Dead matter, probably a dead game. Watch me on twitch: / kiraonttv Sub to my patreon: / kirayt Sub to my main youtube channel: / kiratv1 #deadmatter #steam #2023
No at this point Derek or Derrick is the only one I have any sympathy or compassion for. That there. Is a failed Elliott Ness bc he wasn't given appropriate tools or authority. A failed Patton.
You can tell from his initial breakdown of the problems in studio. He had his thumb right on its pulse. Meaning. You weren't given the proper tools or authority.
After originally threatening to sue me for releasing this video, CEO of QI software, Nikz(johnny guitar on twitter) and I spoke privately and resolved all matters. He had an understandably emotional reaction to the video and I always afford people that without holding it against them, as I understand seeing a video like this is never going to be received well. We've sorted it all out privately, he has thoroughly apologized publicly on twitter and it's all good. I always think it takes way more character to own up to your mistakes and apologize than it does to double down and run away from responsibility. No worries on my end and glad it's resolved. This pinned comment was updated/edited on 11/04/2023 at 6 am Bangkok time, so any replies to it before that were directed to the original message talking about the threat of legal, which is now not on the table.
Mans unhinged, there was some other like youtuber or someone with social standing that would knee jerk react to criticism with claims of lawsuits or calling the police etc but honestly can't remember who. You might have already covered it and I'm just living in the past
Does he have money for lawsuits?? 🤣😂 Where do i apply to join the company ?? i m open to get some free money 👋👋pick me next... i know how to draw stuff in paint 🤯🤯
It's definitely a sign of a company being managed poorly when something like this results in finger-pointing, screaming and name-calling behind the scenes instead of any actual addressing of the issues.
I'm so thankful for your investigations like this, I'm a junior 3d artist and trying to get my foot in the door in the industry via junior jobs or internships, and just to hear that THIS studio was looking for interns is hilarious but worrying, I don't know why that level designer was happy to be building a portfolio, who the fuck would want that project on their portfolio, an complete mess and horrible reputation. This sort of content has definitely increased how cautious I am with applying for games studios, there's a lot of studios hiring that look either too good to be true or shady at best. Stay a real one Kira
Just to be clear the level designer doesn't want Dark Matter on his portfolio, he seen how bad the project was and knew it was a sh*t show, he was basically using the time / money he was getting as a contractor to work on his own stuff, that was what the guy was saying. Lots of people take any job in the industry just to secure rent / food while they figure out what they want to do or get themselves to a level where they can jump ship to a project they actually care about.
The project while completely mismanaged by leaders, is still a good one to have on your portfolio, many in the industry are aware of the game and the failures that are due to leadership, not the team involved. I say this as an industry professional.
@@desocrate Exactly, learning to become a 3D generalist myself. Employers should and usually do focus on the quality of your work, not whether a game sucked in ways not related to your contribution.
I run into this mentality all the time for writing a novel instead of a video game but it's all the same. I'm a self-published author and people come to me and say: "I have a great idea for a book. What advice do you have?" I tell them to learn about the five act play, the hero's journey, theme, character arc, the inciting incident, the protagonist, antagonist, conflict, voice, etc. "Too hard. I'll just write it and it'll be great."
True. Very, very, VERY few people can just write a good book without learning about the well established tropes, themes and writing styles. Sure, it's not a bad idea to twist existing concepts a bit, but there are many good reasons for some books selling and others, well: not doing selling at all.
If anything, you have to learn about the tropes so that you can subvert them. Expectation sets quite a lot of people's reactions to things, after all. Having a "great idea" for anything is normally a sign of someone doomed to fail. Writing, like most creative industries, takes a certain sort of machochistic drive that anyone who's convinced their idea is great from the start won't be able to withstand. If learning is too hard, oh boy, wait til you get to the rejection and brutal honest feedback stage! (Which they likely will never reach because the effort of actually *finishing* the book will likely drive them off first.)
@@zoltanz288 not exactly the same. You can't be a licensed electrician or be hired in food service without going through the training (and keeping up/complying with all relevant laws and standards.) Artistic endeavors don't have any bars to entry.
@@PointsofData more like invisible entry bars, like the comment above said, once you reach the feedback stage, prepare to have your ego brutally murdered.
Oh my goodness! This sounds like project management hell. What an absolute nightmare it would be to be a serious employee trying to get things done in that environment.
HR is supposed to be seemingly nice to employers while actually being on the side of the company, no matter how scummy the company is. With that in mind, I don't think Kira would be willing to take the side of the scummy company often enough.
Anyone who watched your videos knows you are VERY careful to designate sources when possible, allude to where you got the information when not, and if you're just guessing you say so. When people like these try to tear you down they simply confirm that you're 100% on the mark. Please send the funds the usual way.
This project is modern gaming development in a nutshell. It is everywhere, not just this game. Developers and studio heads stretch a games development out as long as possible to secure paychecks for as many years as possible. The game itself is secondary to the yearly paycheck. Maybe it comes out, maybe it doesn't. Maybe the studio goes bankrupt, maybe it doesn't'. Maybe the game is a hit, maybe it's forgotten. Nobody cares about the result, as long as the process takes years, maybe decades with a guaranteed paycheck the whole time. This is modern day game development. Just look at Forsepoken. That game was nothing more than a paycheck for a decade for the team making it. They(Luminous) would have been more than happy to delay it another decade if the suits would have allowed it.
Luminous was formed in 2018, meaning that the roughly 4 year and 4 month production of Forspoken is pretty standard AAA fare. The game was just blandly designed, not some development hell production.
4 million of gamers, people with real lives, who have mouths to feed, all down the drain for basically nothing. people getting paid for nothing while most of us at dead-end 9-5 jobs just to survive. Damn shame, truly sad.
I'll never stop being amused at the idea some possess. That if you can call into question someone's status as a journalist then you can somehow desperately avoid judgment. As if "journalists" are the only people able or willing to talk about something, let alone pass judgment. Remember kids, desperation is a poor substitute for good life choices.
I'm listening to this as I work on my game and planning how I'm going to afford a new graphics card so I can work faster, and am amazed at these guys with millions of dollars just pissing away such a great opportunity to make their game.
Fascinating. There seems to be a lot of overlap between this story and other stories I have heard about management and organization that leads to underwhelming results in the tech sphere. Did I get it right that they identified a whole bunch of issues and then didn't act on it? I wonder if that office they rented was also tied up in long term contracts so they couldn't ditch it when realizing they didn't really have much need for it.
I got to say ... I kind of like the CEO ... he sucked quite a bunch of money out of Tencent WITHOUT giving them the chance to somehow gain interest on their investment ... everybody who does this deserves at least a bit of props, although the other stuff he did sucked xD
I don't blame the Contractors at all. They were working and they had no leader to tell them what they needed to focus on. Like he said, I'm hear learning as much as I can and getting paid for it. They are not leading their team at all...
That is a hefty amount of money for someone to pay himself without any product... At the end he will be so rich, that he can start his own enterprise at least, so everything will be just fine.
I thumbsed-up right away, but only because I know the story and I know that you're gonna have a lot of things to say that I probably don't know about. You're surprisingly good at investigative journalism, even for weird stuff. You would've been a goddamn beast at a real news company, if any of them cared to take you on and let you do what you do with a larger team, bud.
Note there’s a lot of talent but not in Alberta (this is like wondering why there is no local talent in Nebraska). Vancouver has tons of talent. They could easily get remote contractors from Vancouver to work on stuff or even Toronto or Montreal all hotbeds for gamedev talent
My only complaint here is this channel is heavily underated. Grade A journalism and work. Looking forward to see your channel blow up and hit millions of subs
Excellent work by Kira again, going through the hard details. As someone who has seen work in Accounting, 145k a month on all expenses is actually not a lot.
Kind of true. 145k/ month can be a lot or nothing at all. It depends on what you get out of those 145k/ month. And in this case it looks like the money is going down the drain, hence the company gets f-all for it.
Everything about this mess really does scream: Some idiot kid woke up one day and thought he could make and deliver a AAA game. I don't think he's a scammer, but rather an absolute incompetent moron, that he'd rather threaten you with legal action for showcasing his incompetence and mismanagement rather than actually try and scrape together a semblance of a game says enough.
Hey, I just want to say that 10K CAD is only about 7k USD, or 5.5K GBP. Our money is very inflated currently, and while it's a decent wage no doubt, it's not exactly the big bucks. In terms of USD, that would be a CEO taking an 85K a year salary, which would pretty much solve most of the world's economic problems.
so yall willingly gave money to a teen at that time to make a game this big without even having an experience of making a game at all or leading a team to make one....😂 what?!! wtf did they do for 7 years because the game that people got felt like it was rushed and made for a month or even less.
"We can't find any local talent"...I have an unfounded suspicion that of they stopped renting the office space and used that extra 12k to increase salary offerings they might just be able to find someone local.
Say what you want about Derrick but he at least went in and did what they paid him to do; find out what the hell was going wrong and create a solution.
They do a lot of finger pointing externally for a company at least a year behind on an over-funded game. Makes me think of the No Man's Sky fiasco except the company took it on the chin and showed the fuck up with huge fixes/updates/new content.
"Unable to find talent locally." There was a game studio that determined the same thing for CryEngine, so it started a college course to train local talent. When each student graduated, they were picked up by bigger studios.
Not a journelist? Maybe, but you do the work of a journelist from what I've watched of your videos. You've got a sense of balance, you may as well be one.
Anybody can be a journalist. These people just want everybody to think that being a journalist is some special title that requires some kind of university degree so they can gatekeep it. Nope. Anybody with the ability to record words and activities can be a journalist. You, me, even Kira. Kira is, in every way that matters, a journalist.
@@SvendleBerries Well yes anyone can be a journelist, but at the same time no. There is some value in schooling for it and there are a lot of amatuer journelist there that represent good and bad aspects, but I don't disregard the things that schools do teach like the standards and practices, so I would say yes and no, but its not that simple. Just like anyone can be an amateur scientist, but there is value in going through formal education for that, and that isn't just gate-keeping. Of course there are amateur scientists that do make excellent contributions also, but the purpose of formalized schooling is profit (yes) and also having a standard of education so you know that person has gone thru a certain level of expectations.
@@zombiehampster1397 Journalism isn't entirely dead, and one can make solid arguments for it always having been bad with few shining good journalists. (See the Ford company turning people being run over into a crime for stupid people "jaywalkers"). Churnalism has always been around, it's just more visible today like most other things because of the many kinds of media we get it from.
I remember seeing the early teasers for this and it looked very promising. Unfortunately the whole thing has been run with ineptitude and no professionalism. With this and what's happening with Dark and Darker, there really is some crazy stories deep in the gaming sphere at the moment.
I really want to know exactly what their employees are doing all day. I get that they haven’t gotten any work done but I mean in a practical sense, what does an average work day look like? Have to wonder.
9 million?! I work as an accountant/analyst and it’s so easy to waste millions if your not hyper careful. Especially if your income is nonexistent yet. It should have been an internal discussion even before beginning this project what each million will be spent on and what to do get done asap to build a player base and over time build it up.
I've managed at many levels in the military and in the civilian world. I've had barrages of complaints levied against my department and my organization. I've always pulled my employees together and said 'hey, look, this is what happened. This is what we are doing to address it. Unless I tell you personally, you're doing fine, don't listen to the BS outside.' Then I set the example by shutting out the outside noise and doing my best to lead my team to hit our metrics. I've never gone and tried to get reviews taken down or complaints zeroed out of the system. The fact that these jokers are putting so much effort into trying to shut down Kira just tells me that Kira is right. If they had substance, they'd shut him up by releasing their finished product or a substantial and verifiable status update that shows the error of the initial video. The fact that they can't and are instead so focused on trying to censor the critiques tells me that the critiques are spot on.
Thanks for the 1k to post this positive comment. But for real. Game dev here, like, a real one. Thanks for doing these stories on these big timers who spend their time cashing check instead of providing value and making products. They need a light shown on them.
Derek nearly destroyed NWI after joining their executive committee. Specifically Sandstorm. They are only just now getting back to being close, but several people left DIRECTLY because of him. A pair of guys left to take higher-paying/more prestigious jobs, but everyone else who left did so because Derek is an absolute choch.
Man... I invested in a double pack of this game WAY WAAAY back in the beginning. So much misinformation about this game. Had so much potential and was trash. I was in the discord b4 most of the bigger youtubers covered the game. The community had a "cultist" feel to it and anytime an issue was brought up it was "stop bashing the devs" or "you are just trash because its a beta and you're not accepting it". Got into a long conversation with one of the devs in their Gen chat. He asked me for "exact specifics" of how the game as i said "was not trash, but the devs were obviosly bad at their jobs". I laid out an on point synopsis of the facts i had compiled, with only a few speculations and opinions. Citing their own statement, claims and other BS that they fed us all with no follow thru. After that, he said "some of that is true". Then never responded. So i left the discord. Sad state we are in with the survival genre now. Thx you Kira for calling all these aho's out.
If they're in Calgary, they should have been able to find attract some staff from Vancouver/Seattle area - it might be 10hr drive, but Canada is big! plenty of game (like EA Vancouver) and VFX companies in that area.
After watching the whole vid (above comment was made 2mins in)...what the fuck is Tencent doing, though? Imagine it..."Cool idea, bro...heres 5milly.. .we trust you" 🤦🏼♂️ Fuckwits, trusting fuckwits, with more fuckwittery...with no checks, just "trust me bro" vibes. 5milly reach around 😂 🤦🏼♂️
Its always funny to see how hilariously overpaid "senior" staff are for failing crowdfunded products. Paying yourself 150k annually as CEO of a fledgling company that has twice as many contractors as inhouse staff members is just moronic. Dude's paying himself more than most senior planners and programmers make.
it might not be only a studio but a physical address who can be used for much more than just "spending" 10k a month I don't know any of those shady companies but I know I once saw a mailbox who had 30+ company names on one mailbox linked to a single room studio too I highly doubt that's for a "good" reason not an ethical one for sure
Yeah it wasn't Dead Matter, but to be fair with all this survival zombie apocalypse trash that's been going around lately, things start to blend together so it's very understandable to mix them up.
Seems like a pretty great idea for a company currently racing toward 0 budget to spend money on lawsuits against people reporting on them currently racing toward 0 budget.
The game and studio are definitely going down for sure but you have to give credit where credit is due. Derek did a great job on the Appraisal and the suggestions are actually good ones imo
I think there was a better way to stay objective and neutral and still report what this guy had to say. And I wouldve talked about how he essentially came to me. Wanted to be buddies and I told him I wasn't joining the band. Told him I would happily report any quotes you want to supply and that's where we stop. Never wouldve got on here and told everyone that I joined the band and bro is actually a really good dude and guitarist.
I was an IndieGoGo backer. Put up with the key distribution nonsense but when I actually played the Alpha it was pretty clear it was nothing like the promised game and never would be. I refunded immediately and glad I did.
Bro you were so right. Just saw this game was in Early Access (not following too closely) almost nothing but negative reviews. They are charging $40 haha. They clearly were running out of money, became desperate, and rushed an Early Access release which has back fired.... The consensus is the game is unfinished and unoptimized. Disappointing, I was hoping for a 3D Project Zomboid type game.
I was so hopeful for Dead Matter, I remember the initial reveal and was so on board with it. Why can't an experienced and professional firm come up with a project like this and actually bring it out in a timely manner. It's a niche large game development firms won't touch, but smaller companies don't seem able to pull it off...
The closest is Scum they are very talented but they lag the most important resource which is developers. They are about 50 devs but they rarely have time to test out their work before it heads out, leading to controversy. Even AAA studios has management and leadership problems and there is a big culture of releasing bad performing games. So publishers won't take any chances when i comes to survival games.
@@rolf1820 I do have scum but I just couldn’t really get into it, the chat was always overly racist, the mechs were really off putting, and there was a lot of empty open space. I like that the devs are active in updating the game and the survival aspect is the most in-depth I’ve ever experienced, but the community wasn’t one I felt I wanted to be associated with fully from what I saw. Maybe official servers just aren’t for me though and that’s where I went wrong.
@@Voltraluxx Private servers is alot better in that context. I never play on official servers, the same with Rust. I don't know the last time you played but i will argue that there is so many POI now that there is always a new goal or thing to do. Btw mechs is turned off on alot of private servers for the same reason you mention here :) I really love that game
@@rolf1820 I last played two months or so ago, spawned in and was killed by a mech three times and starved to death and thought it was best to revisit it later. I was definitely into the premise but kept landing far from any structures and had absolutely terrible RNG for loot. But i suppose you're supposed to go for the primitive crafted weapons early game instead of hoping to look an assault rifle off the bat.
I backed this game the moment I saw it back in in the, I followed every dev video, got my key, refunded within an hour. So disappointed in this whole project.
It blows my mind the amount of money ppl throw at these funding type projects...time and time again. U want me to support a game....I'll happily buy it when it releases...I'm not and will never give anyone a dime until I have the option to get the game in my hands. Just too many scams out there or projects that just crumble even unintentionally.
All the other stuff looks fishy and bad to me also, but to be fair, even tough I dont know specificaly about game companies, specially small ones, Im a Java Programmer in bussiness space and owning an office even tough most employes work remotely is common. A common model of working atm is 2-4- days remotely 1-2 days in the office, just to meet poeple, talk face to face. Its just psychologicly good and works better for many poeple, me included, then working 100% remotely. On the other hand my company employs 200+ poeple, so its a different kind of costs for them...
Lol, I worked in a startup that was very similar. However, it was the CEOs and their assistants that fucked it all up in the beginning, using company money to buy Iphones and cars for themselves and also having a big office with pointless equipment like a 20$ lamp at each desk when it was just a normal office job at a pc with ample ceiling lighting that was mostly empty. Though in my case while a lot of us where juniors training on the job basically, the senior team leads, etc. also were totally clueless. Shit like reinventing the wheel instead of a team lead reading the design docs of the software we were developing an addon for, so the first month I was there and half a year before from the start of the company they had pissed away investment reinventing the wheel except it was made out of twigs and broke apart under the slightest pressure instead of just using the methods already provided by this software to easily implement stuff that was stable instead of crashing every 2 minutes. Or the Module hosting the stuff so users could do a bunch of stuff online based on a flimsy engine crashing if you sneezed in its general direction and being overengineered to the point where the team lead who had developed it was the only one who could ever understand it (a blatantly obvious case of writing code so convoluted only he can understand so he could not be let go) but the same guy pushing a new feature that required to alter all code we had written for this and test everything again (I swear 3/4 of this was making programmers test cause qa was only a single person who also did a bunch of other shit) so that we missed every single deadline like a clock work cause of this game only so after 3 years he left for a great job he only got cause he had leveraged his position in this job to market himself in a specific way at the cost of wasting 3 years of investor money for a product that was shipped at v0.25 when it could have been v1.25 without his bs. Or another team lead that did not give a rat's ass about delivering a product, all he wanted to as well was polish his CV because he would do shit like implement a new database engine that fucked the program so hard no one would ever want to use it. It would save shit it the database instantly so the "Cancel" button everyone ever expects to indeed cancel your edits, would never actually anything. it was total chaos during testing, it would have made for a product literally no on ever would have bought if it had stayed but again at the cost of wasting a lot of money it was implemented and then removed which made us write a buch of code for it and then again delete the code and write new code for database access that works as expected yet again. Not to mention wanting to train just junior devs is such utterly insane ways and not allowing us to implement error handling cause according to him it makes you lazy cause you just write codes with errors which get caught so you don't fix them. Except that not only does this again waste a lot of time and money but not even in uni anyone sane would do this because all errors are caught, handled and the program tells you xyz threw an error so we could check what happened were and quickly fix it. If you remove this error handling, the software silently crashes without telling you where it crashed or why it crashed and you waste endless horribly frustrating hours finding the error. It's the way people had to do this in the stone ages of software development before they had the kind of high end IDEs we had that made all of this infinitely easier. At one point the new CEO, he had been one level lower at first but then they brought in a guy like Derek and the fuckup CEOs were let go (one was allowed to say he left on his own while the other was fired, kinda ruining his career going forward as he refused to talk to the bitter end) even said seriously that nah, no error handling whatsoever, any errors and bs data this software would inevitably write to the database our company would just charge more to fix for higher profits. It was honestly bizarre cause several times I was the one and only voice of reason and this was my first job and I had been working there for like half a year when the first bs like this hit. More bs was wasting a bunch of time and money to ry to implement motion control for business software that work with XBox Kinect to get people's attention at an expo that after 3-4 weeks was found out to be, surprise, surprise, actually impossible to implement. Obviously I had said as much, numerous times while it was being worked on. There was also rampant other bs like a number of people just not staying as long as they were being paid for, wasting endless hours on bs like youtube or someone bringing his Nintendo DS to play during work hours while proudly declaring how he doesn't work and actually weaseling his way into making this happen because he buttered up enough to the higher ups while he work as little as he could get away with, pushing every last bit if work possible to others like when he did nothing but waste time while I was actually working and pretended like I should have done his part, too or like when I literally dictated him code cause I didn't wanna have to stay late waiting for him to for once implement some code I needed to run mine as he was brought on (for as I later found out substantially more money than me) not based on skill but purely based on prior experience in a similar job but actually being bad at the programming langue we were using. The he failed upwards and became our new team lead after the previous guy got his shiny new job elsewhere, having left the ship he himself largely sunk. And literally his first order to us as new team lead was to lie to the boss and not fix code that was totally broken so he could doctor some results and pretend code that is failing is in fact working. He, as usual, lost his temper in a more than pathetic way so I just left him there and talked about it to our boss which lead to him later acting like he wanted to go outside and talk with his fists when actually he was "apologizing" cause I had been 100% right. It's been 8 years and I still have a trauma or I wouldn't have written this wall of text which probably no one will ever see, let alone read as comment to a barely related youtube video.
I find it funny that they look down on youtubers as being unprofessional amateurs just for being youtubers when they... started... on kickstarter oh my god, you cannot make this shit up.
Please do this on Snail Games and Wild Card , all the player base wants to know why a top 20 game [player base on Steam PC] is being Killed off in this cash grab.. I sure do! :)
It is proper journalistic practice to allow someone to respond to allegations before publishing. Let's be honest though, it would have been used as a chance to make legal threats rather than clarify anything.
Good to know these clowns know as much about a journalist's job as they do about project management or leadership, which is to say - nothing at all. If even half of what's in that Exec Summary is true (ie. not embellished by Derek to suit his own purposes) then there is no way a game was going to be delivered... and that is _100% on the shoulders of the people at the top._ Every issue is a straight line back to the CEO & decision-makers... and Nikz might want to be careful tossing legal threats around, as I highly doubt Tencent handed over $5mil to an unproven game developer with no strings attached. They might not be answerable to Kickstarter punters, but they definitely will be to a large investor.
"not enough talent in Alberta" I am pretty sure Bioware Edmonton which is in Alberta along with a rather long list of Dev studios would vastly disagree, its more like people just dont want to work for them which sounds more likely since I know of several people who went to school to get into creating games in various ways and they all say right now the market is rather over saturated to the point they cant get work.
Funny how this game looked a lot like Dead Linger and development and idea behind it and it basically sounding like the same thing happened there happened here...
I've been saying this for years and so have many others. So many people drift through this world as children just pretending to be adults none of them know what they're doing and only know how to follow orders no deductive reasoning skills whatsoever and yet they're being hired to run things and then everyone is surprised when nothing is accomplished competent leadership is necessary in any industry or hell everything in general it's sad that the education system has brought Society to this point this is a social problem having computers do all your thinking for you is not producing intelligent citizens it's dumbing Society to the point of idiocy
Not that this applies to you, but that is actually part of the code of ethics of journalists. Years ago when I did live news for college radio we could lose our show if we didn't offer for comment to whoever we were criticizing because it's based on Canadian law for broadcasters
Yeah that was weird for him to try and justify not reaching out to them. Not defending the game devs, since this is the 1st time ive even heard of the game, but you lose nothing reaching out to them.
Awesome one Kira TY............ my son is learning game design at college and wants to goto uni for a degree in the same.... you have helped me advise my child about the shady practises that I can hopefully help him in the future ....
![[🔴LIVE] งานประกาศรางวัล MAYA TV AWARDS 2024 : มายามหาชน](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nwmWYXXVwBY/mqdefault.jpg)
Calling fellow employees "shitters" is really showing how much professionalism they have as a company.
You mean Derick who was fired?
No wonder they wanted him gone.
I think the guy read Christine one too many times.
No at this point Derek or Derrick is the only one I have any sympathy or compassion for. That there. Is a failed Elliott Ness bc he wasn't given appropriate tools or authority. A failed Patton.
You can tell from his initial breakdown of the problems in studio. He had his thumb right on its pulse. Meaning. You weren't given the proper tools or authority.
I absolutely adore our "not a journalist, not a journalist advisor" Kira for providing us with the receipts
"not a journalist, not a journal writer"
@@bookle5829it just for the entertainment y'all
He's not.
Don't forget, he also doesn't have a "real job"!
Not a journalist, not a journalistic reporter.
After originally threatening to sue me for releasing this video, CEO of QI software, Nikz(johnny guitar on twitter) and I spoke privately and resolved all matters. He had an understandably emotional reaction to the video and I always afford people that without holding it against them, as I understand seeing a video like this is never going to be received well. We've sorted it all out privately, he has thoroughly apologized publicly on twitter and it's all good. I always think it takes way more character to own up to your mistakes and apologize than it does to double down and run away from responsibility. No worries on my end and glad it's resolved.
This pinned comment was updated/edited on 11/04/2023 at 6 am Bangkok time, so any replies to it before that were directed to the original message talking about the threat of legal, which is now not on the table.
Ah the tried and true "frivolous lawsuit to silence the critics" strat. They'll get WR in "Tank my reputation" this run, for sure...
Jesus christ. Fuck em up Kira! 💪
Mans unhinged, there was some other like youtuber or someone with social standing that would knee jerk react to criticism with claims of lawsuits or calling the police etc but honestly can't remember who. You might have already covered it and I'm just living in the past
This right here is why I avoid social media.
Does he have money for lawsuits?? 🤣😂
Where do i apply to join the company ?? i m open to get some free money 👋👋pick me next... i know how to draw stuff in paint 🤯🤯
It's definitely a sign of a company being managed poorly when something like this results in finger-pointing, screaming and name-calling behind the scenes instead of any actual addressing of the issues.
yeah and calling fellow employees lazy or shit never helps much.
Ive seen the same thing in multiple industries it all ends the same unless someone saves them.
It's called quantum integrity because it's integrity both exists and doesn't exist until you measure it.
9 months late but holy shit what an incredible joke, this deserves way more than 16 likes
I'm so thankful for your investigations like this, I'm a junior 3d artist and trying to get my foot in the door in the industry via junior jobs or internships, and just to hear that THIS studio was looking for interns is hilarious but worrying, I don't know why that level designer was happy to be building a portfolio, who the fuck would want that project on their portfolio, an complete mess and horrible reputation.
This sort of content has definitely increased how cautious I am with applying for games studios, there's a lot of studios hiring that look either too good to be true or shady at best.
Stay a real one Kira
to be fair. as it seems you can remote plug them and get paid for whatever you do 😂 this style of leadership attracts shady ppl. with bad workethics.
Just to be clear the level designer doesn't want Dark Matter on his portfolio, he seen how bad the project was and knew it was a sh*t show, he was basically using the time / money he was getting as a contractor to work on his own stuff, that was what the guy was saying.
Lots of people take any job in the industry just to secure rent / food while they figure out what they want to do or get themselves to a level where they can jump ship to a project they actually care about.
The project while completely mismanaged by leaders, is still a good one to have on your portfolio, many in the industry are aware of the game and the failures that are due to leadership, not the team involved. I say this as an industry professional.
@@desocrate Exactly, learning to become a 3D generalist myself. Employers should and usually do focus on the quality of your work, not whether a game sucked in ways not related to your contribution.
I run into this mentality all the time for writing a novel instead of a video game but it's all the same. I'm a self-published author and people come to me and say: "I have a great idea for a book. What advice do you have?" I tell them to learn about the five act play, the hero's journey, theme, character arc, the inciting incident, the protagonist, antagonist, conflict, voice, etc. "Too hard. I'll just write it and it'll be great."
True.
Very, very, VERY few people can just write a good book without learning about the well established tropes, themes and writing styles. Sure, it's not a bad idea to twist existing concepts a bit, but there are many good reasons for some books selling and others, well: not doing selling at all.
If anything, you have to learn about the tropes so that you can subvert them. Expectation sets quite a lot of people's reactions to things, after all.
Having a "great idea" for anything is normally a sign of someone doomed to fail. Writing, like most creative industries, takes a certain sort of machochistic drive that anyone who's convinced their idea is great from the start won't be able to withstand. If learning is too hard, oh boy, wait til you get to the rejection and brutal honest feedback stage! (Which they likely will never reach because the effort of actually *finishing* the book will likely drive them off first.)
this mentality is everywhere. plumbing, state, food industry... you name it, it has it.
@@zoltanz288 not exactly the same. You can't be a licensed electrician or be hired in food service without going through the training (and keeping up/complying with all relevant laws and standards.)
Artistic endeavors don't have any bars to entry.
@@PointsofData more like invisible entry bars, like the comment above said, once you reach the feedback stage, prepare to have your ego brutally murdered.
Seems like Quantum Integrity is quite an apt name for this company.
Looking for this comment so I didn't need to post it myself.
They are all trying very hard to see how fast the game development is going that they have no idea where the it actually is.
My thoughts exactly
Oh my goodness! This sounds like project management hell. What an absolute nightmare it would be to be a serious employee trying to get things done in that environment.
Kira sounds like he'd make an excellent HR personnel official. Nothing phases him.
i rather see him in accounting/finances 🧐 "who tf bought monkey nft's 😡" "what have you done during 170 hours 😡" "we will be broke in 6 months 😡" 🤣🤣🤣🤣
HR is supposed to be seemingly nice to employers while actually being on the side of the company, no matter how scummy the company is.
With that in mind, I don't think Kira would be willing to take the side of the scummy company often enough.
@@lightworker2956 Exactly, nothing phases him.
i agree he could totaly sack someone for "hotdog hunting" with a straight face
I fucking love watching this game die, mmmm it gives me sustenance.
You can say, this game is a dead matter
@@iloveanothermanswives4278 (seinfeld theme plays)
in a way, I'm getting my money''s worth of buying the game from all the drama it's produced
I mean... CEO's receiving incredibly large salaries and bonusses despite actively doing a terrible job is just the standard everywhere
Anyone who watched your videos knows you are VERY careful to designate sources when possible, allude to where you got the information when not, and if you're just guessing you say so. When people like these try to tear you down they simply confirm that you're 100% on the mark.
Please send the funds the usual way.
This project is modern gaming development in a nutshell. It is everywhere, not just this game. Developers and studio heads stretch a games development out as long as possible to secure paychecks for as many years as possible. The game itself is secondary to the yearly paycheck. Maybe it comes out, maybe it doesn't. Maybe the studio goes bankrupt, maybe it doesn't'. Maybe the game is a hit, maybe it's forgotten. Nobody cares about the result, as long as the process takes years, maybe decades with a guaranteed paycheck the whole time. This is modern day game development. Just look at Forsepoken. That game was nothing more than a paycheck for a decade for the team making it. They(Luminous) would have been more than happy to delay it another decade if the suits would have allowed it.
I thought rushing and crunching were still the bigger problems.
Luminous was formed in 2018, meaning that the roughly 4 year and 4 month production of Forspoken is pretty standard AAA fare. The game was just blandly designed, not some development hell production.
@@RobertDrane with today's damn near 6 year dev cycle? if they have to rush and crunch its probably because they suck at their jobs.
@@zoltanz288 Stop blaming workers. That's the attitude of entitled pricks.
4 million of gamers, people with real lives, who have mouths to feed, all down the drain for basically nothing. people getting paid for nothing while most of us at dead-end 9-5 jobs just to survive. Damn shame, truly sad.
I'll never stop being amused at the idea some possess. That if you can call into question someone's status as a journalist then you can somehow desperately avoid judgment. As if "journalists" are the only people able or willing to talk about something, let alone pass judgment. Remember kids, desperation is a poor substitute for good life choices.
I'm listening to this as I work on my game and planning how I'm going to afford a new graphics card so I can work faster, and am amazed at these guys with millions of dollars just pissing away such a great opportunity to make their game.
Fascinating. There seems to be a lot of overlap between this story and other stories I have heard about management and organization that leads to underwhelming results in the tech sphere. Did I get it right that they identified a whole bunch of issues and then didn't act on it? I wonder if that office they rented was also tied up in long term contracts so they couldn't ditch it when realizing they didn't really have much need for it.
I got to say ... I kind of like the CEO ... he sucked quite a bunch of money out of Tencent WITHOUT giving them the chance to somehow gain interest on their investment ... everybody who does this deserves at least a bit of props, although the other stuff he did sucked xD
Yeah sure, all you have to do is also conveniently forget that he took other people’s money too
I don't blame the Contractors at all. They were working and they had no leader to tell them what they needed to focus on. Like he said, I'm hear learning as much as I can and getting paid for it. They are not leading their team at all...
That is a hefty amount of money for someone to pay himself without any product...
At the end he will be so rich, that he can start his own enterprise at least, so everything will be just fine.
I thumbsed-up right away, but only because I know the story and I know that you're gonna have a lot of things to say that I probably don't know about. You're surprisingly good at investigative journalism, even for weird stuff. You would've been a goddamn beast at a real news company, if any of them cared to take you on and let you do what you do with a larger team, bud.
Note there’s a lot of talent but not in Alberta (this is like wondering why there is no local talent in Nebraska). Vancouver has tons of talent. They could easily get remote contractors from Vancouver to work on stuff or even Toronto or Montreal all hotbeds for gamedev talent
My only complaint here is this channel is heavily underated. Grade A journalism and work. Looking forward to see your channel blow up and hit millions of subs
u know that this is his 2nd channel?
@@shadesmarerik4112 This content should have been on the main channel, so much good info they were trying to hide.
Excellent work by Kira again, going through the hard details.
As someone who has seen work in Accounting, 145k a month on all expenses is actually not a lot.
Kind of true. 145k/ month can be a lot or nothing at all.
It depends on what you get out of those 145k/ month. And in this case it looks like the money is going down the drain, hence the company gets f-all for it.
What I enjoy in stories like this is the psychology angle and it's not disappointing
Everything about this mess really does scream: Some idiot kid woke up one day and thought he could make and deliver a AAA game.
I don't think he's a scammer, but rather an absolute incompetent moron, that he'd rather threaten you with legal action for showcasing his incompetence and mismanagement rather than actually try and scrape together a semblance of a game says enough.
Hey, I just want to say that 10K CAD is only about 7k USD, or 5.5K GBP. Our money is very inflated currently, and while it's a decent wage no doubt, it's not exactly the big bucks. In terms of USD, that would be a CEO taking an 85K a year salary, which would pretty much solve most of the world's economic problems.
so yall willingly gave money to a teen at that time to make a game this big without even having an experience of making a game at all or leading a team to make one....😂 what?!! wtf did they do for 7 years because the game that people got felt like it was rushed and made for a month or even less.
"We can't find any local talent"...I have an unfounded suspicion that of they stopped renting the office space and used that extra 12k to increase salary offerings they might just be able to find someone local.
If this is true, imagine Tencent will be contacting their legal team tonight…
Say what you want about Derrick but he at least went in and did what they paid him to do; find out what the hell was going wrong and create a solution.
Absolutely spot on considering the steam reviews.
They do a lot of finger pointing externally for a company at least a year behind on an over-funded game. Makes me think of the No Man's Sky fiasco except the company took it on the chin and showed the fuck up with huge fixes/updates/new content.
"Unable to find talent locally." There was a game studio that determined the same thing for CryEngine, so it started a college course to train local talent. When each student graduated, they were picked up by bigger studios.
>Kira isn't a journalist
Unintentional compliment right here
Im appalled that a studio can "function" for so long without anyone working as they should, how is that possible.
Not a journelist? Maybe, but you do the work of a journelist from what I've watched of your videos. You've got a sense of balance, you may as well be one.
Not a journalist in title only, and quite honestly that word is so tarnished "TH-camr" is a better one. Lol.
Anybody can be a journalist. These people just want everybody to think that being a journalist is some special title that requires some kind of university degree so they can gatekeep it. Nope. Anybody with the ability to record words and activities can be a journalist. You, me, even Kira. Kira is, in every way that matters, a journalist.
@@ectothermic lol yeah but there are great examples of journelists out there, but i know what you mean :)
@@SvendleBerries Well yes anyone can be a journelist, but at the same time no. There is some value in schooling for it and there are a lot of amatuer journelist there that represent good and bad aspects, but I don't disregard the things that schools do teach like the standards and practices, so I would say yes and no, but its not that simple.
Just like anyone can be an amateur scientist, but there is value in going through formal education for that, and that isn't just gate-keeping. Of course there are amateur scientists that do make excellent contributions also, but the purpose of formalized schooling is profit (yes) and also having a standard of education so you know that person has gone thru a certain level of expectations.
@@zombiehampster1397 Journalism isn't entirely dead, and one can make solid arguments for it always having been bad with few shining good journalists. (See the Ford company turning people being run over into a crime for stupid people "jaywalkers"). Churnalism has always been around, it's just more visible today like most other things because of the many kinds of media we get it from.
I remember seeing the early teasers for this and it looked very promising. Unfortunately the whole thing has been run with ineptitude and no professionalism. With this and what's happening with Dark and Darker, there really is some crazy stories deep in the gaming sphere at the moment.
I can’t wait until the executives post more juicy shit
I really want to know exactly what their employees are doing all day. I get that they haven’t gotten any work done but I mean in a practical sense, what does an average work day look like? Have to wonder.
Johnny is still denying any dev was unpaid or paid late lol
9 million?! I work as an accountant/analyst and it’s so easy to waste millions if your not hyper careful. Especially if your income is nonexistent yet. It should have been an internal discussion even before beginning this project what each million will be spent on and what to do get done asap to build a player base and over time build it up.
For real, money can be spent like water really easily.
I've managed at many levels in the military and in the civilian world. I've had barrages of complaints levied against my department and my organization. I've always pulled my employees together and said 'hey, look, this is what happened. This is what we are doing to address it. Unless I tell you personally, you're doing fine, don't listen to the BS outside.' Then I set the example by shutting out the outside noise and doing my best to lead my team to hit our metrics. I've never gone and tried to get reviews taken down or complaints zeroed out of the system. The fact that these jokers are putting so much effort into trying to shut down Kira just tells me that Kira is right. If they had substance, they'd shut him up by releasing their finished product or a substantial and verifiable status update that shows the error of the initial video. The fact that they can't and are instead so focused on trying to censor the critiques tells me that the critiques are spot on.
Great video, very thorough. Subscribed!
That executive summary - holy shit. How do you even fix a company THAT deep in the hole??? What a mess...
Thanks for the 1k to post this positive comment.
But for real. Game dev here, like, a real one. Thanks for doing these stories on these big timers who spend their time cashing check instead of providing value and making products. They need a light shown on them.
16:06 this document reads like a memo you'd find in a Resident Evil game.
It's really a wonderful world where you make a video I can watch so you can make more videos I can watch.
Derek nearly destroyed NWI after joining their executive committee. Specifically Sandstorm. They are only just now getting back to being close, but several people left DIRECTLY because of him. A pair of guys left to take higher-paying/more prestigious jobs, but everyone else who left did so because Derek is an absolute choch.
Man... I invested in a double pack of this game WAY WAAAY back in the beginning. So much misinformation about this game. Had so much potential and was trash. I was in the discord b4 most of the bigger youtubers covered the game. The community had a "cultist" feel to it and anytime an issue was brought up it was "stop bashing the devs" or "you are just trash because its a beta and you're not accepting it". Got into a long conversation with one of the devs in their Gen chat. He asked me for "exact specifics" of how the game as i said "was not trash, but the devs were obviosly bad at their jobs". I laid out an on point synopsis of the facts i had compiled, with only a few speculations and opinions. Citing their own statement, claims and other BS that they fed us all with no follow thru. After that, he said "some of that is true". Then never responded. So i left the discord. Sad state we are in with the survival genre now. Thx you Kira for calling all these aho's out.
If they're in Calgary, they should have been able to find attract some staff from Vancouver/Seattle area - it might be 10hr drive, but Canada is big! plenty of game (like EA Vancouver) and VFX companies in that area.
Watching this video after the early access release is so
enlightening.
DEAD game that doesn't MATTER
RIP my $20. Guess driving around old Canmore in a Crown Vic police cruiser will never come to pass.
Wow...a scam? I never would have guessed people would do such a thing...😂 😂 😂
After watching the whole vid (above comment was made 2mins in)...what the fuck is Tencent doing, though? Imagine it..."Cool idea, bro...heres 5milly..
.we trust you" 🤦🏼♂️ Fuckwits, trusting fuckwits, with more fuckwittery...with no checks, just "trust me bro" vibes. 5milly reach around 😂 🤦🏼♂️
Quantum "Integrity" Studio
I'm guessing that name is ironic.
Its always funny to see how hilariously overpaid "senior" staff are for failing crowdfunded products. Paying yourself 150k annually as CEO of a fledgling company that has twice as many contractors as inhouse staff members is just moronic. Dude's paying himself more than most senior planners and programmers make.
it might not be only a studio but a physical address who can be used for much more than just "spending" 10k a month I don't know any of those shady companies but I know I once saw a mailbox who had 30+ company names on one mailbox linked to a single room studio too I highly doubt that's for a "good" reason not an ethical one for sure
I was lucky I could refund my money. This was in February this year. So at least they stick to their words in regards to refunds.
This document pointing out how this company was run almost seems like a solo component developer could've done better at this rate lol.
How they gonna claim you for copyright when they couldnt secure the copyright on their own game title? Lmfao
I thought that was the day before?
Yeah it wasn't Dead Matter, but to be fair with all this survival zombie apocalypse trash that's been going around lately, things start to blend together so it's very understandable to mix them up.
Seems like a pretty great idea for a company currently racing toward 0 budget to spend money on lawsuits against people reporting on them currently racing toward 0 budget.
This video aged very, very well. =]
I wasn't planning on asking for a refund because I thought they were at least trying. But these people are completely inept. I'll take my $30 back
The game and studio are definitely going down for sure but you have to give credit where credit is due. Derek did a great job on the Appraisal and the suggestions are actually good ones imo
Another great exposé, Kira.
As someone who appreciates good journalism, you're great. Really, technically, very good. Thorough and fair. Love your work.
I think there was a better way to stay objective and neutral and still report what this guy had to say. And I wouldve talked about how he essentially came to me. Wanted to be buddies and I told him I wasn't joining the band. Told him I would happily report any quotes you want to supply and that's where we stop. Never wouldve got on here and told everyone that I joined the band and bro is actually a really good dude and guitarist.
Good lord, these guys are the running circus and the clowns at the same time
I was an IndieGoGo backer. Put up with the key distribution nonsense but when I actually played the Alpha it was pretty clear it was nothing like the promised game and never would be. I refunded immediately and glad I did.
Bro you were so right. Just saw this game was in Early Access (not following too closely) almost nothing but negative reviews. They are charging $40 haha. They clearly were running out of money, became desperate, and rushed an Early Access release which has back fired.... The consensus is the game is unfinished and unoptimized. Disappointing, I was hoping for a 3D Project Zomboid type game.
I was so hopeful for Dead Matter, I remember the initial reveal and was so on board with it. Why can't an experienced and professional firm come up with a project like this and actually bring it out in a timely manner. It's a niche large game development firms won't touch, but smaller companies don't seem able to pull it off...
The closest is Scum they are very talented but they lag the most important resource which is developers. They are about 50 devs but they rarely have time to test out their work before it heads out, leading to controversy. Even AAA studios has management and leadership problems and there is a big culture of releasing bad performing games. So publishers won't take any chances when i comes to survival games.
@@rolf1820 I do have scum but I just couldn’t really get into it, the chat was always overly racist, the mechs were really off putting, and there was a lot of empty open space. I like that the devs are active in updating the game and the survival aspect is the most in-depth I’ve ever experienced, but the community wasn’t one I felt I wanted to be associated with fully from what I saw. Maybe official servers just aren’t for me though and that’s where I went wrong.
@@Voltraluxx Private servers is alot better in that context. I never play on official servers, the same with Rust. I don't know the last time you played but i will argue that there is so many POI now that there is always a new goal or thing to do. Btw mechs is turned off on alot of private servers for the same reason you mention here :) I really love that game
@@rolf1820 I last played two months or so ago, spawned in and was killed by a mech three times and starved to death and thought it was best to revisit it later. I was definitely into the premise but kept landing far from any structures and had absolutely terrible RNG for loot. But i suppose you're supposed to go for the primitive crafted weapons early game instead of hoping to look an assault rifle off the bat.
@@Voltraluxx Yeah that is not how i play. If you want to learn the game play some singleplayer with mechs turned off and with some higher loot
is there a specific reason for hiding the risk assessment?
really disgusting to hear that they have a groupchat and click that toxic in a company i feel sorry for the people who have and is working there
I backed this game the moment I saw it back in in the, I followed every dev video, got my key, refunded within an hour.
So disappointed in this whole project.
Yeah, like, you've got them dead to rights on like 10+ accounts. If I had money in this game, I'd definitely be seeking a refund.
It blows my mind the amount of money ppl throw at these funding type projects...time and time again. U want me to support a game....I'll happily buy it when it releases...I'm not and will never give anyone a dime until I have the option to get the game in my hands. Just too many scams out there or projects that just crumble even unintentionally.
All the other stuff looks fishy and bad to me also, but to be fair, even tough I dont know specificaly about game companies, specially small ones, Im a Java Programmer in bussiness space and owning an office even tough most employes work remotely is common. A common model of working atm is 2-4- days remotely 1-2 days in the office, just to meet poeple, talk face to face. Its just psychologicly good and works better for many poeple, me included, then working 100% remotely. On the other hand my company employs 200+ poeple, so its a different kind of costs for them...
I kind of want to apply just to see what their interview process is, I'm probably qualified lol
Lol, I worked in a startup that was very similar. However, it was the CEOs and their assistants that fucked it all up in the beginning, using company money to buy Iphones and cars for themselves and also having a big office with pointless equipment like a 20$ lamp at each desk when it was just a normal office job at a pc with ample ceiling lighting that was mostly empty.
Though in my case while a lot of us where juniors training on the job basically, the senior team leads, etc. also were totally clueless.
Shit like reinventing the wheel instead of a team lead reading the design docs of the software we were developing an addon for,
so the first month I was there and half a year before from the start of the company they had pissed away investment reinventing the wheel except it was made out of twigs and broke apart under the slightest pressure instead of just using the methods already provided by this software to easily implement stuff that was stable instead of crashing every 2 minutes.
Or the Module hosting the stuff so users could do a bunch of stuff online based on a flimsy engine crashing if you sneezed in its general direction and being overengineered to the point where the team lead who had developed it was the only one who could ever understand it (a blatantly obvious case of writing code so convoluted only he can understand so he could not be let go) but the same guy pushing a new feature that required to alter all code we had written for this and test everything again (I swear 3/4 of this was making programmers test cause qa was only a single person who also did a bunch of other shit) so that we missed every single deadline like a clock work cause of this game only so after 3 years he left for a great job he only got cause he had leveraged his position in this job to market himself in a specific way at the cost of wasting 3 years of investor money for a product that was shipped at v0.25 when it could have been v1.25 without his bs.
Or another team lead that did not give a rat's ass about delivering a product, all he wanted to as well was polish his CV because he would do shit like implement a new database engine that fucked the program so hard no one would ever want to use it. It would save shit it the database instantly so the "Cancel" button everyone ever expects to indeed cancel your edits, would never actually anything.
it was total chaos during testing, it would have made for a product literally no on ever would have bought if it had stayed but again at the cost of wasting a lot of money it was implemented and then removed which made us write a buch of code for it and then again delete the code and write new code for database access that works as expected yet again.
Not to mention wanting to train just junior devs is such utterly insane ways and not allowing us to implement error handling cause according to him it makes you lazy cause you just write codes with errors which get caught so you don't fix them.
Except that not only does this again waste a lot of time and money but not even in uni anyone sane would do this because all errors are caught, handled and the program tells you xyz threw an error so we could check what happened were and quickly fix it.
If you remove this error handling, the software silently crashes without telling you where it crashed or why it crashed and you waste endless horribly frustrating hours finding the error.
It's the way people had to do this in the stone ages of software development before they had the kind of high end IDEs we had that made all of this infinitely easier.
At one point the new CEO, he had been one level lower at first but then they brought in a guy like Derek and the fuckup CEOs were let go (one was allowed to say he left on his own while the other was fired, kinda ruining his career going forward as he refused to talk to the bitter end) even said seriously that nah, no error handling whatsoever, any errors and bs data this software would inevitably write to the database our company would just charge more to fix for higher profits.
It was honestly bizarre cause several times I was the one and only voice of reason and this was my first job and I had been working there for like half a year when the first bs like this hit.
More bs was wasting a bunch of time and money to ry to implement motion control for business software that work with XBox Kinect
to get people's attention at an expo that after 3-4 weeks was found out to be, surprise, surprise, actually impossible to implement. Obviously I had said as much, numerous times while it was being worked on.
There was also rampant other bs like a number of people just not staying as long as they were being paid for, wasting endless hours on bs like youtube or someone bringing his Nintendo DS to play during work hours while proudly declaring how he doesn't work and actually weaseling his way into making this happen because he buttered up enough to the higher ups while he work as little as he could get away with, pushing every last bit if work possible to others like when he did nothing but waste time while I was actually working and pretended like I should have done his part, too or like when I literally dictated him code cause I didn't wanna have to stay late waiting for him to for once implement some code I needed to run mine as he was brought on (for as I later found out substantially more money than me) not based on skill but purely based on prior experience in a similar job but actually being bad at the programming langue we were using.
The he failed upwards and became our new team lead after the previous guy got his shiny new job elsewhere, having left the ship he himself largely sunk. And literally his first order to us as new team lead was to lie to the boss and not fix code that was totally broken so he could doctor some results and pretend code that is failing is in fact working.
He, as usual, lost his temper in a more than pathetic way so I just left him there and talked about it to our boss which lead to him later acting like he wanted to go outside and talk with his fists when actually he was "apologizing" cause I had been 100% right.
It's been 8 years and I still have a trauma or I wouldn't have written this wall of text which probably no one will ever see, let alone read as comment to a barely related youtube video.
Good on you!
I'm not enough of a follower to keep up with this drama.. but I'll watch the next vid.
Cheers.
Why blur that risk assessment?
I find it funny that they look down on youtubers as being unprofessional amateurs just for being youtubers when they... started... on kickstarter oh my god, you cannot make this shit up.
Running out of money in November, makes sense why they released this crap, for $40 on top of it. They need more money smh.
when you look at the blogposts, they've basically been reworking the same stuff for years now, it's ridiculous
Please do this on Snail Games and Wild Card , all the player base wants to know why a top 20 game [player base on Steam PC] is being Killed off in this cash grab.. I sure do! :)
lol trust me lots of studios have physical locations that are basically ghost towns since covid started.
The comment from Nick that you should talk to them 4 minutes *after* he told you they have nothing to say is a clear picture of the people involved.
It is proper journalistic practice to allow someone to respond to allegations before publishing. Let's be honest though, it would have been used as a chance to make legal threats rather than clarify anything.
Sucks man, I had so high expectation for this game.
Was checking up on it here and there
Sounds like that company is ran like the average wow guild.
Good to know these clowns know as much about a journalist's job as they do about project management or leadership, which is to say - nothing at all. If even half of what's in that Exec Summary is true (ie. not embellished by Derek to suit his own purposes) then there is no way a game was going to be delivered... and that is _100% on the shoulders of the people at the top._ Every issue is a straight line back to the CEO & decision-makers... and Nikz might want to be careful tossing legal threats around, as I highly doubt Tencent handed over $5mil to an unproven game developer with no strings attached. They might not be answerable to Kickstarter punters, but they definitely will be to a large investor.
"not enough talent in Alberta" I am pretty sure Bioware Edmonton which is in Alberta along with a rather long list of Dev studios would vastly disagree, its more like people just dont want to work for them which sounds more likely since I know of several people who went to school to get into creating games in various ways and they all say right now the market is rather over saturated to the point they cant get work.
I love the way the scammers in these companies react to Kira. Really shows true colors. I will never support a game from a new studio on KS.
Funny how this game looked a lot like Dead Linger and development and idea behind it and it basically sounding like the same thing happened there happened here...
I've been saying this for years and so have many others. So many people drift through this world as children just pretending to be adults none of them know what they're doing and only know how to follow orders no deductive reasoning skills whatsoever and yet they're being hired to run things and then everyone is surprised when nothing is accomplished competent leadership is necessary in any industry or hell everything in general it's sad that the education system has brought Society to this point this is a social problem having computers do all your thinking for you is not producing intelligent citizens it's dumbing Society to the point of idiocy
Not that this applies to you, but that is actually part of the code of ethics of journalists. Years ago when I did live news for college radio we could lose our show if we didn't offer for comment to whoever we were criticizing because it's based on Canadian law for broadcasters
Yeah that was weird for him to try and justify not reaching out to them. Not defending the game devs, since this is the 1st time ive even heard of the game, but you lose nothing reaching out to them.
I have backed a single KS and it was this game, what an absolute shit show.
Awesome one Kira TY............ my son is learning game design at college and wants to goto uni for a degree in the same.... you have helped me advise my child about the shady practises that I can hopefully help him in the future ....
sounds like Tommy talerico's amico office space with nobody working in it!
yup just like amico