50K, yet she might get a premium pay and other benefits worth an extra 10K for example. See the category "Health Insurance Premiums" for example (very USA). CEOs will often just show you a strict concept of their "salary", which does not represent their total revenue or benefits.
96k was for 3 years and 120k was average for all 5 years I believe, so It would depend on whether or not he took those 3/4 of a year without pay in average. If not, then if those first two years he's taken the same salary, it woould be about 156k, otherwise it would be aboout 230k.
I think you are incorrect. It's very simple he received both $96k in salary AND $120k in distributions per year (both subject to different tax rates). I own an S-Corp in the US and this is how it usually works. There's the amount you pay yourself as a salary and the amount distribute to all the owners (which may just be yourself). Additional "pay" in health insurance etc. can also be covered by the company.
I have NEVER had a company pay for my lunch when interviewing for a job. He paid for so many things he didn't need to.
....because those things didn't happen. He's hiding the money he stole as all this ancillary shit that can't ever be traced realistically.
26:30 this serves as a reminder that people like DarkSydePhil exist, who on a 2-person household bought a "business class" Internet not knowing it's slower and not meant for "gaming" or "streaming" and only offers better customer support, while costing 2-3 times more than normal connection.
Its always a good day when KiraTV uploads another Chronicles of Elyria video keep up the great work man.
Imagine how many more features he could add to the game if he didn't spend his time stroking his own ego on a blog!
It’s impossible to add features to something that doesn’t exist duh lol
None... I don't think he knows how to develop anything
As if he had any type of talent in programming lol.
But yeah, I feel ya.
It’s caspian… what features would he implement…
I mean it sounds like he is a writer not a programmer. A programmer would just made a bad game and ran away.
For the record Kira, how internet tends to work here in the USA is that you have two kinds. Business and Residential.
Business costs more, but any downtime is subtracted from what you owe at the end of your billing period. So if your internet is down for 50% of the time, your bill will only be half what it should be.
It's also slower on download, but much faster on upload. The reason for this is because more channels are dedicated to sending data back up. Residential internet has been, generally speaking, 90% down and 10% up.
Side note, there's long been a belief that part of why is to discourage piracy by throttling upload bandwidth, but a lot of it has more to do with the fact that a residence hasn't needed the ability to upload until fairly recently.
I live in Washington not far from Bellevue, and lemme tell you, Bellevue is INCREDIBLY high end. That city doesn't even feel real when you go to it. It is completely pristine and clean, with tons of high end shops and car dealerships selling Lamborghinis and Aston Martins. No joke, Bellevue is ridiculous. That salary is laughable for that area, and nobody in their right mind would work there if they were paid that. Not to mention just logistically, you wouldn't in any way be able to afford to live anywhere close to Bellevue with that kind of salary.
"Studio" should have been someone's finished basement. I ran a retail store out of a finish barn for a year, and only purchased a commercial property when the non-HOA HOA neighbors complained there was too many delivery trucks coming to our house at a townhall. We then moved into a very small location. Only after 3 years of profitability have we decided to buy our own dedicated commercial property at $300k. It also has residential modular homes on the property that we will rent out. I don't understand how people make such clearly stupid financial decisions like leasing an expensive commercial location when your entire business is digital...
This drama saga is the true MMO, and it’s a great one.
I love how generous Caspian makes himself sound with employee salary with money that was not his, in a game that has never been shown, and a project he mismanaged in every possible way into the ground.
All that money, all those expenses, over 5 years of development and absolutely nothing tangible produced.
Yet he talks as if it was. It's mindboggling.
Their struggle find "high" quality engineers makes sense now considering they are surrounded by a ton of companies that pay college grads 120k per year base.
The difference between the 120k and 96k for the different sections is because he said the 96k was the take home pay, whereas I would assume the 120k is the gross wages.
It's generally unwise to assume anything when dealing with a proven liar.
@@machinech183He literally stated it, Kira read it, then forgot
@@rory43043 that make him a less of a liar right?
@@absi49 it makes Kira illiterate. If your base assumption is that everything in the post is a lie, then there’s no point in even discussing the figures
The reason business class internet is slower and more expensive is that it comes with service-level agreements (SLAs) -- guaranteed uptime percentage against a guaranteed refund/credit if it falls short. You also get actual real customer service instead of what your residential provider provides. Some residential providers will threaten to cancel residential service if a work-from-home or business user on residential service tells customer service "our business" or "my job" depends on reliable service. "You need commercial internet then. It's in your terms of service that we're not responsible for business losses on a residential connection. Pay up."
And in the US, generally, it is *illegal* to tell employees they can't talk to each other about their pay. Lots of employers don't know this or don't care, but an employer can be fined for enforcing a rule like that. There are exceptions -- doesn't apply to contractors or executives, for example. But the rank and file have a right to talk about their pay. Even telling them "you can't discuss it on company time" is illegal.
you should really put 'supposed' in front of the "actual real customer service" etc.
not that they'd be responsible for business losses then either. just get multiple lines if you can and wireless, if a tornado blows the lines they ain't paying up for any losses.
one difference that's been a thing in many locales for a while now is that consumer line no longer gets it's own ip, it's just natted.
@@lasskinn474 What's covered and what make-goods are available to the customer would be spelled out in the SLA. Point is, residential service doens't have much in the way of SLA.
@@grayaj23 and the sla has clauses to get fucked by most reasons except basically them doing something on purpose to cut it and covers just the service costs anyway typically, it's not like it's a business insurance.
look, hp's, lenovos etc's pro support is same way nowadays. "3 day onsite" in practical terms is "get fucked 3 weeks bickering if the monitor broke due to the battery or not". none of that stuff is actually worth it nowadays, not hp's, not anybodys. only place the sla works out is in a datacenter and if the center gets flooded they're still flooded no matter what sla you had. just have a plan b.
@@lasskinn474 I get same-day service and rebates/discounts from my ISP when they exceed the SLA for downtime. I also get text messages with updates on when things are going to be working again. Your mileage (and contract terms) may vary.
At any rate, I was just answering a specific question about why commercial internet service costs more for less bandwidth. I wasn't making any substantive claims about whether it's worth the cost.
IDK how HP and Lenovo got brought into this.
@Kira, you are correct. I paid around $80 for a "plot of land" during that last crowd funding round. Never saw a penny returned. I asked SoulBound and Xsolla and was denied. It wasn't even a month after purchase
Caspian: I am not paying myself
Also Caspian: I paid myself 75k as shareholder and 120k a year on average
Did you pay attention to the part where he said it was basically paying for the tax burden, and not going into his pocket? The 75k, I mean.
Also, "myself" is an ethereal concept. Who am I? How can I define my own person?
@@xxkillbotxx7553 I read the journal so, yes :D Still a poor last minute excuse to years of "no money to me"
Wonder what his wife got as she was an employee and a shareholder too
@@jakubblaha4904 Not everything is a grand conspiracy, dude. People can just be incompetent.
@@xxkillbotxx7553 Yeah but where there is smoke there is fire. Caspian is the same guy who "shuttered the studio" then said wait its not closed where did you get that crazy idea once he found out he could get sued. He also claims the game has been in a state where it should be showable but no one has ever seen this game played. He also farms for sympathy constantly in these journals about how rough he has had it despite the fact that he is the one that ripped people off and didnt deliver what he promised even in a bad state. I wouldn't believe Caspian on anything at this point.
IF everything was above board, hes seriously gone so far out of his way to make people suspicious, you'd swear he was actively trying to build the reputation of a scammer.
The one and only Caspicast series from Kira
I looked up their address, because my office is next to Valve's building. They weren't located near Valve by a long shot, but they were located adjacent to a botanical garden. My area is an extremely expensive place to work/live in, their area was still expensive, but definitely "in the middle of nothing" (aka no close amenities, so their rent would have been significantly lower than where I am/Valve is).
They definitely went too hard on expenses and probably too many work amenities too. They aren't allowed to have residential internet due to the building they were in.
Either way, I'm glad I was never financially invested in this garbage pile of a game. They would have saved money just renting out a WeWork space or just working full-remote. And not paying first/business class on everything on their travel related expenses.
I don't understand why the average salary cost would be lowered if Caspian didn't receive a salary. It would be easy for him to exclude himself from the calculation.
My favorite line: "Be prepared for that" - that you have to pay taxes and med insurance on your employees. (37:47)
If this takes you offguard when planning your business.... oh boi....
I live in Washington around the Seattle/Bellevue area. Bellevue is a very high end area to live. A lot of local celebrities/sports athletes live in Bellevue. It's also very close to Microsoft and Nintendo of America's headquarters. And yes, Valve is headquartered in Bellevue. If their employees lived in Bellevue, $70ish k per year is very low and definitely below cost of living for most people for that area. It is obscenely expensive right now to live there.
Does anyone remember all his talk about the "Soulbound Engine" thing. Was that just a concept or did he actually write any code?
Fever dream I think
Soulborn Engine. He tryna go innovative rather than using existing softwares out there.
Yeah, the high end office and equipment makes it seem like our buddy Caspian was more into the image of looking like a legit big time studio rather than doing the work. Once again, this stuff is meaningless and Caspian loves to tell and now show. Utter dribble. Caspian needs to show what was accomplished in the time period he had people's money. Zero percent of this has been done.
I never received a refund for what I purchased during that final crowdfunding push. I've said it before, but I dropped more than $2K on the fever dream that was CoE. I regret it, and have learned since to be very cautious (largely thanks to your channel and others, like SidAlpha) of crowdfunded projects.
what could you buy on a game like this that would cost 2k?
@@ppsarrakisIt was small purchases over time, atop larger ones. The FOMO was strong with this project, and I'd never been exposed to that sort of thing. Learn from my mistake.
It's a shame you lost your money mate. At least you learnt something. There's no such thing as a mistake so long as you learnt something.
Good luck mate
You did what???
@@joaopereira4218 Did I stutter? I'm not ashamed of being taken for a ride. I learned from the experience.
If only he spent more time developing than posting these massive essays
Ship has long sailed
Methinks he's much, much better at talking about game development than actually doing game development.
Guy is an idiot has no programming skills just a regular scammer
These blog posts are so entertaining. I can't believe someone like Caspian raised so much money when he seemingly has zero idea how to spend time and money and keep an actual studio running. The fact that he spends so much time and effort into making all of these blog posts (essentially saying "I investigated myself and I found I did no wrongdoing") instead of doing anything else that is productive... this guy is missing an opportunity to be some corporate blogger for some company (but then he wouldn't get to talk about himself)
He really is just the Arnold Rimmer of game dev.
Would he have CoE instead of H on his forehead? And pay himself a fee for being an advertising board.
I live in Seattle, across the lake from Bellevue. $68k is fucking madness. You couldn’t even afford to live in Bellevue for that money; you’d have to go farther out, which means a hellish commute and expensive gas. A couple weeks ago, I saw a job ad for a lead at Bungie, which is also located in Bellevue, for upwards of $200k.
However, I pay around $1200 a year for 1 gig internet, so I can absolutely buy that they paid $6000. It’s exploitatively expensive.
I refuse to accept that someone could be so incompetent in every way as Caspian seems to be. I have followed this saga from Kira's very first video on the game, but I didn't catch until now that Caspian worked as a software developer before. That makes it even more strange. I'm a software developer too who are dipping his toes in game development. Game development isn't _that_ much different from other types of software development. Even if he hadn't made a single game before he started, and even if he worked all by himself in his spare time after work, and learned game development from scratch, a software developer should definitely have some type of working game to show for it after almost a decade (if I understand the blog post correctly, he started working on the game in 2015). Certainly not as ambitious a project as Chronicles of Elyria, but at least something more than long and convoluted blog posts.
It's almost as if he's purposefully incompetent, stepping on landmine after landmine. If he had rolled the dice for every decision, he and the game would probably be in a better position. In a way, it's admirable. If it wasn't for other people's money, time and hopes he poured down the drain, it would be funny.
Being an entrepreneur (what he tried to do) is a lot different than being a software developer. He seemed to realize that somewhat after a long time.
The most incredible thing is that being a software developer, he could not understand that it could take more than 100 years to develop an MMORPG alone or with a small team of non-professionals.
What you're thinking about is: is it likely that guy X is this dumb? But what you should be thinking about is: is it likely that out of a thousand CEOs, one of them is this dumb? And to that, the answer is "yes." (And the one-out-of-a-thousand dumb guys is the one who gets videos made about him.)
@@argylemanni280 That's true. It takes completely different skillsets. But the point I was trying to make was more like even if he weren't an entrepeneur, if he had skipped starting a company, hiring people etc., he would have been able to produce a game in this time. Not the product he claimed to be making, but at least a working game, maybe even a good game.
@@lightworker2956 bro your passion to try to defend Caspian using the argument "but people out there did worse" or "but people out there did the same" in dozens of comments in this video is quite something else LOL, im pretty sure the people that lost thousand of dollars that will not get refunded bcs dude was incopetent as bricks will GLADLY agree with you!!!!
Self help book budget has to be thicc
I'm far more interested to, one day, hear actual firsthand reports from ex-employees about what it was like to work for him. I bet it was a nightmare of stress and indecision. I remember him throwing his people under the bus even in his old blogs.
He coulda hired 1 or 2 guys that actually knew what they were doing instead of underpaying 17 employees who did... what exactly?
I suspect they put up with insane levels of micromanaging combined with constant changes of direction.
Indie project attracts indie devs. Majority of indie devs don't know what they were doing and they also don't ask as much payment as professionals do.
A professional game dev would not work on an indie game unless it was their own game. Those professionals would rather go to an established studio or go independent.
They had a lot of meetings and played a lot of videogames
@@MichaelFloodSr I am not saying the programmers did this, but it sure does sound like: "I am doing research *plays video games for another 5 hours*"
I've actually been loving these read-throughs. Definitely seems like he's just a guy with ambitions that are much bigger than his experience can handle... But with 8 million dollars to throw at it.
The saddest part about this is he never intended to be scammer, at least not at the beginning. The game was just a classical case of something being way, way too big in scope and hookwinking people with pre renders. At the end though, he took PPP loans when he fired the entire studio and was taking money from the public days or hours (forget which one) before closing the studio due to lack of funds.
He's a full blown narcissist, sounds like you're almost defending him
It is an old story, but didn't he lie about the stuff originally?
I don't remember ever in this saga anything like :" I only have an ambition ".
There's a saying that people shouldn't be educated beyond their intelligence. Caspian proves that you shouldn't be funded beyond your competence.
Leaf: I don't think he's more narcissistic than the average guy. I think the average guy here wouldn't say "yeah my bad I wasted 8M because I was stupid." We might want him to say that, but most people in his shoes wouldn't, especially because that might get him sued.
He said the salaries were net. And that the taxes for the salaries were a separate category. So for the last part, he probably added what he got in both net and taxes
Chronicles of Caspian is my favorite TH-cam comedy show. Thank you for continuing to cover this topic 😊
The fact that his studio had facilities for motion capturing is telling to me. In my opinion it shows that he definetly didnt have his priorities right. It also wouldnt be the first company trying to do something "fancy" like motion capturing while completely failing to focus on and deliver the basics. And even if the motion capture wasnt used, the facility was still paid for.
he couldnt figure out how to program a fog of war, so he was gonna mo-cap a real fog. whats not to understand?
This is truly a fascinating tale of how one man, the legend of Caspian managed to piss away so much money and time with so little to show for it. A true egima of what the man is thinking, was it a scam? was it delusion? was it incompetence? was it really about the friends we made along the way?
As an accountant, not super experienced, i think most people would be shocked at how expensive starting/running a business is.
Yeah it gets a little pricy. Although I think Caspian here did it in a pretty inefficient way, particularly in the way of salaries.
Not like he didn't received millions of dollars.
Caspian? is that you
Yeah, that's my primary takeaway from this video.
When PPP loans/grants started one way to prove your financials was to show figures from the prior 2 years. I know some info from the loan and application was considered public info.
So I wonder if thats why he chose to share his financials from just 2017-2019. He might have thought the info was already "out there" so there was no harm in disclosing it.
Don't need to take a salary in the first couple years. New company and a shit tonne of money. Put everything on the company credit card.
Your audio is realllly low in this video, but thank you for it as always
Waking up to a new episode of Catching the Caspians? Truly an unexpected surprise.
after seeing how he managed "his" money = straight to jail, that goblin literally made up stuff.
Caspian earned the following salary:
Year 1: $156k
Year 2: $156k
Year 3: $96k
Year 4: $96k
Year 5: $96k
That ticks the box for the $96k over the 3 years and the $120k of the 5 years
Yay, another installment of Blogs of Elyria :D
Seems like Kira got really lost in the sauce with the math at 31:21. Basically, the claim goes as follows: The project lead pays himself a WAGE that is X. However, his company generated revenue (from crowdfunding), and the claim is that because he owns the business, he must pay BUSINESS TAX Y for being the owner of a profitable business - out of his own pocket. So, if he was not to basically give himself money from the business, he would be paying for this tax out of pocket, making his not amazing wage potentially not even be a living wage.
So, the claim goes that he paid himself WAGE X, and at the end of the fiscal year (or quarter, unclear) he then transfers Y to himself, where Y is the exact amount needed to pay for the profitable business tax. Hence, while the total amount transferred to his bank account is higher than his wage, unless he's dodging taxes, the excess goes directly from his bank account to the IRS.
That is the claim as I read it. I don't know if it's legitimate, I run a business but it's not even on the same continent as this man and the rules are just completely different here. It sounds sort of legitimate, a bit of a bullshit tax but hey, the business world is nothing if not full of these.
Wow been following the main channel for almost 3 years now, you look amazing! Congrats!
Thanks
Nice to see you still covering this Kira :)
I just want to say that my experience with business internet in the US is about right with what this dude said.
The providers won't let you get residential internet in a business setting, for obvious reasons.
It's "commercial" internet and it's insanely marked up.
How did youtube take so long to recommend your second channel? I’ve been binging all your other videos for the past two weeks. Subscribed!
26:48 If you live near the coasts in the US, internet is pretty great with plenty of choices since the submarine internet cables generally terminate in NYC, Virginia, Washington state, and California. The closer you get to the rural areas or toward the middle of the US, the harder it is to find competitive choices at fair prices. Starlink is starting to change that I hear.
So, next is to find out where the missing money went. I think we all know...
He invested it in the Amico!
@@gateroozeink5061 LOOOOOL!
The real MMO was the blog posts he made along the way...
Haven't watched the full video yet, but I'm guessing it's Caspian saying "Woe is me" and taking no accountability.
I scrolled through the entire post and it's mostly a realistic picture of the financials, with some suspect expenses but nothing major. But redditors have to get outraged, hit the outrage button, make the outrage post, like the outrage posts, all before they even know what's going on.
@@argylemanni280 I hope that Caspian's boots taste good man.
Another one! Woot woot
The company I work for in the UK is a small business that pays for a designated internet line. We are charged £360/month by BT, that’s around $460/month - or around $5,500 a year.
That is a huge difference between costs. I mean look at Software vs PC Hardware. So they made their employees bring their own workstations? Heck, even the Internet listing is a step higher.
*Edit So they said they built all their PCs and barely updated them. Perhaps that was also one reason why the demo was not good. Tech limits while building.
depends what updates , i actualy had 2 year course about software development and testing , one of first few things you do when you start new project is turn updates off on almost everything if not everything your project will use, why? well , ever played videogame , booted up windows or used any program who broke something?
now imagine that in software dev that 6 months into project , adobe you used fuckedup most assets becouse artist did update , compatibility is something done much later down the line
i could write more and in bigger detail but...im just chilling drinking tea.
@@VarenvelDarakus it depends somewhat how the development is ran. we run multiple sw development projects and if we don't update it's due to some component not being compatible and we try to make it compatible or look for an alternative.
you'd still want faster compiles and shit though. it's not like you couldn't develop on an old computer though or that you couldn't develop the mmo engine itself on a computer frozen in time or the whole game - the big parts that matter which is the architecture and how it actually works, it's just really strange use of money for a company, that's all, not upgrading and making the employees feel better with bigger monitors and everything. especially the licensing costs still being high as fuck for every sort of software.
tech limits while building? really? they have no demo, there is no game these posts are buying him time so people forget because nobody is getting aggressive enough to take him down
In the last code update dude showed of a server setup of 8 ancient 4790k quad core cpu's running his trash server code. He could buy a single thread ripper system and get double the cores and faster clockspeeds. He has no money, he got those PC's in a dumpster of an electronic shop, then wasted weeks setting them up with servers and making them communicate together for something that will never be used in the final game lmao
Modders have worked remotely forever and that's how they can sometimes make total conversion mods for no pay and in their freetime. Imagine what people can do if actually employed. Renting and office and forcing people to waste money on a shitty apartment is overrated
pc hardware vs. employee costs is really strange for a company. and licensing stuff.
They will have bought most of the hardware in the time he didn't calculate here, the hardware he mentions wasn't that expensive at the time either, I thought he would have spent a lot more on this tbh. His software and licensing costs are wayyyy below what I would expect even for a business that small, somethings a bit off there.
in a lot of countries (and I think most American states) it's illegal for employers to stop you talking about your salary, so check the laws in your area
I can kind of understand why Caspian didn't include all of the numbers. It seems like he's telling a story and trying to make a point, in this case the financial workings of game development. Including costs from when he shrank the company to just himself and one or two employees would fog the point he's trying to make. That being said, it would be nice to have all of the numbers so people could make their own conclusions, but again, that's not part of the story Caspian is trying to convey.
Still not a fan of Caspian, but the finance stuff is interesting to me.
TL;DR: Business Internet is more expensive as essentially you're paying for a guaranteed service with an SLA.
Business vs. Residential Internet: "Residential" is typically marketed in speed tiers, _can_ be asymmetrical (i.e. your download speed is much faster than your upload speed), and importantly typically does not come with a guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA). "Business" tiers are typically offer symmetrical (e.g. the same) download & upload speed, but usually offer enhanced support options and where you *may* be able to claim back money for an outage or any downtime is guaranteed to a minimum stated amount.
Jesus i first saw all your vids from four and two years ago but damn you got a glow up 🎉
Business internet is considerably more expensive than residential. This is mostly due to SLA's if something goes wrong. Quite important for businesses and they get charged through the nose accordingly. Not sure if what is stated is reasonable or not, though.
42:40 I think your laundry is ready my boy!
well there is 2.2 M unaccounted for in his math which would of been from the year 2016 as the kickstart funds released with initial funds from the website. Since he put 500k of his own money to start the company he probably paid himself back after the kickstarter, leaving the 1.7M to fund the company in 2016
The average cost of startups office furniture is around $20k
You do NOT give yourself a paycheck while taking distributions. Your taxes are based on income. You have personal income tax and business tax. If you "lucky" like here, we also pay a personal property tax based on equipment and furniture. Expenses are how you deal with taxes. And you only take distributions. Then you pay your pressman income tax from that.
Also, a good CPA should have been able to tell him he was spending money in unnecessary areas.
I didn't know about this game until you mentioned it and I been following this chronicles for years now 😅 can't wait to see how it ends
I'll be honest, if it was me I'd be getting pizzas from Just Eat every day I'd worked. Luckily for the public I don't have a Kickstarter.
Doing quick math, he would've had to pay himself ~156k for the 2 years missing if the 3 year avr is 96k and the 5 year total is 600k (120k/year for 5 years).
well he had to have money from somewhere to dick around for years and to keep dicking around for years.
The 96k was take home. He obviously made more than that. He probably made around 150k per year 17-19.
@kira based on your question if we got refunded for the extra domains we bought a few days before. i can personnaly tell you i bought my new duchy a few days before he posted the message we didnt give him enough money. that part im the maddest about as thats really just a cash and grab moment
Ditto. And they worked hard on getting all of the available land sold, and all those assets package. How much time was used on the game store and kingdom selection, and how much did they work on the actual game?....right up to when he shut down the whole thing.
that makes at least 3 people saying it that I've seen in this comment section. Crazy.
Again I agree with wanting the specifics... but you would never get that, from any dev. ever. NDA, PI, privacy, these are legal blocks to him telling you those specifics, and could literally mean lawsuits against him if he released that information. Don't get mad at me, that is just the law man. I still agree with you though. Wish it were not that way. As for $150k for a lead dev, there is clearly, absolutely room for that to have happened, for multiple people. Remember, earlier on, he didn't have the same devs/level of talent he did later. There could have been, for example, as many as five people making that in the final year, with plenty of room for the previous two years with either few people/less pay. Makes sense to me.
And yes, I can personally attest to that cost for ISP for a business. 100% and then some. Again, not defending, just using basic reasoning and facts - you're still right, he has failed thus far, and I do wish we could have more specifics on money distribution.
Ok so about the internet costs I will say I don't know if it's different in the US but as someone who worked for an internet provider I can certainly say that (at least in the UK) business packages are not automatically slower and 3 times as expensive as the norm.
They're normally built to handle large businesses having 50-100 computers working at a time so they're generally superior to residential services.
They will be a bit more expensive but come with bonuses like compensation if your service is out for a long time and a much quicker response time.
A funny thing that happened a few times would be having residential customers threaten to sue us for having to wait more than a day for a repair because they ran a business at home. When we then pointed out they were defrauding the company by not declaring that they suddenly didn't want to have lawsuits involved lol.
A blessing from the lord!
It’s coming guys, just be patient.
FTC, DOJ and IRS should look into this guy.
When this all explodes all this narcissistic doubling and tripling down is only going to make the court case worse for him.
You know the whole train crash in slow motion saying.
if they were the legit ones laid out on a graph it would say "96 percent to employee salaries" and "3 percent towards devlopment"
Is paying developers to develop not also a development expense? Now the problem is they were developing marketing material to try to bring in investors not a game.
@@dekulruno Only half true. Paying employees to make them able to work is a project contribution, however, game dev needs alot of stuff to pay like like computer upgrades and maintainance, electricity, marketing and fee to have approval on whatever the platforms you are gonna sell your game on. This is why if you are an indie dev, never spend money on stuff like expensive headquarters, fancy office chairs and parties like Caspian did.
Since the average tax rate in that area is fairly high, reporting the salaries as only being net after tax pay makes the average salary look way lower than it would have been in reality. If the average net salary was $64k than the actual average salary would have been more like ~$90k. Still probably on the lower end for the area conscidering Valve is accross the street, but still some funny math going on there. I'm an executive director of a small comany and nobody I know reports salaries like this.
I never once thought Caspian straight up stole money or the project was a planned scam. Its simple though, they blew through all the money while basically accomplishing nothing. I dont care about the money just show us WHAT was done in the game. How many assets were created, how much of the map was finished etc. At the end how much of the game was playable? 10%? 25% 50% ??? The money went to salaries, rent, software etc. I have no doubt. BUT WHAT WAS DONE IN THAT TIME???? My guess is not much and its simply a case of gross mismanagment and became negligence bordering on fraud when they continued accepting money when they knew nothing was getting done. In any case the people who gave money and got nothing in return are the only victims here.
"Had we continued in 2020 our expenses would have..." I'm sorry, I don't want to hit a man when they're down, but nobody cares about what expenses could have been occurred? "If I'd hired super models to scan in to our game, we could have spent so much more, so really we saved money!"
It's not about the game you don't make. It's about the money you squandered along the way.
Kira you joked about what lessons you could learn about this and here is what I learned: If you are going to start a game think of the budget and time, then triple both values. If you manage to finish under budget congrats you made it; If you still go over budget/time mistakes were made.
No offense, but if you make your estimations this accurately, don't even bother to start the project, since you probably don't have a clue what is waiting for you, like old Caspian here.
Seemingly from this, he was even surprised he had to pay taxes and med insurances for employees.
You can, and should make a quite accurate plan beforehand, with proportional reserves. Just randomly multiply things, because you may not know something, is not the fruitful start imo.
I'm a scientist, making multiple research plans with cost estimations per year. I see this attitude from some of my collegaues, they don't have a clue what will be the expenses usually, so again, no offense to you, but don't start without know-how.
@@AquaCoalaNest The point I was making is to assume that it is going to be more expensive than you initially think.
Also, my point is regardless of how the budget stimation was done. If the original amount calculated was X double or triple it. Its also a much more fruitful start it seems than what ever Caspian did.