Please make a video about why "Starmade" or "Interstellar rift" died. Those are really good games but they are dying nowdays. There are not more that 30-50 players left it both games summary. Maybe you'll be even able to give those games a second chance.
one of my proudest achievements is writing a steam guide for starforge about how to remove it from your games library and making it the highest rated steam guide for the entire game
It depends in where and what you get with offices. Most people who start businesses don't realize how expensive certain things are, especially physical housing. Where I live you can get a small four person office for about 600 per month, and then add another 120 for utilities and you have decent spot. But really at that small of a team you should keep it in a spare room. Most people screw the pooch by getting something they simply don't need, and this extends to everyone. You don't need the best equipment to record a video, render videos, or make movies especially now days. My phone can record decent videos and do very basic editting for $100.
I have no idea how people think ~100k is enough for renting an office and hiring a bunch of full-time developers. It's not. Why else do you think AAA developers need to invest so much money into each game?
it's way too easy to underestimate how long it would take to code/design something for any 1 even if its something simple/basic, for example, from time to time i develop some small java apps /php web apps for students ,i know the logic, how it's done, the steps,but even with a clear idea,at the beginning of the project i struggle to remember how to code (bcz i shift a lot between programming languages, remembering the exact syntax is time-consuming or simply months passed since my last project) but after 1 week i start to accelerate xD, if i may compare, it's like u are a very skilled pro player in some fps games (u know how to dodge, headshot snipe,etc)then u stop playing for months , when u come back u find urself becoming a nub compared to ur old skills even walking smoothly/swapping is hard, but with a little practice,in no time u can get ur skills back, the point is: aside from "they overestimated their skill and underestimated how long it would take" they didn't have a good plan and didn't organize the project,if it was me ,i would make tons of prototype test for the generated world module alone ,nothing more , nothing less ,and how to optimised to the maximum,bcz this , this is the heart of the game, its the fondation part,if its sucks ,its gonna be a "pain without end"bcz u dont want ur project heart that 70 % or more of the game modules attached to it to be suck ,bcz its time cnsumming and exhusting process if done wrong,so if they did that right ,then they could hire some 3d designers to make all the game objects and some audio artist,then they could work on some anti-cheat solution(some game fall down bcz they didnt care about this part), but they didn't, our 2 dudes choose the self-destruction path
Your correct and probably didn't help that they mostly hired collage student to work on there project. My sister husband was in his 3rd year of school when they hired him
The most important part, so often missed in these projects (especially when designed by junior or self-taught programmers), is planning. Plan the scope of the project, plan what every bit of the game is supposed to do and have the flow worked out before you actually start coding anything. Work out how you are going to modularise it to be able to handle extra features you didn't initially anticipate. Scope creep is so often caused by a lack of planned structure at the start, and worsened by developers not having adequately prepared for unplanned features pushed upon them.
i gotta hand it to them, their defense mode was freaking awesome. Build a base with limited resources and survive against waves, get a bunch of crazy randomly generated weapons, it was really fun with friends. Then they removed it, for absolutely no reason. And that was about the biggest change they ever got to before jumping ship.
it was removed because the guy on their team that did the proceedural code left, and nobody could figure out his code, and due to IP worries, they were not even sure if they were even still allowed to use it.. :( did you get your name in the game credits too? You see some of what starforge could have been in space engineers, emperyion, and no mans sky and the anger at Starforge in some ways inspired those game makers to do better, so its not all bad. :)
@@phoenixx5092 that's not possible, when you're hired onto a company, there's no way that it's not a contractual agreement that everything you work on, stays with the company. They would have definitely had the rights to it. Believe it or not, some companies even fuck you by getting you to sign an agreement saying that anything you make outside of work from the time you're hired to a specified time after you leave, also belongs to them. It's crazy.
@@lolzmanxd2646 Yeah at least they were in older games. Now shitthesda relies too heavily on the community mods to improve their shitty not even half baked games.
@@ChaiKarl Now? What do you even mean by now? F76 is not mod friendly and almost anything old that could be modded was modded. You are full of shit, way more than bethesda anyway.
Yeah, but there is a differece in scale. Codehatch is a tiny business that couldn't even afford unique inspirational backstories for the founders. Bethesda is a massive multimillion dollar company with massive IPs and tons of employees. Basically, losing to a chihuahua is embarassing when you are 5. It is pathetic when you are 25. Scale matters.
Ah, yes, StarForge. The game that made me swear off of early access forever. Every now and then, just when I think I've moved on and can sleep at night, it comes back to haunt me.
@@pyroparagon8945 The game, while barebones, was a complete product in that what it DID have was fully functional. It’s better to cut out major content and release what’s left in a good state than have a bunch of content in a poor state.
I remember the hype for this like it was yesterday, but I never heard what happened with it. I just remember backers insisting that it would be revolutionary
I remeber buying it after watching the yogscast, to begin with the game was fun then they patched out everything to "fix" it then abandoned it leaving everyone in the dark.
By my reading of it, their bios say they've been working on learning to code since they were ten, not that we learned to code at the age of ten and have been working since then.
F me I bought this early access stuff when it came on steam, hyped by the big trailers and promises, and got scammed good. Hell I even bought Reign of kings, which was btw better and even got a little success, but I HOPE for the future that they stop making scammy survival games (or making any games at all); look at their latest title, Heat (not even on their website btw), it's the same crap.
Honestly what were people expecting? If you give a inexperience development team 135k to make a multiple player voxel based game with ever expanding requirements of course it's going to fail.
To be honest, Reign of Kings had A LOT of potential in the early days. The combat, stamina usage and building was really fun and inventive, but they ended up nerfing things and broke most of the combat. Absolutely no touch with their community at all, sadly
The problem that was really talked about at the time was that much of reign of kings systems were pulled from Starforge, so they used the Starforge code to subsidize design) reign of kings, but also get that additional seed money. The game wasn't bad, and it had a significantly better reception because code}{atch didn't point people towards its old game, but the fact they they still drop it the same way they dropped the first is just sad.
@@Smithor Yeah, i agree with your point. I didn't even know Starforge was a thing until i saw this video, and I can clearly see how much they pulled from Starforge into RoK. It's just a mess overall
I remember looking at Reign of Kings on steam, thinking "oh, this looks cool, but I it feels familiar somehow". I saw it a year after or so, and definitely didn't assume at the time that the company had gone on to make another game (I figured the only way they'd abandon a game like that was to be defunct). Do a little snooping and discover its the same company, and everything made sense. I do think reign of kings had an actual chance at life, unlike Starforge, but I just couldn't risk my friends money(or my own) on the current reviews. After all, I myself had reviewed Starforge positively early on.
@@Smithor 100% understand that. I had around 200~ hours played on RoK before they butchered everything with updates and fixes nobody asked for. Did some research back then, figured they didn't even consider what the community wanted out of the game and left it like that. Haven't looked back since
I had bought Starforge.... but then when the refund period was announced, I didn't notice it and missed it. ... Fool me once, shame on them. Fool me twice... well, they didn't fool me twice. I didn't even knew they had "made" another game and are "making" a third one.
I saw another "why X failed" video a few days ago and made me think of this game, which I got burned by, and wondered if anyone did a video for it. Turns out not looking it up was the correct choice :p
let's face it,most GoFundMe style early access games are shit, the only GoFundMe type of game I've played and is good is undertale edit:yes there are a lot more great crowdfunded games i just never played em
I played starforge when it was just released on steam, i was so eager to get it and play it with my friend, the alpha version was very promising and the hovercraft update was..well...pretty cool actually, then came the randomly generated bs and the game died for me and many others.
I have 2 extreme experiences with early access games: - Starforge, as the worst experience i could ever have; - Space Engineers, as the greatest experience i could hope for.
This doesn't seem like a scam. This simply seems some people embark on a project with little idea how to realize it all and absolutely no realistic idea at all how much it would cost to make it. And-- you know what? So many classic games started off the same way and only turned out differently because of a few lucky breaks. But you don't call those "scams" because they were funded by a single company and not a bunch of people on a crowd-funding website.
It sounds like 2 inexperienced young adults got way in over their heads and promised a bunch of stuff they weren't even sure they could deliver on and despite their best efforts, were ruined by their lack of planning and inability to engage in any meaningful introspection, which ended up screwing over a lot of people. The most heinous of their mistakes was that they were entirely unapologetic.
It failed because I was working on a game with the same name back in 2008 (before I knew how to code). When I learned to code, i found this game was published. My StarForge was inspired by Star Control 2.
If they made a small, basic game that worked well and then raised money to expand the game. It probably would have been good. But they did 1 billion different things at once and non of it worked.
I almost think that it might have been the use of Unity 3D that tanked this project. It needed a custom-built engine to be implemented well; and the scope of what they were promising would require a larger team than what they had. ... the complexity of what they had been trying to achieve hadn't every really been done before, either; a revolutionary approach might need to be taken to memory structures and storage on the same scale as rasterization for 3D when it was first developed.
131.400 hours is expecting them to 24/7 something. 43.700 hours would be more realistic if they would have worked on it 8/7. if you say they have worked like a normal workforce with about 210 workdays they would suddenly only have 25.200 hours experience. especially kids have to go to school and if they were there for like 10 years and had maybe 3 hours for learning you would actually get a number like 15k hours. but 10k hours to master videogame programming where a team of 50 and more people work on one project in a company you would think that you need 500.000h of experience to master this *not trying to defend the company, their games look shit
I think I got lucky with this early access thinggie... My first and only Early Access til now was Hades, and that game is LIT. (anyway, new sub for you)
@@JinwooYoon1217 It feels and play like an almost full game, and it's cheap even for my broke ass self, how many $20 games that you can sink that much hrs into, I'm 100hrs in and counting, so far, costed me like 20cent an hour, which is a damn bang for the buck
the truth is that 140k is not even close to enough for the all the things they promised. I can honestly say without exeggeration this game would easily take a million to make.
I bought into this, had my refund denied, and was banned from their forums for it. The best part is the guy who made it lives here, so it's possible the guy that scammed me has passed me on the street.
It's a scam. Immediately firing most of the devs you hired and then ghosting the community isn't a move you'd make if you were in over your heads workload wise. I don't know if he went over this in the video but yeah, they did that.
If someone advertise an investment that gives you 20% interest you know it is a scam. The same applies here, if someone says he needs 75.000$ to create a game that has more features than GTA, Skyrim and Halo combined, than it is either a scam or more likely a hopeless naive developer. For that money, you can at best pay one developer for one year (more likely half a year). To be surprised, that doesn't work is the same as to be surprised, that that Nigerian prince, who wanted send you millions, doesn't exist. The very best outcome of such a situation is something like No man's sky.
There is no such thing as "mastering game development". It's like expecting a building company having "mastered building (of anything and everything)" and based on that except them to build you a moon city for 10million people in 2010.
05:41 When I wrote a documentation about my software thesis I filled it with promises like these. Now I'm not even sure If I can even make a main menu in the game with a few months left.
I saw it comeing (after buying the ""beta"" it was actually the third steam game i ever owned) after i saw the enemies FLOATING AND Ragdolling rather then actually walking
The sad thing for me was that this game wasn't the only one that pulled this very thing on me. Vox did it too, and it's *still* on the Steam store as a buggy, unplayable mess that will never live up to the promises made in the Steam store page itself because the dev stopped development. I can't even get a refund.
I remember buying this with a friend once. Played it for half an hour and the uninstalling again. It was such a mess and after years of nothingness it got "released" Glad to be part of that shitshow xD
am working on a game, and i will never do a crowdfounding, kickstarter or steam greenlight. my game might youst be free and ratter receve donation. cuz since i started with game modding and then game making(and am not good, mor of 3D artist than coder). i know that best way from seeing the bad indie games on indiegogo/kickstarter/steamgreenlight is that: keep it cheap/Really cheap or free. dont have drm, no dlc/paywall/Lootbox bulshit. Also dont over promising stuff/ make hype. And if some one want to pirate it lett them, cuz in the end IF the game is good or ok you will sell/Receve donation cuz people likes it might even from thos that have pirated it. :) thats some of my observation over years :) but i have as a hobby/hobbyWork not as work so i keep the money out of it, but if i can earn aliving from it thats super :) ps Dyslexia and from Norway. Good video from you all ways :D
why not? my suggestion is simple: Make a fix money requirement VERY FIX I MEAN! So fix reject any extra if you claim you will not exceed target under no case! (also I pirate my games before buying them to test it... if its working and I am having fun I buy it before keep playing it.)
@@StigDesign no... if you get more than 75.000$ as example(if its target) donator will witness a screen saying "hey... I got paid by my boss(you) allready... please wait until I relase game) by this you will not feel pressure of "I should make more" ever because you cannot go beyond your target! now I know this is still taking away your "freedom" in a sense but atleast you are not getting extra pressure randomly because someone rich decided to give you 1000 bucks randomly :D
I bought that game on Steam. Because of that one game I have become wary of early access games. Only one other early acess game I bought actually turned out great, and was fully released. ARK: Survival Evolved. I have not played that in months, just can't because of time anymore. But holy hell does Starforge leave a bad taste in my mouth and STILL fills me with rage to this day.
When i was in 5th grade I got a book from the book fair about gaming (it sucked, in hindsight) that mentioned how Starforge was a mix between Minecraft and Halo, and I'm only now realizing why I never heard of it outside that book.
I liked StarForge...when it was in alpha...but yeah, very unfortunate it went the way it did. So much lost potential...and the funny part was the 30XX (I think?) Series of games, released during Starforge's lifespan, accomplished what they couldn't, at least in terms of a massive world, building stuff and sci-fi shooter combat. I should play those again..
I remember playing starforge for the first time, my best friend in high school was really hyped about it and bought two copies of the beta. One for him and me, when we first played it he was almost silent because he was so frustrated at how bad the game ran. I think he played it a little longer but I never tried it again after that day.
Oh, this is gold, pure gold... I’m watching this video about a scam videogame and TH-cam interrupts it for a spot on Fallout 76... I had to pause laughing wildly...
I am in the credits for the game lol. Apparently part of the story here was there was a Jurassic Park moment when the guy that had programed most of the proceedural engines, left the team, leaving them with an entirely undocumented procedural system, which was so unmanagable, (on top of IP concerns) they had to remove the entire thing. Since that was the cornerstone of the gameplay, they never really recovered from that. Fail or not, I went straight from this game to space engineers, which then set the benchmark for sandbox sci fi games from that point on, and in its current version has some passing similarity with the star forge we always wanted but never got. I never looked back.
My only real experience is seeing that reddit post. Getting hyped and started playing the first demo build. Got my first video with over 1,000 views with it. It was me screaming like a little girl after I accidentally spawned a monster and didn't know it and got rushed. Bout pissed myself. Got bored and never played it again. Thought about it every now and then, but honestly didn't know about any of this transpiring. So this was really really interesting to watch. Kind of sent me back a little bit.
Robinjhoe1 honestly shit like this is just ineptitude and two guys not knowing how to use their money. If you’re interested in coding and want to make your own game just go for it learn new things and consistently improve in the areas your lacking practice and you’ll be fine.
I say it once and I say it a million times, don't give your money to any company trying to fulfill their dreams. If you are interested in supporting them, do so after their product is made and available for purchase. If they can't get their money the regular way through investors, then they're a failure as a company. The consumer shouldn't have to pay for the initial cost of making a product, because you're barely protected as far as getting any sort of refund should said product be shit. These companies treat you as a source of risk free capital, and all you sheep keep giving them your money. It may sound condescending, but it's the truth, stop being sheep.
Fun fact. I can't see any codehatch games on MY steam. I can only see them online. Did they ban all the players who bought starforge from buying their games and keep them from posting?
Calling games a scam when their kickstarter got 130k... which is basically just enough to pay two ppl one year worth of rent to try to make what equates to a post-patch No Man's Sky. That's not a scam, that's just gamers being really bad at math.
Regardless of the amount, the stuff that CodeHatch promised was never put into the game, making the players who paid money to receive those promises feel as if they got scammed.
You should checkout unturned 2 when it get's fully released. since unturned was the game that started growing your channel. i really miss the bootleg episodes since me and my friends used to visit each other and buy some snacks while watching the episodes.
So it doesn't keep you from losing it, it just makes it slightly easier to find it. If you lose it in the city and then notice at home that thing will still be lost and you will feel dumb for buying it
My experience with star-forge was that i wasn't dumb enough to fall for a project i knew was to massive for a couple of nubs. So i never fell prey to their idiocy.
They raised roughly enough money to hire me (senior software engineer) for a year. And that's not including benefits or employment taxes. There's no way they raised enough money for even the two developers they already had, let alone hiring other staff.
So far my hesitance to buy early access titles has served me well. Only bought Ark Factorio and Elite Dangerous and all those worked wonderfully. Just gotta resist that hype...
Seems less like an intentional scam and more like ambition + incompetence. They didn't pocket the money and run, they put it into an office and staff. More of a Dashcon than a Fyre Fest.
I have only ever spend money on two kickstarter projects: StarForge and Kerbal Space Program. StarForge was a disaster, but others took the idea and made awesome games like Space Engineers and Empyrion. KSP was and is amazing. What's the lesson? Don't preorder, and always check the company before buying early access games.
I bought this game for 26 bucks when it first launched the alpha. Such a massive letdown. In fact, they literally made the game worse with an update shortly before they bailed. The game actually had a bit of fun in it before they completely trashed it.
Not sure you can call a crowdfunded project a “scam” if there was an actual product delivered. Crowdfunding is by nature a risky investment. Can’t expect a guarantee that the end product is going to be good.
I do believe that they tried to make the game work, but didn't understand the scope and the depth of their promises, and ended up spending years in trying to make something that they didn't have the skills to do - which is fine, not everything is a success, and early access / kickstarter stuff should always be considered as an investment and not as something that you are buying anyways - as for the refunds, it is hard to refund any money that has already been spent. The only thing I truly find fault is their handling of the situation, and their conduct online - better communication and self-reflection would have in my opinion done a lot, but we should also remember that we can sometimes be very toxic in our behaviour, and maybe some of us could have been more mature in our communication towards the devs - and I believe a lot of them were, but sometimes things are just broken beyond repair. In the end like the video suggest and people have commented, we should use this as a way to learning experience towards our approach to backing projects, and people who wish to develop to understand the scope of what they want to deliver very, very well. Of course, I might be wrong and the devs were nothing but "muhahahaha, we want money", but I doubt that, and truly believe that they wanted to deliver on their promises - classic tale of dreams and hopes clashing with the reality of development.
Yeah, Starforge... I bought this game and never played it because I was waiting for it to get ready, but since that never happened, I simply bought a game that I never played. I tried to refund it but Steam refused, saying the 14 days for a refund had passed. Well, if the game is a scam, I don't see how they could deny a refund, but apparently they can. This game is the sole reason why I almost entirely stopped buying early access games. I'm very careful about that now and research the developers before any such purchase. Steam probably lost a lot of money as well due to losing people's confidence. Never going to buy any of these developers' products again.
As soon as you said how much was raised and how much above their target it was, I was like "oh, that explains it; they didn't know what they were doing."
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What ever happened to nanovor?
I don't get why people make wallets with no place for cash. It is a fucking wallet, and we are still far from being a cashless society
can you do "How Hellion Failed". Zerogravity abandoned the game in October on 2019.
Please make a video about why "Starmade" or "Interstellar rift" died. Those are really good games but they are dying nowdays. There are not more that 30-50 players left it both games summary. Maybe you'll be even able to give those games a second chance.
one of my proudest achievements is writing a steam guide for starforge about how to remove it from your games library and making it the highest rated steam guide for the entire game
Uninstalling the game deserves its own Steam achievement.
I realised you're the same person. Damn dude you're fucking legend!
^Juno (first CM)
An old community member linked me that guide and I thought it was hilarious.
The one game I had removed from my Steam library of over 450 games.
Oh that was you!
How to fail in game industry:
1. get 140k in crowdfunding
2. Get physical HQ/offices
3. Failure.
It depends in where and what you get with offices. Most people who start businesses don't realize how expensive certain things are, especially physical housing.
Where I live you can get a small four person office for about 600 per month, and then add another 120 for utilities and you have decent spot. But really at that small of a team you should keep it in a spare room.
Most people screw the pooch by getting something they simply don't need, and this extends to everyone. You don't need the best equipment to record a video, render videos, or make movies especially now days. My phone can record decent videos and do very basic editting for $100.
So true
In the old days, we make games in our parents' garage.
I have no idea how people think ~100k is enough for renting an office and hiring a bunch of full-time developers. It's not. Why else do you think AAA developers need to invest so much money into each game?
@@shiinaai2978 in the new days we make them in virtual networks and discord servers.
They are young and they over estimated their skill and under estimated how long it would take. Classic Jr Dev senario.
it's way too easy to underestimate how long it would take to code/design something for any 1 even if its something simple/basic, for example, from time to time i develop some small java apps /php web apps for students ,i know the logic, how it's done, the steps,but even with a clear idea,at the beginning of the project i struggle to remember how to code (bcz i shift a lot between programming languages, remembering the exact syntax is time-consuming or simply months passed since my last project) but after 1 week i start to accelerate xD, if i may compare, it's like u are a very skilled pro player in some fps games (u know how to dodge, headshot snipe,etc)then u stop playing for months , when u come back u find urself becoming a nub compared to ur old skills even walking smoothly/swapping is hard, but with a little practice,in no time u can get ur skills back, the point is: aside from "they overestimated their skill and underestimated how long it would take" they didn't have a good plan and didn't organize the project,if it was me ,i would make tons of prototype test for the generated world module alone ,nothing more , nothing less ,and how to optimised to the maximum,bcz this , this is the heart of the game, its the fondation part,if its sucks ,its gonna be a "pain without end"bcz u dont want ur project heart that 70 % or more of the game modules attached to it to be suck ,bcz its time cnsumming and exhusting process if done wrong,so if they did that right ,then they could hire some 3d designers to make all the game objects and some audio artist,then they could work on some anti-cheat solution(some game fall down bcz they didnt care about this part), but they didn't, our 2 dudes choose the self-destruction path
@@gastongl404 don't forget about that scope creep as well.
Your correct and probably didn't help that they mostly hired collage student to work on there project. My sister husband was in his 3rd year of school when they hired him
The most important part, so often missed in these projects (especially when designed by junior or self-taught programmers), is planning. Plan the scope of the project, plan what every bit of the game is supposed to do and have the flow worked out before you actually start coding anything. Work out how you are going to modularise it to be able to handle extra features you didn't initially anticipate. Scope creep is so often caused by a lack of planned structure at the start, and worsened by developers not having adequately prepared for unplanned features pushed upon them.
i gotta hand it to them, their defense mode was freaking awesome. Build a base with limited resources and survive against waves, get a bunch of crazy randomly generated weapons, it was really fun with friends.
Then they removed it, for absolutely no reason. And that was about the biggest change they ever got to before jumping ship.
it was removed because the guy on their team that did the proceedural code left, and nobody could figure out his code, and due to IP worries, they were not even sure if they were even still allowed to use it.. :( did you get your name in the game credits too? You see some of what starforge could have been in space engineers, emperyion, and no mans sky and the anger at Starforge in some ways inspired those game makers to do better, so its not all bad. :)
@@phoenixx5092 that's not possible, when you're hired onto a company, there's no way that it's not a contractual agreement that everything you work on, stays with the company. They would have definitely had the rights to it. Believe it or not, some companies even fuck you by getting you to sign an agreement saying that anything you make outside of work from the time you're hired to a specified time after you leave, also belongs to them. It's crazy.
I always wanted a game like that ever since old "Build a base and survive" Roblox games
@@diegov1743 I mean, Rimworld scratched that itch for me
@@phoenixx5092no they’re just the types to abandon things when they’re bored
Bethesda: Our games are a complete mess, buggiest ever.
CodeHatch: Hold my beer
Sammy Gadberry at least Bethesda’s bugs had charm they were just so amazing
@@lolzmanxd2646 Yeah at least they were in older games. Now shitthesda relies too heavily on the community mods to improve their shitty not even half baked games.
Have you tried Reign of Kings in its golden age? It was awesome.
@@ChaiKarl Now? What do you even mean by now? F76 is not mod friendly and almost anything old that could be modded was modded. You are full of shit, way more than bethesda anyway.
Yeah, but there is a differece in scale. Codehatch is a tiny business that couldn't even afford unique inspirational backstories for the founders. Bethesda is a massive multimillion dollar company with massive IPs and tons of employees. Basically, losing to a chihuahua is embarassing when you are 5. It is pathetic when you are 25. Scale matters.
How to fail as a game dev:
- Promise too much in your game so that you end up accomplishing nothing
While wildly overestimating how far you can stretch a very finite budget.
Ah, yes, StarForge. The game that made me swear off of early access forever. Every now and then, just when I think I've moved on and can sleep at night, it comes back to haunt me.
All of us my friend... All of us...
@@lilmoris1 No, *not* all of us. Also got starforge, but realized that one or a few bad EA title (early access) doesn't mean all will be bad.
Empyrion is everything that Starforge promised, and more, also Steam early access, its all a crap shoot
I was like 12 when i asked my dad for this, felt so awful when my young self realized the mistake, dad said it was ok but i felt like an idiot lol
Much better to learn that lesson for 15$, later in life it is a lot more expensive
The diffrence between that 12 year old and codehatch, is that the 12 year old WILL make better games if he/she keeps making them.
"Mom, can we get No Man's Sky?"
"We have No Man's Sky at home."
*No Man's Sky at home:*
At least NMS can have pride that the game mostly worked on release. Sure it crashed a lot, but atleast you could walk without spazzing and clipping
@@pyroparagon8945 The game, while barebones, was a complete product in that what it DID have was fully functional.
It’s better to cut out major content and release what’s left in a good state than have a bunch of content in a poor state.
Another franchise/title you may want to dig your teeth in is Magicka Wizard Wars.
Wild ASpec spotted
“You caught a wild ASpec!”
I remember the hype for this like it was yesterday, but I never heard what happened with it. I just remember backers insisting that it would be revolutionary
Romantic Outlaw
Like err... Star Citizen for example? 😁
Just wanted to say just like star citizen
I remeber buying it after watching the yogscast, to begin with the game was fun then they patched out everything to "fix" it then abandoned it leaving everyone in the dark.
I remember that! I felt like accidentally bought a different game.....
>Watching yogscast
You earned your own failures, friend.
@@booradley6832 what's wrong with yogscast?
By my reading of it, their bios say they've been working on learning to code since they were ten, not that we learned to code at the age of ten and have been working since then.
I paid for this game and warned people when they made a second game. None of my friends listened. Oh well.
reign of kings was pretty fun at launch tho, even tho they destroyed the game soon after
F me I bought this early access stuff when it came on steam, hyped by the big trailers and promises, and got scammed good. Hell I even bought Reign of kings, which was btw better and even got a little success, but I HOPE for the future that they stop making scammy survival games (or making any games at all); look at their latest title, Heat (not even on their website btw), it's the same crap.
I bought the founders edition of StarForge and convinced 5 other friends to do it as well.
@@hantront Yikes
Honestly what were people expecting? If you give a inexperience development team 135k to make a multiple player voxel based game with ever expanding requirements of course it's going to fail.
but then they did it twice. Inexperience wasn't the issue, they're thieves.
I thought I was the only person who bought this game in like 2012
To be honest, Reign of Kings had A LOT of potential in the early days. The combat, stamina usage and building was really fun and inventive, but they ended up nerfing things and broke most of the combat. Absolutely no touch with their community at all, sadly
A moron justifying buying the next game from a company that releases a trash game.
The problem that was really talked about at the time was that much of reign of kings systems were pulled from Starforge, so they used the Starforge code to subsidize design) reign of kings, but also get that additional seed money. The game wasn't bad, and it had a significantly better reception because code}{atch didn't point people towards its old game, but the fact they they still drop it the same way they dropped the first is just sad.
@@Smithor Yeah, i agree with your point. I didn't even know Starforge was a thing until i saw this video, and I can clearly see how much they pulled from Starforge into RoK. It's just a mess overall
I remember looking at Reign of Kings on steam, thinking "oh, this looks cool, but I it feels familiar somehow". I saw it a year after or so, and definitely didn't assume at the time that the company had gone on to make another game (I figured the only way they'd abandon a game like that was to be defunct). Do a little snooping and discover its the same company, and everything made sense.
I do think reign of kings had an actual chance at life, unlike Starforge, but I just couldn't risk my friends money(or my own) on the current reviews. After all, I myself had reviewed Starforge positively early on.
@@Smithor 100% understand that. I had around 200~ hours played on RoK before they butchered everything with updates and fixes nobody asked for. Did some research back then, figured they didn't even consider what the community wanted out of the game and left it like that. Haven't looked back since
I had bought Starforge.... but then when the refund period was announced, I didn't notice it and missed it. ... Fool me once, shame on them. Fool me twice... well, they didn't fool me twice. I didn't even knew they had "made" another game and are "making" a third one.
I saw another "why X failed" video a few days ago and made me think of this game, which I got burned by, and wondered if anyone did a video for it. Turns out not looking it up was the correct choice :p
I still have this game in my library. Me and my friends played it back when it first came out and it was so bad.
let's face it,most GoFundMe style early access games are shit, the only GoFundMe type of game I've played and is good is undertale
edit:yes there are a lot more great crowdfunded games i just never played em
Its about as shit as an ANIME FAN ON PROM NIGHT
I thinl Undertale is overhyped.
Wasn’t shovelknight a crowdfunded game too?
Also Darkest Dungeon
insurgency and kingdom come deliverance are good gofundme games
I played starforge when it was just released on steam, i was so eager to get it and play it with my friend, the alpha version was very promising and the hovercraft update was..well...pretty cool actually, then came the randomly generated bs and the game died for me and many others.
Well tbh when your budget is
How not to lose a wallet: CHAIN IT TO YOUR HIP YOU DINGUS.
Get an eyelet kit and chain up all the things!
Yes
yep that's why I chain up my dates.
Can't really do that in court houses or schools...so, that's a no-go.
I had to google for a tutorial to remove it from my steam library...
You dont "dig a gravestone"; you "dig a grave".
Nah, they failed so bad, that they didn't dig the grave first, they dug out a gravestone of someone else.
it should be noted that they bought their assets too
"In their late 20s, let's say 25.." smh
Holy shit i forgot abput this game. I remember thinking this was gonna be the game to bring us into the next generation.
I have 2 extreme experiences with early access games:
- Starforge, as the worst experience i could ever have;
- Space Engineers, as the greatest experience i could hope for.
Mandalores review on this game is a pure treat
Thank you for providing the backstory!
I bought this for like 5 bucks with a friend on steam, we had a couple hour laugh at it. I feel for those that spent more...
This doesn't seem like a scam. This simply seems some people embark on a project with little idea how to realize it all and absolutely no realistic idea at all how much it would cost to make it. And-- you know what? So many classic games started off the same way and only turned out differently because of a few lucky breaks. But you don't call those "scams" because they were funded by a single company and not a bunch of people on a crowd-funding website.
It sounds like 2 inexperienced young adults got way in over their heads and promised a bunch of stuff they weren't even sure they could deliver on and despite their best efforts, were ruined by their lack of planning and inability to engage in any meaningful introspection, which ended up screwing over a lot of people. The most heinous of their mistakes was that they were entirely unapologetic.
It failed because I was working on a game with the same name back in 2008 (before I knew how to code). When I learned to code, i found this game was published. My StarForge was inspired by Star Control 2.
If they made a small, basic game that worked well and then raised money to expand the game. It probably would have been good. But they did 1 billion different things at once and non of it worked.
I almost think that it might have been the use of Unity 3D that tanked this project. It needed a custom-built engine to be implemented well; and the scope of what they were promising would require a larger team than what they had. ... the complexity of what they had been trying to achieve hadn't every really been done before, either; a revolutionary approach might need to be taken to memory structures and storage on the same scale as rasterization for 3D when it was first developed.
Well this was one unpleasant trip down memory lane. I'm one of the suckers who got scammed into buying the founders edition for 70 bucks.
4:38 brilliant
Bruh I remember playing the demo for this back when I saw it on the Facepunch forums and everyone was so hype
131.400 hours is expecting them to 24/7 something. 43.700 hours would be more realistic if they would have worked on it 8/7. if you say they have worked like a normal workforce with about 210 workdays they would suddenly only have 25.200 hours experience. especially kids have to go to school and if they were there for like 10 years and had maybe 3 hours for learning you would actually get a number like 15k hours.
but 10k hours to master videogame programming where a team of 50 and more people work on one project in a company you would think that you need 500.000h of experience to master this
*not trying to defend the company, their games look shit
Me: Gets Scammed by StarForge, Reign of Kings, and Heat.
CodeHatch: Wanna see me do it again?
I think I got lucky with this early access thinggie...
My first and only Early Access til now was Hades, and that game is LIT.
(anyway, new sub for you)
Yo! Almost 50 runs in Hades so far, and about 40 hours of game time so far. So good already and not even finished!
@@JinwooYoon1217 It feels and play like an almost full game, and it's cheap even for my broke ass self, how many $20 games that you can sink that much hrs into, I'm 100hrs in and counting, so far, costed me like 20cent an hour, which is a damn bang for the buck
the truth is that 140k is not even close to enough for the all the things they promised. I can honestly say without exeggeration this game would easily take a million to make.
I bought into this, had my refund denied, and was banned from their forums for it. The best part is the guy who made it lives here, so it's possible the guy that scammed me has passed me on the street.
Doesn't strike me as a scam, just that they bit off way more than they could chew.
It's a scam. Immediately firing most of the devs you hired and then ghosting the community isn't a move you'd make if you were in over your heads workload wise. I don't know if he went over this in the video but yeah, they did that.
the fact that anyone thought that $130,000 would make the game they where taking about is silly
somone bought me this game based on the trailer, and it was terrible, it was completely un-optimized and crashed my computer within 5 minutes.
If someone advertise an investment that gives you 20% interest you know it is a scam. The same applies here, if someone says he needs 75.000$ to create a game that has more features than GTA, Skyrim and Halo combined, than it is either a scam or more likely a hopeless naive developer. For that money, you can at best pay one developer for one year (more likely half a year). To be surprised, that doesn't work is the same as to be surprised, that that Nigerian prince, who wanted send you millions, doesn't exist. The very best outcome of such a situation is something like No man's sky.
Digital Homicide: "Who are you?"
Codehatch: "I'm you."
There is no such thing as "mastering game development".
It's like expecting a building company having "mastered building (of anything and everything)" and based on that except them to build you a moon city for 10million people in 2010.
05:41 When I wrote a documentation about my software thesis I filled it with promises like these. Now I'm not even sure If I can even make a main menu in the game with a few months left.
Relax. All thesis start like that
Is the “independatly” not a dead giveaway?
I saw it comeing (after buying the ""beta"" it was actually the third steam game i ever owned) after i saw the enemies FLOATING AND Ragdolling rather then actually walking
They should have taken their terrain idea from system era soft works and their game astroneer
When you did the math for how many times they had mastered coding, i laughed so hard i started coughing 🤣🤣
The sad thing for me was that this game wasn't the only one that pulled this very thing on me. Vox did it too, and it's *still* on the Steam store as a buggy, unplayable mess that will never live up to the promises made in the Steam store page itself because the dev stopped development.
I can't even get a refund.
Hahaha they gave the Blizzard defence.
I remember buying this with a friend once. Played it for half an hour and the uninstalling again. It was such a mess and after years of nothingness it got "released"
Glad to be part of that shitshow xD
3:51 Copy and paste
Professional devs right there, ladies and gentlemen
am working on a game, and i will never do a crowdfounding, kickstarter or steam greenlight.
my game might youst be free and ratter receve donation. cuz since i started with game modding and then game making(and am not good, mor of 3D artist than coder). i know that best way from seeing the bad indie games on indiegogo/kickstarter/steamgreenlight is that: keep it cheap/Really cheap or free. dont have drm, no dlc/paywall/Lootbox bulshit. Also dont over promising stuff/ make hype. And if some one want to pirate it lett them, cuz in the end IF the game is good or ok you will sell/Receve donation cuz people likes it might even from thos that have pirated it. :) thats some of my observation over years :)
but i have as a hobby/hobbyWork not as work so i keep the money out of it, but if i can earn aliving from it thats super :)
ps Dyslexia and from Norway.
Good video from you all ways :D
why not?
my suggestion is simple: Make a fix money requirement
VERY FIX I MEAN! So fix reject any extra if you claim you will not exceed target under no case!
(also I pirate my games before buying them to test it... if its working and I am having fun I buy it before keep playing it.)
@@makaramuss you mean a Minimum donation/buy price like 1$? :)
@@StigDesign no...
if you get more than 75.000$ as example(if its target) donator will witness a screen saying "hey... I got paid by my boss(you) allready... please wait until I relase game)
by this you will not feel pressure of "I should make more" ever because you cannot go beyond your target!
now I know this is still taking away your "freedom" in a sense but atleast you are not getting extra pressure randomly because someone rich decided to give you 1000 bucks randomly :D
@@makaramuss oh i see, yes thats true :)
I bought that game on Steam. Because of that one game I have become wary of early access games. Only one other early acess game I bought actually turned out great, and was fully released. ARK: Survival Evolved. I have not played that in months, just can't because of time anymore.
But holy hell does Starforge leave a bad taste in my mouth and STILL fills me with rage to this day.
When i was in 5th grade I got a book from the book fair about gaming (it sucked, in hindsight) that mentioned how Starforge was a mix between Minecraft and Halo, and I'm only now realizing why I never heard of it outside that book.
I liked StarForge...when it was in alpha...but yeah, very unfortunate it went the way it did. So much lost potential...and the funny part was the 30XX (I think?) Series of games, released during Starforge's lifespan, accomplished what they couldn't, at least in terms of a massive world, building stuff and sci-fi shooter combat.
I should play those again..
I remember StarForge. I paid $80, felt good about it, and realized how naive I was when they cancelled development.
I remember playing starforge for the first time, my best friend in high school was really hyped about it and bought two copies of the beta. One for him and me, when we first played it he was almost silent because he was so frustrated at how bad the game ran. I think he played it a little longer but I never tried it again after that day.
Oh, this is gold, pure gold...
I’m watching this video about a scam videogame and TH-cam interrupts it for a spot on Fallout 76... I had to pause laughing wildly...
was actually considering getting one of those wallets... till I saw it was $79
"You like my moon shoes?" - Jerma playing Starforge
I am in the credits for the game lol.
Apparently part of the story here was there was a Jurassic Park moment when the guy that had programed most of the proceedural engines, left the team, leaving them with an entirely undocumented procedural system, which was so unmanagable, (on top of IP concerns) they had to remove the entire thing. Since that was the cornerstone of the gameplay, they never really recovered from that. Fail or not, I went straight from this game to space engineers, which then set the benchmark for sandbox sci fi games from that point on, and in its current version has some passing similarity with the star forge we always wanted but never got. I never looked back.
Every single one of these Why Blank Failed videos feels like something I would want to buy but knowing something really bad was gonna happen to it
My only real experience is seeing that reddit post. Getting hyped and started playing the first demo build.
Got my first video with over 1,000 views with it.
It was me screaming like a little girl after I accidentally spawned a monster and didn't know it and got rushed. Bout pissed myself.
Got bored and never played it again. Thought about it every now and then, but honestly didn't know about any of this transpiring. So this was really really interesting to watch. Kind of sent me back a little bit.
Im really interested in coding and making my own game, but stuff like this makes me really, really scared to even start
Robinjhoe1 honestly shit like this is just ineptitude and two guys not knowing how to use their money. If you’re interested in coding and want to make your own game just go for it learn new things and consistently improve in the areas your lacking practice and you’ll be fine.
I say it once and I say it a million times, don't give your money to any company trying to fulfill their dreams. If you are interested in supporting them, do so after their product is made and available for purchase. If they can't get their money the regular way through investors, then they're a failure as a company. The consumer shouldn't have to pay for the initial cost of making a product, because you're barely protected as far as getting any sort of refund should said product be shit. These companies treat you as a source of risk free capital, and all you sheep keep giving them your money. It may sound condescending, but it's the truth, stop being sheep.
Fun fact. I can't see any codehatch games on MY steam. I can only see them online. Did they ban all the players who bought starforge from buying their games and keep them from posting?
CodeHatch: Makes unfinished scam games and abuses their playerbase.
RoboKast: "What you guys need... is a name change!"
I remember this game. I actually did buy the game for like 15 bucks and it will forever be an uninstalled, gray scar on my steam games list.
This is all very interesting, but what about the Grandma that dyed her hair for the first time? It finally happened!
Calling games a scam when their kickstarter got 130k... which is basically just enough to pay two ppl one year worth of rent to try to make what equates to a post-patch No Man's Sky.
That's not a scam, that's just gamers being really bad at math.
Regardless of the amount, the stuff that CodeHatch promised was never put into the game, making the players who paid money to receive those promises feel as if they got scammed.
You should checkout unturned 2 when it get's fully released. since unturned was the game that started growing your channel.
i really miss the bootleg episodes since me and my friends used to visit each other and buy some snacks
while watching the episodes.
"dig your own gravestone" does this dude have a proof reader? Lol
No the game is that bad
So it doesn't keep you from losing it, it just makes it slightly easier to find it. If you lose it in the city and then notice at home that thing will still be lost and you will feel dumb for buying it
My experience with star-forge was that i wasn't dumb enough to fall for a project i knew was to massive for a couple of nubs. So i never fell prey to their idiocy.
They raised roughly enough money to hire me (senior software engineer) for a year. And that's not including benefits or employment taxes. There's no way they raised enough money for even the two developers they already had, let alone hiring other staff.
So far my hesitance to buy early access titles has served me well. Only bought Ark Factorio and Elite Dangerous and all those worked wonderfully. Just gotta resist that hype...
Star Citizen: Hold my beer.
Seems less like an intentional scam and more like ambition + incompetence. They didn't pocket the money and run, they put it into an office and staff. More of a Dashcon than a Fyre Fest.
... CodeHacks?
...need I say more except "why were people surprised?" ?
Because this was the first one. They hadn't pulled this stunt before yet.
I believe the truth is that 130000$ is not enough money to create a game in the scale of what intended for starforge, same happened with yogventures.
I think the reality is they probably got bored with starforge and wanted to move on to something more interesting.
I have only ever spend money on two kickstarter projects: StarForge and Kerbal Space Program. StarForge was a disaster, but others took the idea and made awesome games like Space Engineers and Empyrion. KSP was and is amazing. What's the lesson? Don't preorder, and always check the company before buying early access games.
I bought this game for 26 bucks when it first launched the alpha. Such a massive letdown. In fact, they literally made the game worse with an update shortly before they bailed. The game actually had a bit of fun in it before they completely trashed it.
Man the nostalgia i had watching this XD
Not sure you can call a crowdfunded project a “scam” if there was an actual product delivered. Crowdfunding is by nature a risky investment. Can’t expect a guarantee that the end product is going to be good.
I do believe that they tried to make the game work, but didn't understand the scope and the depth of their promises, and ended up spending years in trying to make something that they didn't have the skills to do - which is fine, not everything is a success, and early access / kickstarter stuff should always be considered as an investment and not as something that you are buying anyways - as for the refunds, it is hard to refund any money that has already been spent.
The only thing I truly find fault is their handling of the situation, and their conduct online - better communication and self-reflection would have in my opinion done a lot, but we should also remember that we can sometimes be very toxic in our behaviour, and maybe some of us could have been more mature in our communication towards the devs - and I believe a lot of them were, but sometimes things are just broken beyond repair.
In the end like the video suggest and people have commented, we should use this as a way to learning experience towards our approach to backing projects, and people who wish to develop to understand the scope of what they want to deliver very, very well.
Of course, I might be wrong and the devs were nothing but "muhahahaha, we want money", but I doubt that, and truly believe that they wanted to deliver on their promises - classic tale of dreams and hopes clashing with the reality of development.
Yeah, Starforge... I bought this game and never played it because I was waiting for it to get ready, but since that never happened, I simply bought a game that I never played. I tried to refund it but Steam refused, saying the 14 days for a refund had passed. Well, if the game is a scam, I don't see how they could deny a refund, but apparently they can. This game is the sole reason why I almost entirely stopped buying early access games. I'm very careful about that now and research the developers before any such purchase. Steam probably lost a lot of money as well due to losing people's confidence. Never going to buy any of these developers' products again.
As soon as you said how much was raised and how much above their target it was, I was like "oh, that explains it; they didn't know what they were doing."