Things You Should Know, the Monday Morning Edition

The first thing that you need to know is that if you start a blog, people want you to slap up blog posts, every day. I can't say that I blame them, but it's a challenge. We held our family reunion last weekend. Now most folks just have the relatives over for a picnic and awkward conversation. Not us. Our family reunion is a three day affair with tents filling the mowed portion of our seven acres of land. At least that's the plan. This year, due to a confluence of events, it was much smaller. No less work, and no less fun, just smaller.

The point is that the reunion was last weekend, this week I take our youngest to college. Those of you with college age kids, or attending college yourself, understand that is quite the endeavor. Ice that cake with the normal workload of finishing Heroes of Stalingrad, prepping our Pacific Theater game, and all the other tidbits associated with a game publishing company, and you'll understand that it's going to be a every-minute-counts kind of week.

I do want to share  a couple of things with you today.

I'm sure that many of you have backed projects on Kickstarter. I've backed quite a few myself, and executed a successful game project to boot. Most of us go gaga when a game raises a couple of hundred grand, but that's nothing. Check out The Veronica Mars Movie. Hey, I know I'm late to the show, but, wow! Over five million dollars, fastest to one million, fastest to two million, and the most backers ever, even though that achievement is misleading; they inflated their numbers with a

Ms. Mars

quarter ton of $1 donors. Still, an amazing project.

On the other hand, The Doom That Came to Atlantic City is much less amazing. Erik Chevalier raised $122,874, to fund the production of the game, and thirteen months later, he announced that "The project is over. The game is cancelled." Erik can say what he wants, but I know what it takes to make a game like this, and it's about $100,000 less than what he raised. His claim that he walked into a situation "beyond his abilities" just doesn't ring true. With $122,000 he could have made mistake after mistake, learned from them, made more mistakes, and then hired someone to publish it for him, and still delivered a high-quality, profitable game. God knows my company has been late delivering products, but to throw your hands up and surrender is so lazy, so lame, so pathetic.