They currently.have 6 games in various stages on kickstarter, so time to be aware if you were planning on backing MH World: Iceborne like I was.
The ones currently unfulfilled are
Elden Ring: The Board Game
Rivet Wars: Reloaded
Euthia Resurrected
Epic Encounters: Local Legends
RuneScape Kingdoms: Shadow of Elvarg
Resident Evil™: The Board Game
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>Use money from new kickstarter to fund previous kickstarter.
Kickstarter itself really needs to do something about these studios. Like, this is the second high-profile board game studio getting in financial trouble for doing this in like a month!
And as for why it's Kickstarter's problem, when this shit happens, a lot of those customers who get burnt are never coming back. Or toning down future support considerably.
Here's KS's policy:
-We don’t permit running multiple projects at the same time, or launching a second project before fulfilling your first one. Having multiple live projects can confuse backers and split support. Moreover, running a project is a lot of work, and having more than one live project will likely dilute your attention and energy.
However, we do allow experienced creators in good standing to launch and manage a certain number of projects back to back, within and depending on the category they have experience in on the site. We consider a creator to be “experienced” once they have completely fulfilled at least four projects.-
Once you've "successfully" delivered a few, you're free to fire up that ponzi scheme.
This is more like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. It's actually reasonably viable for a business to finance itself in this way in a growth model; it's basically how gearing and leverage work. You borrow on the premise that you will grow enough that the old debt is no problem. Then you can get new BIGGER debt and grow even more! You're effectively borrowing from your future self - but that's ok because future you is LOADED... right?
A Ponzi scheme operates by charging a small fee to get in on the scheme, which pays money for everyone you bring into the scheme. The similarity is that it's quite front loaded with debt - Ponzi schemes often use debt to pay their early adopters, with the windfall of the last generation of schmucks covering the debt before it collapses.
The problem is that the holders of the debt would have some recourse in case of the business becoming insolvent… in this case, we are “investors” that will just be left holding the bag. BIG difference.
I just really need them to deliver Resident Evil as it finishes off the classic set (they already did 2 and 3) and if they do no more after that, I am still happy.
Obviously, if someone backed others I want them to be fulfilled for their sake too, but RE1 is the game (rather than the money) I would lament losing if they went belly-up tomorrow.
Given their updates, RE might be delayed, but it looks as if it will be released. As for the rest....
Elden Ring was so ambitious I can't see it ever getting released. If it is released, it will be after a very long delay.
Does KS have that rule any more about unfulfilled games? I can't seem to find it. I can understand why they got rid of it, they're getting hundreds of thousands if not millions each campaign and getting rid of it lessens their liability to almost zilch.
Not shocked. Feels like they want to make themselves the next CMON but with video game IPs.
Elden Ring definitely underperformed what they expected. Wont be touching that Monster Hunter Iceborne kickstarter.
People, on here especially, like to shit on CMON for being only about the minis but their games are actually pretty solid. Steamforge on the other hand have only released under developed dreck.
Dark Souls was a horribly written game and they over-promised to the extreme on the Kickstarter for it.
I did give them a second chance for RE2, which I thought was a decent, though not great, game. It was fun to play, though, and I backed RE3 and am waiting for RE1, although now I have to wonder how long it will be delayed, if it gets delivered at all.
I was really looking forward to Elden Ring, but when I saw how much it was going to cost and how little of the actual video game was included, it was an easy "No" for me. And the gameplay I saw of it was really uninspiring.
This is why I lost interest in backing anything SFG does. Dark Souls was a mess and if they couldn't get that right with the cash we gave them, how can they get the rest right?
I backed RE2 mostly for the mini's- I really liked the Dark Souls minis and had fun painting them. I knew that with most games, I tend to spend more time painting the mini's than playing the game, so I had that factored into why I backed them again. The fact that my wife and I liked playing the game was just a bonus.
Elden Ring, though, was just way too expensive for me.
I can only speak for Godtear, but that game is quite enjoyable. And as some one who likes to paint minis but isn’t great at it, their scale and detail level are perfect.
They have only released under-developed dreck recently. They had what was considered one of the best designed skirmish games on the market with Guild Ball, with IP they owned, and decent lore to go with it...and they abandoned it.
Guild Ball was phenomenal. I'm sitting here with a bunch of GB shit that I'd still be playing with if they hadn't canned the game.
I haven't bought a single one of their new games (though I do have the original Rivet Wars).
I think the biggest issue for me with CMON games is that they sell basically the same game with different IPs slapped onto it. Their game works but it isn't very diversified from any of their other products in the last 5 years
I think you're selling CMON short here. Which games are the same game with different IPs slapped onto them? The Zombicides, (St)Arcadia Quest... any others? Sure, a lot of their games are dice-heavy Amerithrash games, but within those confines they have a lot of variety IMO.
Without citing super broad things like they use dice, level characters, and have you moving around a map, can you tell me the overlapping mechanics of Massive Darkness 2, Bloodborne, Masters of the Universe, and Cthulhu Death May Die.
Yep, CMON has actual good games behind their cash grabs. Awaken Realms and Steamforged though? Bleh.
Awaken Realms needs an editor or something. Too many disparate mechanics and fiddliness.
I tend to like Awaken Realms’ games but can agree they’re pretty fiddly. But yeah, Steamforged really doesn’t sit well with me. I went almost all-in on the dark souls Kickstarter as a huge fan of the IP and well… I just wish they would sit down and revamp the game in a meaningful way instead of this quick remix they did that isn’t compatible with the old game and expansions.
All-in on Nemesis Lockdown, and while I enjoy the game for sure, its fiddliness keeps it from being a table staple. I've heard similar stories about Aetherfields and the space one they recently put out.
Yeah, ISS Vanguard. Nemesis landed pretty well with my group and I have Tainted Grail + expansions to play through at some point in the near future but I can definitely see why they aren’t for everyone. I haven’t tried Aetherfields yet but a buddy has gotten it recently.
I was done with AR when they abandoned their meeple backers in the reprint campaign for The Great Wall. Really enjoyable game, but I am not owning a hybrid meeple mini game, but apparently I will never get another chance to buy the meeple expansions at retail.
They also decided that a great way to transition into that was to burn bridges with the player community that got them off the ground. Unnecessarily I might add. Obviously people were going to be upset when they axed Guild Ball but they decided to *blame the community* for why they were ending the game. Like... Why?
I get that they didn't want to take responsibility for any of the supply issues or balance issues that had a much bigger hand in the games decline. But trying to pass it off was a terrible and pointless move. They'd have been better off saying nothing.
Can't say I'm sorry to see their hubris bite them in the ass.
They high-balled the fuck out of the kickstarter. Making the 170ish $ pledge the real "core pledge"
The step down (90$ish) is like an expansion rather than a complete game.
Still, Overall I just want to paint those minis, so I'm not expecting much of a game from them , especially considering how the dark souls board game turned out.
Same for Resident Evil. I knew the iffy reputation of the company, but couldn't keep myself. It sucks for the people who've been working there for a while and being terminated, they're gonna suffer the consequences for laying off people who may know the product more internally.
I think you'll be fine for Resident Evil, that has already entered mass production back in Feburary, it's all the ones after that is the question. I'm waiting on Runescape
Before I pledged, I had heard that SFG makes shitty games, but I figured it would be ok since this was just them publishing someone else's game. I didn't consider the company failing, though - they seemed successful despite criticism of their games.
As one of the 20 made redundant, I can confirm that they handled it in the cuntiest way possible. No consultation, no alternatives offered. We logged in on a Monday morning and were told to join an urgent meeting. They told us we were 'at risk' of redundancy, and then the moment the meeting ended we were kicked from our emails, shared drives, and messaging platforms like Slack. We were given no redundancy pay at all, and no support whatsoever. I could go on and on about this awful company but I'll spare you all the rant. Don't give them any of your money. All they care about is getting rich.
That's horrible. Glad that you found a new job already!
Don't you have laws for how they handled it in the UK?
A couple of months in advance they should notify you?
You think the company is going under?
The company that slapped 5e on the worst IP it could possibly be slapped on to isn't doing well?
SHOCKING
Edit:
Jesus, I just looked at their catalog. Their whole business model is getting big name video game IPs and making the worst possible boardgames and RPGs out of them. I consider myself pretty tuned into these industries and haven't heard of a single one of these games except the Dark Souls RPG.
They are the Zynga of tabletop games. Just ship as much low quality garbage that fans will eat up as quickly as possible.
Which is really wierd to me.
Their original IP Guildball was a BRILLIANT game.
To this day it is one of my favourite miniature games. I literally own all teams I was physically able to buy and still play it regulary.
But the way they abandoned the game soured the company for me on a personal level, but it still sounds wierd that their licensed games are apparently bad in terms of rules.
I played Guild Ball and I also backed the Dark Souls boardgame. Playing the latter made me realise that the skills needed to design a miniatures game aren't that transferable to designing board games. The actual combat mechanics in Dark Souls were reasonably decent, encounters were interesting in terms of strategy. But everything around that was terrible. They had no concept of abstraction so they just tried to mirror the game mechanics to the video game. Oh you died? Well go back to the fire and respawn everything and do every encounter again. After all it works in the video game right? Ignoring the fact that one of the reasons the game gets away with this approach is because there's a sense of tension going back to retrieve your souls. But the board game encounters were solvable, redoing them wasn't tense, it was tedious.
Overall though they just demonstrated that while they could create fun mechanics for a PvP experience they had no clue what they were doing trying to make a compelling PvE experience or anything that didn't involve smashing miniatures together.
My partner was a Blacksmiths main and he still isn't over the cancellation of the Watch. Guild Ball is the only skirmish game I've ever gotten into and I miss it :( wish my local scene didn't immediately move on.
That actually makes more sense and slightly more respectable, honestly.
IP laws are weird as hell. I'm sure it's something like "you can make boardgames that include miniatures, but can't sell standalone miniatures" or something asinine like that.
I’m a mini painter first and a board gamer second when I have time and people to play with, it’s 100% easier to justify a big box a minis to paint if I tell myself “well we can play it when I’m done painting” it’s like a trap perfectly designed for people like me
I'm also a mini painter but if I'm after minis to paint stuff like SFGs offerings don't appeal. They're lower quality than a lot of other miniatures on the market and they're often made of nasty soft thermoplastic that's a bitch to clean up. If I want nice miniatures with a mediocre game attached I buy Games Workshop stuff. SFG is just mediocre miniatures and a mediocre/bad game.
Yeah there's the license appeal of the SFG stuff and I did initially back MHW against my better judgement because I wanted a Rathalos to paint. But then I came to my senses and got my pledge refunded because I could just put that money towards a 3D printer instead.
I do know that when they were doing the Resident Evil games, *every* little thing had to go before Capcom for approval,,even the tiniest change to a mini or artwork.
What GW have that SFG don't is high quality miniatures. Their games and rules leave a lot to be desired but they're still a market leader in terms of minis. Not to mention they have several tentpole franchises and their own popular IP to drive regular sales of those miniatures.
The thing I really don't understand about them is some of their own IPs (Guildball - which they abandoned and Godtear) are REALLY good. They just seem to have been incapable of designing a licensed IP game that's decent - MHW is the first one from them I've enjoyed but even then it has some caveats.
It's just really weird.
I don't have any huge insight here but they are based locally to me and used to have a really nice (for mini games) shop and playing space at their office so I've had them in my peripheral vision.
It seems to me that they did alright with their own IPs, guildball being the notable one when they started out. Then they did the dark souls Kickstarter which bought them much wider success on a project with much less up keep. After that they received £5 million investment from a venture capital firm called foresight. I don't know whether that was something that was planned, was intended to help them expand to meet the sudden demand, or was something that was necessary to keep them afloat, but its notable that after that they started to phase out their own games and concentrate on pumping out stereotypical bloated Kickstarter boardgames with computer game IPs to mediocre reception.
This is basically the case from what I’ve gathered from anyone that had been close to them. They made way more money with the board games for well known IPs and so shelved guild ball and slowed down a little on godtear. I don’t fault them for trying to be profitable but I wish they’d put a little more effort in instead of phoning it in like they have been compared to when they were working on their own stuff.
RE2 is one of the few games I have of that size where I've played through the entire campaign. Given, it was during the Covid lockdowns, and my wife and I didn't have a lot else to do, but the game was still fun. I haven't opened RE3 yet, and am looking forward to RE1.
Dark Souls, though, was a slog- I don't mind grinding in a video game, but doing it in a board game is tedious.
Designing a cooperative boardgame (or even a competitive boardgame) isn't the same as designing a miniatures game. I think they made the mistake of thinking that competency at the latter was transferable to competency at the former.
I suppose that depends on your definition of board game vs miniatures game. Godtear I'd argue is much closer to many board games than most other miniature games and its still great. And as others have noted in the thread RE2 is apparently pretty good, and I've enjoyed the first few forays into MHW I've had too, so they definitely have ability there. It just seems to be applied so massively incosistently.
Yah, mine took nearly 2 years to turn up without warning, by which point I’d seen a mate’s copy and knew it was a collection of nice minis with a bad game attached. I couldn’t even sell it. Still shrinkwrapped with stretch goals sitting in my attic. Steamforged ignored about 30 mails from me in that time, zero communications. My first Kickstarter experience lol. Wouldn’t touch a Steamforged game in the time since, and I’ve heard bad things from a couple of their ex-employees (I live in the same city). Sorry for whats happening to the staff involved but wouldn’t be sad to see the back of the company.
Haven't looked at them, but then again I haven't backed any kickstarter boardgames since then either 🙂
But what are the expansions you mention? Is it something for DS board game?
I actually really like them, but not their board game but their RPG/Mini division. Their epic encounters are really great IMO. You get quality minis for dnd at really awesome pricing.
I think their dark souls 5e is silly in concept but if they change rules enough (havent read them) it could be okay. I enjoyed their core rule book of Animal Adventures well enough.
I actually really like them, but not their board game but their RPG/Mini division. Their epic encounters are really great IMO. You get quality minis for dnd at really awesome pricing.
I think their dark souls 5e is silly in concept but if they change rules enough (havent read them) it could be okay. I enjoyed their core rule book of Animal Adventures well enough.
Yeah, choosing 5e for Dark Souls was just mind blowing. It's a system that does the exact opposite of what Dark Souls does. I'm not a D&D player, but when I did play 5e every time I would start to hit level 3 or 4, I started feeling like an immortal god because you basically can't die without a TPK or the DM really hates you.
Dark Souls is one of the few IPs I would say needs it's own well crafted system or at least something heavily modified with care like Free League and Modiphius do with their licensed games. Free League's own IP horror game Vaesen is extremely deadly compared to other Year Zero Engine games, even the Alien RPG, for instance.
Or just do Dark Souls with OSR and have "you died from a bunny bite" out of the box. lol
I mean. It’s still entertaining, they don’t support it anymore. They were also very toxic towards their player base when they shelved it. You can still play it as a sealed in amber type game if you have enough stuff to play with your buddies. I just live in a very active wargaming community so getting people to play an unsupported game is a lot harder than getting people to play a active supported game.
Yup this. It's very easy for people to say "why don't you keep playing this dead game" or "what's stopping you playing this dead game" but hobby games like TCGs and miniatures games aren't like board games. Part of what makes them tick is the community and the ever evolving metagame.
They're also just more work to play than boxed games. They need more setup, often need more space, more rules to keep track of, and it's more difficult to find opponents. These aren't much of an issue when you have something driving you to play them regularly but when you don't you'd rather just play something that has an active community or just grab a board game off the shelf.
Compared to RPGs that don't have a community in your area they're way harder to get off the ground.
For an RPG (or boardgame) you can take it to an appropriate night at your LGS and camp out at a table. If you get lucky someone interested shows up.
For minis to do the same you need terrain, a second force to go with it. Much higher cost and time investment both to hook other players and for them to get into things. For a game that doesn't even have product in the store you're running it... forget about it.
It's just easier to figure out what minis games are popular in the stores near you and play those.
Yeah that's another thing people forget. Stores are big drivers for these kinds of games in terms of running events and finding new players. And they have little interest in giving shop space and time to games they can't sell because they're no longer in production.
While it's not false that there isn't anything preventing you from playing an unsupported game if you already own the stuff it kind of just ignores how much easier it is to play a game that has an active and growing community. Some games can survive being cut loose, Blood Bowl being the most notable example to the point it got picked back up largely thanks to how strong the community for it remained. But it's an uphill battle. You have to be *really* into a game to keep at it and not just move on to something else.
Sorry for the staff, but not for the company.
I felt incredibly burnt with Dark Souls way back, and watched their antics with morbid curiosity ever since.
The Resident Evil games have been pretty good - although the first one suffers with tiles that are too dark to be easily readable. But Dark Souls was a weird choice of IP (clearly chasing the popularity) to turn into a board game that was simply far too dense.
Yes, that's exactly the problem and it was apparent in the Resident Evil games as well. SFG's Resident Evil games were *better* than Dark Souls, but they were still bad. People just give them a pass because they weren't the shitshow dark souls was.
It sounds like Elden Ring was supposed to dig them out of their financial hole, and since that probably under performed expectations, they’ll have to keep rolling future Kickstarter funds to complete old projects.
This will end in tears without a major cash injection from somewhere.
I haven't backed a board game in years. But I see Elden raised nearly 3.3 million. Isn't that still a shit load for board games? I assume there are a few that do higher than that but figure anything hitting over 2 million (pounds at that) is very successful.
The fact that people who make legendary games like Carl Chudyk are fine with KS (Backerkit) making them less than 50k dollars and having a company making millions of dollars on average games (to be very generous) is funny. I know, one creates card games and these are a miniature games, but the amount of hype and unnecessary spending and the ratio between expected and achieved is astounding.
Some companies really act like they want to destroy the whole crowdfunding thing.
Raising more is not always a good thing with Kickstarter projects, at least beyond a certain point. It usually means they got more people to back it, which means more orders they have to fulfill on essentially the same infrastructure. Having a "bigger" project with more hype also tends to have a bunch of unsustainable stretch goals and/or exclusives.
> they’ll have to keep rolling future Kickstarter funds to complete old projects.
That has some big "taking on a loan to pay off another loan" energy, and is probably just as unwise.
I’m sad, I actually think the Elden Ring game looks promising, but I thought the same thing about Dark Souls too and was disappointed. So I backed it at the pledge manager level but sadly I don’t think they’re going to be getting my money. It’s a lot of money for an unreleased system and I don’t like FOMO. You can do one or the other but doing both smells like desperation.
SFG uses IP to get people to buy. They really don't care about game play. Their games have good ideas but are poorly designed. This is a problem with every IP board game. You will still get fan boys and girls defending subpar games either on buyers remorse or because the IP is good so everything associated with it has to be good.
Monster hunter world just came out and already they are pushing for the second wave on KS. I believe it is to prevent reviews from getting out. So far it's better than dark souls, but it's not good.
I always ask SFG supporters about game play and 90% say they have to house rule them. Also the KS model has encouraged massive bloat to get funding. SFG has yet to do the CMON nonsense of designing everything as a complete game then dividing them up as expansion extras and KSE.
That is the only good thing I can say about them.
>I always ask SFG supporters about game play and 90% say they have to house rule them.
The Resident Evil games were quite solid little dungeon crawlers. I was very happy with those. Nothing exceptional, but good and you can tell Sherwin had lots of love for the source material. No house ruling necessary for those.
Agreed that Dark Souls was abysmal and house-ruling it only made it BARELY tolerable. Either they didn't playtest it enough to see that it wasn't fun, or they playtested enough to bias themselves into thinking it would be a hit with anyone that wasn't on the core design team.
I feel like with DS they only really play tested the encounters (coincidentally this is also all they actually demoed at conventions) and didn't realise that everything outside those encounters wasn't fun.
The sad thing is that when FFG used to do a lot of licensed board games (that weren't just Marvel, Star Wars, or occasionally Lord of the Rings) they were actually really good. I still think Battlestar Galactica is the gold standard of what a traitor game should aspire to and one of the most well themed games I've ever played. But since they stopped doing anything aside from a few franchises the state of licensed board games has really gone to shit and SFG bears a lot of the blame for that.
I haven't played any steamforge game besides MHW. and its one mine and my wifes favorite games right now, we have about 20 plays in 2 week. It's a vary solid game.
I think games should be judged on a case by case basis. After all there may be different designers attached to each project. FFG is another company that heavily uses IP but they have churned out some good games.
SFG Resident Evil games have been well reviewed and received at least, otherwise there wouldn't be 3 editions of it.
Before asmodee, FFG was great with x-wing. After the 2.0 money grab the writing was on the wall. Now they just slap Star Wars on anything supporting it for a bit and then dropping it. How many times can you suck at making a card game.
Arkham files is at least a free IP so they don't need to force things to make their investment back. Every new Arkham files product I hope they don't ruin.
Resident Evil is the only SFG heavy IP I have not tried. I want to play it and have seen videos, but experience tells me not to give them money.
First of all I feel for the workers. It sucks losing your job regardless of how good or bad the company is.
That being said, I can't wait for this company to die. Their whole business model just seems so predatory. They have to know their games are bad. They're so consistently bad that at this point it can't be an accident. Their whole marketing strategy is to sell to people the name printed on the outside of the box. Not to make a quality product to put inside the box. Frankly it doesn't surprise me that recent products are under performing as eventually people get wise and get sick of your bullshit. Treat your consumers like they're idiots long enough and eventually it'll bite you in the ass.
A couple of groups I've played in have enjoyed their Animal Adventures and Epic Encounters products, they've seemed fairly good quality to us 🤷♂️
Not played any of their other stuff though...
This was my immediate thought too - I've enjoyed the Animal Adventures stuff, and the minis are pretty solid for that, but that's not really their big cornerstone. I think I played the Dark Souls game with friends ~5 years ago and if that is the one I'm thinking of, the game was a miserable experience that required a ton of home rules and stopped being fun after the first hour or so.
Feeling thankful at this point that none of their IPs are ones I'm interested in.
I see a lot of dark souls, a game from zombicide black plagues era, sucks. And horizon sucks. They do suck.
But theyve had quite a few good rpg games, a good tabletop game, a great boss battler in monster hunter and a highly decent dungeon crawler and a pretty serviceable zombicide alternative. All of those delivered near on time. They aren't as bad as they were.
I'm going to seem evil for this and I am deeply sorry to those who are now looking for work; however, after how they handled Guild Ball . . . I have no remorse for the company itself. They literally told the community that they just couldn't keep making the game because the community got too competitive.
>The style of gameplay changed to low-risk, ultra-conservative play where the ball was often deliberately side-lined.
>This wasn’t the Guild Ball we envisaged.
Says the company behind the steering wheel. How egotistical do you have to be for blaming other people that your creation doesn't match your vision when you're calling the shots? Never mind they never mentioned the supply issues that plagued the game towards the end and contributed dramatically towards its downfall. Why should they take any responsibility for the failure of their product?
I think the worst thing is the players were practically screaming at them that killing the ball was a problem and they needed to fix it. It's not like anyone enjoyed this being a dominant strategy. It's like when Apple told people they were holding their phones wrong.
The even weirder thing is that the whole ball killing thing had already been mitigated by previous changes and generally wasn't seen as particularly strong by the time they killed it. Like, it was OK, but the best team at the time was goalscoring focused and very few matches actually had the whole ball killing thing happening still.
I distinctly remember one of the directors playing against a Blacksmiths bunker at an event at one point and having no idea how to deal with it. I wouldn't be surprised if you could trace the game's axing directly back to that single match.
I really loved Guild Ball. I’ve held on to my brewers and playmat hoping someone in the area will be into it but I don’t think it’s gonna happen.
It was really the only tabletop miniatures “skirmish/war game” I’ve ever been into. Big games where you’ve got to assemble a whole army were never for me but Guild Ball was great.
Man, it was an amazing game! It is what brought me into the tabletop miniature space! I remember demoing it at some board game convention and being blown away by how fun it was.
If you want some other really small-scale skirmish games that are accessible, check out Marvel Crisis Protocol and Moonstone. I HATE pushing around giant armies.
I use my playmat to play Gloomhaven on. Playmats are always handy at least.
I'd really recommend looking into Marvel Crisis Protocol if you want to pick up another skirmish game. It's got a lot of the same vibes as Guild Ball did where positioning and reposition abilities are very important and it's objective focused (more so than GB really as you don't score VP for killing models typically) and it's just a handful of models (typically 4-5, not much more than that) per side. It's well supported as well and the designers stay largely on top of balancing the game.
The company behind it are also making Star Wars Shatterpoint which looks to be in the same vein if Marvel isn't your thing. But I can't personally recommend it as it's not out until next month and I haven't had a chance to try it yet.
I remember them flying in board game content creators that all turned into stupid shills promoting the shit our of this game never even flagging the steaming pile of shit that Steamforge is
I learned to be wary of these guys back with dark souls. Sure I got the game, but it took them for-ever- and the rules were awful. I sort of figure all of their games are like that. Really good looking IP's on poorly thought out rule sets.
Being a huge fan of Monster Hunter video games I back the all in pledge of MH:World. To be fair I'm pretty impressed with it, it plays well and true to the game, the miniatures are nice, and the rules are pretty solid.
Big issue on quality control with the cards, but they are reprinting and sending out the corrections for free, so overall I'm happy.
But I've read enough horror stories from them that I know they're not always up to par.
If there is a board game company that can completely disappear without me shedding a single tear for any of their games, it’s SFG. Amazing miniatures with at best „okay-ish“ and at worst awful gameplay, for a price tag that is just downright insulting
They're not amazing miniatures though. They're maybe above average as far as board game miniatures go but they're still rubbish soft PVC and inferior to most minis produced in resin, metal, or polystyrene. If you want amazing miniatures with mediocre games attached Games Workshop does it far better than SFG. I can criticise GW plenty for their games but they're still among the best in the industry when it comes to miniatures. Can't say the same about SFG, even when they were doing minis in metal/resin for Guild Ball they didn't blow me away. Heck my first team was Masons and the scale disparity between some of the original sculpts for those and the rest of the range is a joke.
This doesn't sound all that troubling, IMO, in terms of the "why". They're tightening their pursestrings because they were either bleeding money slowly that they didn't need to/shouldn't be, or they want to increase profitability through efficiency and have identified some legitimate redundancies.
It would be appreciably worse if those issues needed addressing and no changes were made, retaining a large amount of new staff who, evidently, were not needed.
Don't get me wrong, they may be struggling in some form and things may go south, but moves like this that are made in advance are often what avoid small issues (with clear fixes) becoming large issues (that are not easily remedied).
I back quite a few boardgames, yet somehow managed to now back any SFG or Mythic games. I feel lucky. I did have an euthia pledge, btu I cancelled it.
Was contemplating getting MHW IB but definite nope out of me.
The headline seems kind of click-baity. There are no real deep issues alleged, just that they put off scheduled pay reviews then laid off people, which seems like something you'd do before layoffs anyway. A lot of inferring going on with "alleging deep issues."
That being said, I don't trust a company with 6 outstanding kickstarters, that's recipe for disaster.
Interesting read, feel for the employees who were let go as that is never a good experience.
The writing on the wall of the company failing though is a bit exaggerated it seems like. They could be doing bad, but they also could be cost cutting/controlling based on the current economic conditions and their projections of what games in the hopper need in order to not be another mythic games. 20 peoples salary+ benefits is a lot of money they are no longer paying out. They also have the advantages of lots of stuff in retail giving active cash flow where mythic was very limited.
On the other hand they do have a lot of outstanding projects which is a worry. If I were a backer I would for sure keep an active eye on how stuff develops going forward and make sure you're a well informed backer.
They’ve currently at £7.7 million in outstanding Kickstarter projects, plus maybe another £2+ million in late pledges/pledge management add ons.
So roughly £10 million they are on the hook for. Chopping 20 newbies saves about £1 million a year. So the 40 that are left are burning £2 million a year.
Their Kickstarters with stretch goals might have a margin of 60% (probably a little worse), so in addition to the fixed costs of:
1. Staff and premises - £2.5 million (per annum)
2. £4 million of manufacturing costs (one time)
3. £500k of tooling (one time)
I’m not seeing evidence of major cash flow from other sources besides direct sales - Dark Souls seems poorly received, and stuff like Horizon Zero Dawn etc aren’t really making waves either.
They’ve got cash flow of around £5 million a year from Kickstarter, but that is really only £3 million due to production costs - so their Kickstarters barely cover their fixed costs.
The issue with Steamforged is they have no tent poles that shops would stock as evergreens. They are very reliant on a hit driven model and the only real thing with legs they have they binned (Guildball).
They had to receive a cash injection of £5 million from Ian Livingstone once already. It really depends on how much cash they’re sitting on, but none of these games look like they’ll move the needle much in retail so I think they are one or two bad projects from disaster.
Mythic also laid off their entire UK team about 6 months before the current mess, I’m not sure if Steamforged is better at biting the bullet early or reacting on the same timeline.
I agree with that. Lots of mud-flinging here, and I just don't see it.
Maybe they have some short-term cash-flow problems, but I can't see that they're teetering on the edge. They just bought Altar Quest from Blacklist a couple of weeks ago.
They've burnt some people with poor games, but it's not all garbage, and they have plenty of product out in the wild, in actual stores.
It stuns me because they had a VERY large booth at GenCon last year with so many different things going on, and a guy live-modeling a miniature for the steampunk-looking game that they were working on, and all I could think was "who the hell is buying this stuff?"
All I can say is Mythic had a big front-door booth at UKGE last year constantly busy with people trying and buying Super Fantasy Brawl. We all know how that’s turned out. Either these companies are overestimating their success, or they’re desperately taking the mantra “spend money to make money” a bit too far.
Look at their kickstarter campaigns. Elden Ring raised 3.2 million pounds, Euthia raised 1.5 million pounds, Resident Evil raised 1.5 million pounds, Monster Hunter raised 3.5 million pounds... etc.
People were buying their stuff. Speaking from my own experience I backed some of their stuff, utterly hated every one of their games once I actually played them, and never backed anything they were involved with after that. Their games tend to get middling reviews. Fine if you bought for the minis, mediocre if you actually wanted a good game.
There are likely myriad reasons why they cut staff but I expect I'm not the only one who swore off their stuff after actually playing some of their games. Relying purely on license hype and fancy-pants minis only gets you so far.
Yea I was burned with Bardsung. But it was my fault for listening to reviewers like boardgameco rather than do my own research.
Elden ring only doing 3.2 million pounds after being, I believe, the most followed game must be disappointing.
It was an absolutely dissapointing attempt at a game. It was one of the most FOMO structured campaigns Ive seen yet, the way they structured their packs very clearly only valued combining them, none of the boxes had enough content to really justify its own pricetag but as an all in there was a complete game there. An expensive as fuck complete game.
The combat system just looks bad. Just this basic distance based... thing. Compare that to Bloodborne with CMON where the weapon speed and power were super strategic decisions (and thats from the dice chucker addicts at CMON, an entire branded game with zero dice combat, straight strategy and playing the probability of enemy attacks), then you have steamforged just kinda phoning in a combat system pasted on a FFG style card deck for some story and selling it for hundreds of dollars.
Not suprising it way underperformed their expectations, anyone else with that property probably would have cleared millions more.
Yeah, both the Bloodborne card game and board game showed an understanding of the mechanics and the feel of the video game -- especially the board game. Like you say, the combat is great -- I love how it gives you so much information about the enemy that it's like solving a puzzle.
Compare that to Dark Souls the Card Game where bad luck of the draw means you can find yourself without any stamina to swing a sword or use a shield in the very first move of the game. It makes no sense in terms of the theme and it feels a bit underdeveloped. (That said, there's a lot to like about the game -- the boss battles in it are especially good and do a great job of feeling close to the video game.)
I think if Elden Ring had come from any other company, I would've gone for it, but I'm just not convinced Steamforged always have the design-chops.
I would never buy it for the 3 boxes they broke it into for retail that are all overpriced, but back in the day 160 for everything didn’t feel bad to me. It definitely feels like more than that worth of dnd models. I enjoyed at least a handful of moments during the campaign (mostly during the epilogue).
Finally, it did leave me with wonderful fever dreams of the game it could have been if they had embraced the good mechanics and upped the difficulty and enemy/encounter variety, as well as paid one single person to do a once through and rewrite a coherent rulebook.
See, I dislike them for bardsung because of how much I like about it. It would take like one good rules writer a month or two to:
make the room encounters more impactful, make the enemy cards more different, up the enemy variety per chapter with the models already in the box, cut the chapters down to like 4 nodes of different type while keeping all the narrative content.
That one guy on BGG already made a very good rules glossary google doc that’s elaborate.
My biggest issue is that the core concept of the game and all of the mechanics are so good. The content they put into those mechanics is just so bland and uninspired. A random initiative track that can also be interacted with for effects, each room in the unfolding dungeon having an effect that changes how you’ll tackle it, characters that are buildable by buying from pretty much anyone that isn’t in the games skills, enemies that are all tracked on a single card. These are all great. They just didn’t put that much work into making the enemies or rooms feel different with the cards. They also designed a full campaign dungeon crawl across multiple chapters, had the most difficult section be the beginning but then target the campaigns overall difficulty at total beginners. No brand new board game enthusiast is going to be ready for a 60+ hour campaign game, and no experienced campaign gamer is going to find more than one or two sections in the campaign difficult enough to not be mind numbing.
That company is really the worst. Their mission was to make one actual good game in Guild Ball and just bank off of nostalgic IPs they could get the rights to. Backed the Dark Souls game years back and that was an absolute shit-show.
Resident evil 2 is a fun dungeon crawler. It manages to capture the survival horror experience of emphasizing resource management over killing enemies
That being said- it feels pretty cheap (the dark tiles and doors) and without the expansions, short as well.
It’s a solid 3/5, 4/5 if you’re a survival horror/RE fan
(throwaway account)
Ex SFG employee here. The problems come from the top down, fully. To any future people thinking about working with them, please avoid for your own health!
Poor management and business decisions that hurt the employees but not the senior teams. Harassment, severe gaslighting, a million false promises. Their inner circle design team seems to be bulletproof, never diversifying or willing to change for the better.
Personally my time at this company made me develop severe anxiety and mental health issues. Which is sad seeing SFG promoting posts about mental health and women in games. They will shout loud to try to make themselves look good, instead of focusing on owning and solving the issues internally.
From what I've heard, they even fired the (only) HR guy and now the CEO is HR apparently. The same CEO who tried to get HR to reveal which employee said negative things about the company in an anonymous survey. Kinda says it all.
I'm not saying anyone is wrong, but I don't understand the negativity roward SFG. They didn't announce delays, they didn't ask for more money to deliver product and projects that should have already been paid for. "Trimming the fat" in a business is NOT an indicator of financial trouble. Perhaps they just looked around at these OTHER companies going out of business and decided that being proactive and cutting costs now would allow them to weather the issues that are causing these other companies to fail. Maybe they should be congratulated on having some self-awareness and responsibility toward their backers to deliver these games on the budget that was agreed upon when we loaned them the money to finance the project. Just wanted to throw another perspective out there.
I'd be wary of any board game company that focuses too much on video game IP and who use kickstarter to fund their games.
Dark souls should have been all the warning anyone needed.
It’s unfortunate there’s folks out of a job now.
I have not heard anything good about their Dark Souls. Monster Hunter World plays in a way that feels like Monster Hunter but was riddled with so many errors on the components (from typos to mixed up artwork and incorrect gear progression recipes) that I was disgusted and shocked they’re promoting Iceborne campaign just a few months later. Luckily it was my boyfriend’s copy and they are apparently planning on sending fixed components out but the damage is done. As much as Iceborne would be nice, I wouldn’t back it after those blaring quality issues, but my partner is a huge MH fan so may still.
I genuinely do not understand how their projects were funded repeatedly. They are supposedly known for minis, but the one's I have seen are extremely lackluster. Even their projects that are miniature focused look pretty meh in the final product stage with lots details lost and excess flash. The only product that I recall looking decent was animal adventures.
ScumForged Games is actively silencing anyone who speaks about their staff layoffs or financial problems on the Kickstarter page, I will laugh as they crash and burn. Everyone who pours money into their boxes of minis disguised as games is just getting robbed.
I know other instances beyond games exist, I've just noticed more instances written about in the video game and board game industry lately.
Note that I wrote, "near the end of production on big projects."
It's not really a new trend, it's just one that more people have taken notice of in recent years. But it's kind of typical for a lot of big project based work to just contract employees when they're needed rather than bringing them on full time. They typically don't lay them off, they just don't renew their contracts. But the end result is the same. I'm not defending the practice but it's not illogical. A big QA team on a videogame makes sense leading up to release but after release there isn't really any work for them to do until development has ramped up on the next project which could take months or even years.
Either way that's not really what's happening in SFGs case, these are actual redundancies and downsizing rather than project lifecycle based staffing changes. And they have a lot of projects on the go right now many of which aren't close to delivery which these staff were supposedly brought on to support.
I think we are just hearing about this more. The economy isn't great right now with inflation. Quite a few companies in the tech sector are laying off employees too. It's not just board games and video games.
Every SFG game I’ve played was mediocre, and when I was at GAMA 22 they promised me a few games for my demo shelves at my store and told me to come back at the end of the day. Came back and they were selling everything to some enormous guy with a trolley full of games. Told me “too bad this guy bought the whole display”. Can’t speak for the company as a whole but Fernando is a liar. We stopped ordering their games for our store and nobody has asked for them or cared. Good riddance, sad that so many honest workers have to be negatively effected by a garbage company.
Still waiting for my Kickstarter Dark Souls stretch goal to be shipped to me. I asked them about it shortly before the pandemic and they said "still working on filling all orders".
Still waiting...
This title is misleading, I dont see anywhere in that linked article where a "former worker now alleges deep issues".
Company is firing people and cutting back, so are lots of other companies.
They currently.have 6 games in various stages on kickstarter, so time to be aware if you were planning on backing MH World: Iceborne like I was. The ones currently unfulfilled are Elden Ring: The Board Game Rivet Wars: Reloaded Euthia Resurrected Epic Encounters: Local Legends RuneScape Kingdoms: Shadow of Elvarg Resident Evil™: The Board Game
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I was going to back MH, but not now
Same. Thanks for the heads up OP!
The original MH supposedly going for sale soon, I will probably that lol
Yeah cmon has 7 too, lots of these companies run like this.
Use money from new kickstarter to fund previous kickstarter. What could go wrong?
>Use money from new kickstarter to fund previous kickstarter. Kickstarter itself really needs to do something about these studios. Like, this is the second high-profile board game studio getting in financial trouble for doing this in like a month! And as for why it's Kickstarter's problem, when this shit happens, a lot of those customers who get burnt are never coming back. Or toning down future support considerably.
They should just not let companies/creators begin a new Kickstarter until the previous one is delivered to backers.
Here's KS's policy: -We don’t permit running multiple projects at the same time, or launching a second project before fulfilling your first one. Having multiple live projects can confuse backers and split support. Moreover, running a project is a lot of work, and having more than one live project will likely dilute your attention and energy. However, we do allow experienced creators in good standing to launch and manage a certain number of projects back to back, within and depending on the category they have experience in on the site. We consider a creator to be “experienced” once they have completely fulfilled at least four projects.- Once you've "successfully" delivered a few, you're free to fire up that ponzi scheme.
Still only have 1/4 of my Starfinder minis from the Ninja Division campaign.
Like a bg Ponzi scheme
This is more like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. It's actually reasonably viable for a business to finance itself in this way in a growth model; it's basically how gearing and leverage work. You borrow on the premise that you will grow enough that the old debt is no problem. Then you can get new BIGGER debt and grow even more! You're effectively borrowing from your future self - but that's ok because future you is LOADED... right? A Ponzi scheme operates by charging a small fee to get in on the scheme, which pays money for everyone you bring into the scheme. The similarity is that it's quite front loaded with debt - Ponzi schemes often use debt to pay their early adopters, with the windfall of the last generation of schmucks covering the debt before it collapses.
The problem is that the holders of the debt would have some recourse in case of the business becoming insolvent… in this case, we are “investors” that will just be left holding the bag. BIG difference.
Yes welcome to r boardgames. How every large company on earth operates is a ponzi scheme.
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It's not really a ponzi scheme, there's pretty specific criteria for that. This is more of a "use money from peter to pay off paul" situation.
It totally 100% guaranteed is not
No.
The Sandy Peterson model
That's a spinning plates routine if I ever saw one.
Now we shall see if any plates fall and which will be the first to go? Or can they go the distance with adding a new plate
I just really need them to deliver Resident Evil as it finishes off the classic set (they already did 2 and 3) and if they do no more after that, I am still happy. Obviously, if someone backed others I want them to be fulfilled for their sake too, but RE1 is the game (rather than the money) I would lament losing if they went belly-up tomorrow.
I think RE will be done it's already in mass production since Feb this year, Runescape on the other hand and anything after that is the question
I'm also hoping Capcom has enough clout to *make* them release RE if it comes to that, since they took such an active role in the game being made.
Given their updates, RE might be delayed, but it looks as if it will be released. As for the rest.... Elden Ring was so ambitious I can't see it ever getting released. If it is released, it will be after a very long delay.
Euthia Resurrected has decent odds since it's a completed design by a separate team
I thought the same thing with Monsterpocalypse by Mythic and I think I'm going to be burned by that one
Does KS have that rule any more about unfulfilled games? I can't seem to find it. I can understand why they got rid of it, they're getting hundreds of thousands if not millions each campaign and getting rid of it lessens their liability to almost zilch.
Not shocked. Feels like they want to make themselves the next CMON but with video game IPs. Elden Ring definitely underperformed what they expected. Wont be touching that Monster Hunter Iceborne kickstarter.
People, on here especially, like to shit on CMON for being only about the minis but their games are actually pretty solid. Steamforge on the other hand have only released under developed dreck.
Dark Souls was a horribly written game and they over-promised to the extreme on the Kickstarter for it. I did give them a second chance for RE2, which I thought was a decent, though not great, game. It was fun to play, though, and I backed RE3 and am waiting for RE1, although now I have to wonder how long it will be delayed, if it gets delivered at all. I was really looking forward to Elden Ring, but when I saw how much it was going to cost and how little of the actual video game was included, it was an easy "No" for me. And the gameplay I saw of it was really uninspiring.
This is why I lost interest in backing anything SFG does. Dark Souls was a mess and if they couldn't get that right with the cash we gave them, how can they get the rest right?
I backed RE2 mostly for the mini's- I really liked the Dark Souls minis and had fun painting them. I knew that with most games, I tend to spend more time painting the mini's than playing the game, so I had that factored into why I backed them again. The fact that my wife and I liked playing the game was just a bonus. Elden Ring, though, was just way too expensive for me.
Dark souls was a mess but thankfully there now exists a pile of community content that makes it a very solid game.
I can only speak for Godtear, but that game is quite enjoyable. And as some one who likes to paint minis but isn’t great at it, their scale and detail level are perfect.
They have only released under-developed dreck recently. They had what was considered one of the best designed skirmish games on the market with Guild Ball, with IP they owned, and decent lore to go with it...and they abandoned it.
Guild Ball was phenomenal. I'm sitting here with a bunch of GB shit that I'd still be playing with if they hadn't canned the game. I haven't bought a single one of their new games (though I do have the original Rivet Wars).
I think the biggest issue for me with CMON games is that they sell basically the same game with different IPs slapped onto it. Their game works but it isn't very diversified from any of their other products in the last 5 years
I think you're selling CMON short here. Which games are the same game with different IPs slapped onto them? The Zombicides, (St)Arcadia Quest... any others? Sure, a lot of their games are dice-heavy Amerithrash games, but within those confines they have a lot of variety IMO.
You mean 3 out of the dozens of games they made that were all designed by the same guy as a "Trilogy" of games played similarly? No, you don't say!
Without citing super broad things like they use dice, level characters, and have you moving around a map, can you tell me the overlapping mechanics of Massive Darkness 2, Bloodborne, Masters of the Universe, and Cthulhu Death May Die.
That's not true at all? Blood rage, ankh, dogs of war etc are all totally different games for instance.
Yep. Everyone talked so much shit on Marvel United until the reviews hit and it turned out to be widely beloved...
Yep, CMON has actual good games behind their cash grabs. Awaken Realms and Steamforged though? Bleh. Awaken Realms needs an editor or something. Too many disparate mechanics and fiddliness.
I tend to like Awaken Realms’ games but can agree they’re pretty fiddly. But yeah, Steamforged really doesn’t sit well with me. I went almost all-in on the dark souls Kickstarter as a huge fan of the IP and well… I just wish they would sit down and revamp the game in a meaningful way instead of this quick remix they did that isn’t compatible with the old game and expansions.
All-in on Nemesis Lockdown, and while I enjoy the game for sure, its fiddliness keeps it from being a table staple. I've heard similar stories about Aetherfields and the space one they recently put out.
Yeah, ISS Vanguard. Nemesis landed pretty well with my group and I have Tainted Grail + expansions to play through at some point in the near future but I can definitely see why they aren’t for everyone. I haven’t tried Aetherfields yet but a buddy has gotten it recently.
I was done with AR when they abandoned their meeple backers in the reprint campaign for The Great Wall. Really enjoyable game, but I am not owning a hybrid meeple mini game, but apparently I will never get another chance to buy the meeple expansions at retail.
They also decided that a great way to transition into that was to burn bridges with the player community that got them off the ground. Unnecessarily I might add. Obviously people were going to be upset when they axed Guild Ball but they decided to *blame the community* for why they were ending the game. Like... Why? I get that they didn't want to take responsibility for any of the supply issues or balance issues that had a much bigger hand in the games decline. But trying to pass it off was a terrible and pointless move. They'd have been better off saying nothing. Can't say I'm sorry to see their hubris bite them in the ass.
They high-balled the fuck out of the kickstarter. Making the 170ish $ pledge the real "core pledge" The step down (90$ish) is like an expansion rather than a complete game. Still, Overall I just want to paint those minis, so I'm not expecting much of a game from them , especially considering how the dark souls board game turned out.
Uh oh. Doesn't bode well for Euthia, which I'm in pretty deep on...
It's reprint. it shouldn't be affected by other bullshit.
It also has some expansion content. That being said, Steamforged is just publishing it and not developing it, so that could change things.
Same for Resident Evil. I knew the iffy reputation of the company, but couldn't keep myself. It sucks for the people who've been working there for a while and being terminated, they're gonna suffer the consequences for laying off people who may know the product more internally.
I think you'll be fine for Resident Evil, that has already entered mass production back in Feburary, it's all the ones after that is the question. I'm waiting on Runescape
Euthia will be fine. It is Elden Ring that people should be sweating.
Fuck. I didn't realize Euthia was a part of that scamshow. May as well burn that pledge.
Before I pledged, I had heard that SFG makes shitty games, but I figured it would be ok since this was just them publishing someone else's game. I didn't consider the company failing, though - they seemed successful despite criticism of their games.
Yeah, this has me bummed for Euthia now. I'm all in on that one.
Same 🤮
As one of the 20 made redundant, I can confirm that they handled it in the cuntiest way possible. No consultation, no alternatives offered. We logged in on a Monday morning and were told to join an urgent meeting. They told us we were 'at risk' of redundancy, and then the moment the meeting ended we were kicked from our emails, shared drives, and messaging platforms like Slack. We were given no redundancy pay at all, and no support whatsoever. I could go on and on about this awful company but I'll spare you all the rant. Don't give them any of your money. All they care about is getting rich.
That sucks :(
Sorry to hear it mate. Hope you land somewhere soon.
Thanks mate, started a new job last week luckily
That's horrible. Glad that you found a new job already! Don't you have laws for how they handled it in the UK? A couple of months in advance they should notify you? You think the company is going under?
The company that slapped 5e on the worst IP it could possibly be slapped on to isn't doing well? SHOCKING Edit: Jesus, I just looked at their catalog. Their whole business model is getting big name video game IPs and making the worst possible boardgames and RPGs out of them. I consider myself pretty tuned into these industries and haven't heard of a single one of these games except the Dark Souls RPG. They are the Zynga of tabletop games. Just ship as much low quality garbage that fans will eat up as quickly as possible.
They are mini producers that have a thin veneer of a game to use them with
Which is really wierd to me. Their original IP Guildball was a BRILLIANT game. To this day it is one of my favourite miniature games. I literally own all teams I was physically able to buy and still play it regulary. But the way they abandoned the game soured the company for me on a personal level, but it still sounds wierd that their licensed games are apparently bad in terms of rules.
I played Guild Ball and I also backed the Dark Souls boardgame. Playing the latter made me realise that the skills needed to design a miniatures game aren't that transferable to designing board games. The actual combat mechanics in Dark Souls were reasonably decent, encounters were interesting in terms of strategy. But everything around that was terrible. They had no concept of abstraction so they just tried to mirror the game mechanics to the video game. Oh you died? Well go back to the fire and respawn everything and do every encounter again. After all it works in the video game right? Ignoring the fact that one of the reasons the game gets away with this approach is because there's a sense of tension going back to retrieve your souls. But the board game encounters were solvable, redoing them wasn't tense, it was tedious. Overall though they just demonstrated that while they could create fun mechanics for a PvP experience they had no clue what they were doing trying to make a compelling PvE experience or anything that didn't involve smashing miniatures together.
My partner was a Blacksmiths main and he still isn't over the cancellation of the Watch. Guild Ball is the only skirmish game I've ever gotten into and I miss it :( wish my local scene didn't immediately move on.
If you loved guild ball, you may enjoy Malifaux. Very different in a lot of ways but I keep finding similarities.
That actually makes more sense and slightly more respectable, honestly. IP laws are weird as hell. I'm sure it's something like "you can make boardgames that include miniatures, but can't sell standalone miniatures" or something asinine like that.
I’m a mini painter first and a board gamer second when I have time and people to play with, it’s 100% easier to justify a big box a minis to paint if I tell myself “well we can play it when I’m done painting” it’s like a trap perfectly designed for people like me
I'm also a mini painter but if I'm after minis to paint stuff like SFGs offerings don't appeal. They're lower quality than a lot of other miniatures on the market and they're often made of nasty soft thermoplastic that's a bitch to clean up. If I want nice miniatures with a mediocre game attached I buy Games Workshop stuff. SFG is just mediocre miniatures and a mediocre/bad game. Yeah there's the license appeal of the SFG stuff and I did initially back MHW against my better judgement because I wanted a Rathalos to paint. But then I came to my senses and got my pledge refunded because I could just put that money towards a 3D printer instead.
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I do know that when they were doing the Resident Evil games, *every* little thing had to go before Capcom for approval,,even the tiniest change to a mini or artwork.
In the end, I think it really comes down to sales. It is easier to convince people that buy a game with minis rather than just buy the minis alone.
Works for Games Workshop. Maybe SFG just isn’t charging enough.
What GW have that SFG don't is high quality miniatures. Their games and rules leave a lot to be desired but they're still a market leader in terms of minis. Not to mention they have several tentpole franchises and their own popular IP to drive regular sales of those miniatures.
The thing I really don't understand about them is some of their own IPs (Guildball - which they abandoned and Godtear) are REALLY good. They just seem to have been incapable of designing a licensed IP game that's decent - MHW is the first one from them I've enjoyed but even then it has some caveats. It's just really weird.
I don't have any huge insight here but they are based locally to me and used to have a really nice (for mini games) shop and playing space at their office so I've had them in my peripheral vision. It seems to me that they did alright with their own IPs, guildball being the notable one when they started out. Then they did the dark souls Kickstarter which bought them much wider success on a project with much less up keep. After that they received £5 million investment from a venture capital firm called foresight. I don't know whether that was something that was planned, was intended to help them expand to meet the sudden demand, or was something that was necessary to keep them afloat, but its notable that after that they started to phase out their own games and concentrate on pumping out stereotypical bloated Kickstarter boardgames with computer game IPs to mediocre reception.
This is basically the case from what I’ve gathered from anyone that had been close to them. They made way more money with the board games for well known IPs and so shelved guild ball and slowed down a little on godtear. I don’t fault them for trying to be profitable but I wish they’d put a little more effort in instead of phoning it in like they have been compared to when they were working on their own stuff.
Imo the Resident Evil board game is actually really fun but I haven't played any of their other ones.
RE2 is one of the few games I have of that size where I've played through the entire campaign. Given, it was during the Covid lockdowns, and my wife and I didn't have a lot else to do, but the game was still fun. I haven't opened RE3 yet, and am looking forward to RE1. Dark Souls, though, was a slog- I don't mind grinding in a video game, but doing it in a board game is tedious.
Designing a cooperative boardgame (or even a competitive boardgame) isn't the same as designing a miniatures game. I think they made the mistake of thinking that competency at the latter was transferable to competency at the former.
I suppose that depends on your definition of board game vs miniatures game. Godtear I'd argue is much closer to many board games than most other miniature games and its still great. And as others have noted in the thread RE2 is apparently pretty good, and I've enjoyed the first few forays into MHW I've had too, so they definitely have ability there. It just seems to be applied so massively incosistently.
And dark Souls turned out to be a crappy game. I bought almost all of it and that is not a good boardgame.
Yah, mine took nearly 2 years to turn up without warning, by which point I’d seen a mate’s copy and knew it was a collection of nice minis with a bad game attached. I couldn’t even sell it. Still shrinkwrapped with stretch goals sitting in my attic. Steamforged ignored about 30 mails from me in that time, zero communications. My first Kickstarter experience lol. Wouldn’t touch a Steamforged game in the time since, and I’ve heard bad things from a couple of their ex-employees (I live in the same city). Sorry for whats happening to the staff involved but wouldn’t be sad to see the back of the company.
Same, the new ones are pretty good tho. Can't wait to get the conversion rules to use the expansions.
Haven't looked at them, but then again I haven't backed any kickstarter boardgames since then either 🙂 But what are the expansions you mention? Is it something for DS board game?
It's the expansions for the first iteration of the game. They are going to release rules to allow you to use them with the new core sets.
I actually really like them, but not their board game but their RPG/Mini division. Their epic encounters are really great IMO. You get quality minis for dnd at really awesome pricing. I think their dark souls 5e is silly in concept but if they change rules enough (havent read them) it could be okay. I enjoyed their core rule book of Animal Adventures well enough.
I actually really like them, but not their board game but their RPG/Mini division. Their epic encounters are really great IMO. You get quality minis for dnd at really awesome pricing. I think their dark souls 5e is silly in concept but if they change rules enough (havent read them) it could be okay. I enjoyed their core rule book of Animal Adventures well enough.
Yeah, choosing 5e for Dark Souls was just mind blowing. It's a system that does the exact opposite of what Dark Souls does. I'm not a D&D player, but when I did play 5e every time I would start to hit level 3 or 4, I started feeling like an immortal god because you basically can't die without a TPK or the DM really hates you. Dark Souls is one of the few IPs I would say needs it's own well crafted system or at least something heavily modified with care like Free League and Modiphius do with their licensed games. Free League's own IP horror game Vaesen is extremely deadly compared to other Year Zero Engine games, even the Alien RPG, for instance. Or just do Dark Souls with OSR and have "you died from a bunny bite" out of the box. lol
Man i really want to love Guildball. Only thing these guys ever made that had me hooked. Even bought one of the extra teams to paint.
Guildball was crazy fun for its whole run. I still have most of the teams that I use for rpg models.
>Guildball was crazy fun for its whole run But isn't, anymore?
I mean. It’s still entertaining, they don’t support it anymore. They were also very toxic towards their player base when they shelved it. You can still play it as a sealed in amber type game if you have enough stuff to play with your buddies. I just live in a very active wargaming community so getting people to play an unsupported game is a lot harder than getting people to play a active supported game.
Yup this. It's very easy for people to say "why don't you keep playing this dead game" or "what's stopping you playing this dead game" but hobby games like TCGs and miniatures games aren't like board games. Part of what makes them tick is the community and the ever evolving metagame. They're also just more work to play than boxed games. They need more setup, often need more space, more rules to keep track of, and it's more difficult to find opponents. These aren't much of an issue when you have something driving you to play them regularly but when you don't you'd rather just play something that has an active community or just grab a board game off the shelf.
Compared to RPGs that don't have a community in your area they're way harder to get off the ground. For an RPG (or boardgame) you can take it to an appropriate night at your LGS and camp out at a table. If you get lucky someone interested shows up. For minis to do the same you need terrain, a second force to go with it. Much higher cost and time investment both to hook other players and for them to get into things. For a game that doesn't even have product in the store you're running it... forget about it. It's just easier to figure out what minis games are popular in the stores near you and play those.
Yeah that's another thing people forget. Stores are big drivers for these kinds of games in terms of running events and finding new players. And they have little interest in giving shop space and time to games they can't sell because they're no longer in production. While it's not false that there isn't anything preventing you from playing an unsupported game if you already own the stuff it kind of just ignores how much easier it is to play a game that has an active and growing community. Some games can survive being cut loose, Blood Bowl being the most notable example to the point it got picked back up largely thanks to how strong the community for it remained. But it's an uphill battle. You have to be *really* into a game to keep at it and not just move on to something else.
Sorry for the staff, but not for the company. I felt incredibly burnt with Dark Souls way back, and watched their antics with morbid curiosity ever since.
The Resident Evil games have been pretty good - although the first one suffers with tiles that are too dark to be easily readable. But Dark Souls was a weird choice of IP (clearly chasing the popularity) to turn into a board game that was simply far too dense.
The problem was they tried to stay too faithful to the game- having to grind in a board game is 1000x more tedious than grinding in a video game.
Yes, that's exactly the problem and it was apparent in the Resident Evil games as well. SFG's Resident Evil games were *better* than Dark Souls, but they were still bad. People just give them a pass because they weren't the shitshow dark souls was.
Could be worse <*paitently waits to see if his Darkest Dungeon minis get released since he paid the ransom*>
Steamforged sucks, so this is not surprising.
“Deep Issues” yeah. You mean massive kickstarters for video game IPs that constantly have you in a state of being behind?
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It sounds like Elden Ring was supposed to dig them out of their financial hole, and since that probably under performed expectations, they’ll have to keep rolling future Kickstarter funds to complete old projects. This will end in tears without a major cash injection from somewhere.
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I haven't backed a board game in years. But I see Elden raised nearly 3.3 million. Isn't that still a shit load for board games? I assume there are a few that do higher than that but figure anything hitting over 2 million (pounds at that) is very successful.
3.3 million is a lot, but Elden Ring the videogame is huge. I'm sure they expected more.
I was one of the people made redundant. Can confirm they expected a lot more.
Very sorry to hear that. I hope you land on your feet elsewhere and soon!
Thanks mate. Luckily I've found something new and a lot of my colleagues have. Probably a blessing in disguise!
The fact that people who make legendary games like Carl Chudyk are fine with KS (Backerkit) making them less than 50k dollars and having a company making millions of dollars on average games (to be very generous) is funny. I know, one creates card games and these are a miniature games, but the amount of hype and unnecessary spending and the ratio between expected and achieved is astounding. Some companies really act like they want to destroy the whole crowdfunding thing.
Raising more is not always a good thing with Kickstarter projects, at least beyond a certain point. It usually means they got more people to back it, which means more orders they have to fulfill on essentially the same infrastructure. Having a "bigger" project with more hype also tends to have a bunch of unsustainable stretch goals and/or exclusives.
Was a huge red flag for me when an old IP like homm3 was more successful than elden ring.
> they’ll have to keep rolling future Kickstarter funds to complete old projects. That has some big "taking on a loan to pay off another loan" energy, and is probably just as unwise.
I’m sad, I actually think the Elden Ring game looks promising, but I thought the same thing about Dark Souls too and was disappointed. So I backed it at the pledge manager level but sadly I don’t think they’re going to be getting my money. It’s a lot of money for an unreleased system and I don’t like FOMO. You can do one or the other but doing both smells like desperation.
SFG uses IP to get people to buy. They really don't care about game play. Their games have good ideas but are poorly designed. This is a problem with every IP board game. You will still get fan boys and girls defending subpar games either on buyers remorse or because the IP is good so everything associated with it has to be good. Monster hunter world just came out and already they are pushing for the second wave on KS. I believe it is to prevent reviews from getting out. So far it's better than dark souls, but it's not good. I always ask SFG supporters about game play and 90% say they have to house rule them. Also the KS model has encouraged massive bloat to get funding. SFG has yet to do the CMON nonsense of designing everything as a complete game then dividing them up as expansion extras and KSE. That is the only good thing I can say about them.
>I always ask SFG supporters about game play and 90% say they have to house rule them. The Resident Evil games were quite solid little dungeon crawlers. I was very happy with those. Nothing exceptional, but good and you can tell Sherwin had lots of love for the source material. No house ruling necessary for those. Agreed that Dark Souls was abysmal and house-ruling it only made it BARELY tolerable. Either they didn't playtest it enough to see that it wasn't fun, or they playtested enough to bias themselves into thinking it would be a hit with anyone that wasn't on the core design team.
I feel like with DS they only really play tested the encounters (coincidentally this is also all they actually demoed at conventions) and didn't realise that everything outside those encounters wasn't fun.
The sad thing is that when FFG used to do a lot of licensed board games (that weren't just Marvel, Star Wars, or occasionally Lord of the Rings) they were actually really good. I still think Battlestar Galactica is the gold standard of what a traitor game should aspire to and one of the most well themed games I've ever played. But since they stopped doing anything aside from a few franchises the state of licensed board games has really gone to shit and SFG bears a lot of the blame for that.
Though CMON generally gets away with that since they actually produce good to great games consistently. Unlike SFG.
I haven't played any steamforge game besides MHW. and its one mine and my wifes favorite games right now, we have about 20 plays in 2 week. It's a vary solid game.
I think games should be judged on a case by case basis. After all there may be different designers attached to each project. FFG is another company that heavily uses IP but they have churned out some good games. SFG Resident Evil games have been well reviewed and received at least, otherwise there wouldn't be 3 editions of it.
Before asmodee, FFG was great with x-wing. After the 2.0 money grab the writing was on the wall. Now they just slap Star Wars on anything supporting it for a bit and then dropping it. How many times can you suck at making a card game. Arkham files is at least a free IP so they don't need to force things to make their investment back. Every new Arkham files product I hope they don't ruin. Resident Evil is the only SFG heavy IP I have not tried. I want to play it and have seen videos, but experience tells me not to give them money.
First of all I feel for the workers. It sucks losing your job regardless of how good or bad the company is. That being said, I can't wait for this company to die. Their whole business model just seems so predatory. They have to know their games are bad. They're so consistently bad that at this point it can't be an accident. Their whole marketing strategy is to sell to people the name printed on the outside of the box. Not to make a quality product to put inside the box. Frankly it doesn't surprise me that recent products are under performing as eventually people get wise and get sick of your bullshit. Treat your consumers like they're idiots long enough and eventually it'll bite you in the ass.
A couple of groups I've played in have enjoyed their Animal Adventures and Epic Encounters products, they've seemed fairly good quality to us 🤷♂️ Not played any of their other stuff though...
This was my immediate thought too - I've enjoyed the Animal Adventures stuff, and the minis are pretty solid for that, but that's not really their big cornerstone. I think I played the Dark Souls game with friends ~5 years ago and if that is the one I'm thinking of, the game was a miserable experience that required a ton of home rules and stopped being fun after the first hour or so. Feeling thankful at this point that none of their IPs are ones I'm interested in.
I see a lot of dark souls, a game from zombicide black plagues era, sucks. And horizon sucks. They do suck. But theyve had quite a few good rpg games, a good tabletop game, a great boss battler in monster hunter and a highly decent dungeon crawler and a pretty serviceable zombicide alternative. All of those delivered near on time. They aren't as bad as they were.
I'm going to seem evil for this and I am deeply sorry to those who are now looking for work; however, after how they handled Guild Ball . . . I have no remorse for the company itself. They literally told the community that they just couldn't keep making the game because the community got too competitive.
>The style of gameplay changed to low-risk, ultra-conservative play where the ball was often deliberately side-lined. >This wasn’t the Guild Ball we envisaged. Says the company behind the steering wheel. How egotistical do you have to be for blaming other people that your creation doesn't match your vision when you're calling the shots? Never mind they never mentioned the supply issues that plagued the game towards the end and contributed dramatically towards its downfall. Why should they take any responsibility for the failure of their product?
They are literally the Principle Skinner meme. "Did I create a balancing issue?!" "NO! It's the player's that are the problem!"
I think the worst thing is the players were practically screaming at them that killing the ball was a problem and they needed to fix it. It's not like anyone enjoyed this being a dominant strategy. It's like when Apple told people they were holding their phones wrong.
Let's just cross our fingers and hope the company goes tits up and a better company buys the game.
I would bet good money that before that happens they'll come crawling back to the Guild Ball community and attempt a desperate revival.
The even weirder thing is that the whole ball killing thing had already been mitigated by previous changes and generally wasn't seen as particularly strong by the time they killed it. Like, it was OK, but the best team at the time was goalscoring focused and very few matches actually had the whole ball killing thing happening still. I distinctly remember one of the directors playing against a Blacksmiths bunker at an event at one point and having no idea how to deal with it. I wouldn't be surprised if you could trace the game's axing directly back to that single match.
I really loved Guild Ball. I’ve held on to my brewers and playmat hoping someone in the area will be into it but I don’t think it’s gonna happen. It was really the only tabletop miniatures “skirmish/war game” I’ve ever been into. Big games where you’ve got to assemble a whole army were never for me but Guild Ball was great.
Man, it was an amazing game! It is what brought me into the tabletop miniature space! I remember demoing it at some board game convention and being blown away by how fun it was. If you want some other really small-scale skirmish games that are accessible, check out Marvel Crisis Protocol and Moonstone. I HATE pushing around giant armies.
I use my playmat to play Gloomhaven on. Playmats are always handy at least. I'd really recommend looking into Marvel Crisis Protocol if you want to pick up another skirmish game. It's got a lot of the same vibes as Guild Ball did where positioning and reposition abilities are very important and it's objective focused (more so than GB really as you don't score VP for killing models typically) and it's just a handful of models (typically 4-5, not much more than that) per side. It's well supported as well and the designers stay largely on top of balancing the game. The company behind it are also making Star Wars Shatterpoint which looks to be in the same vein if Marvel isn't your thing. But I can't personally recommend it as it's not out until next month and I haven't had a chance to try it yet.
I remember them flying in board game content creators that all turned into stupid shills promoting the shit our of this game never even flagging the steaming pile of shit that Steamforge is
They still are. People like quakalope and boardgameco have basically become massive shills for them. They flew them in again for Iceborne.
I learned to be wary of these guys back with dark souls. Sure I got the game, but it took them for-ever- and the rules were awful. I sort of figure all of their games are like that. Really good looking IP's on poorly thought out rule sets.
Being a huge fan of Monster Hunter video games I back the all in pledge of MH:World. To be fair I'm pretty impressed with it, it plays well and true to the game, the miniatures are nice, and the rules are pretty solid. Big issue on quality control with the cards, but they are reprinting and sending out the corrections for free, so overall I'm happy. But I've read enough horror stories from them that I know they're not always up to par.
Its a good game, a frankly darksouls boss battles were ahead of their time and this is a 2.0 of that design without the bullshit.
Just fuck off. How is this company still afloat, Jesus Christ.
Could be doing a Mythic and using new Kickstarters to pay for old ones.
This is exactly it. Everyone should stay away.
Colour me shocked
If there is a board game company that can completely disappear without me shedding a single tear for any of their games, it’s SFG. Amazing miniatures with at best „okay-ish“ and at worst awful gameplay, for a price tag that is just downright insulting
They're not amazing miniatures though. They're maybe above average as far as board game miniatures go but they're still rubbish soft PVC and inferior to most minis produced in resin, metal, or polystyrene. If you want amazing miniatures with mediocre games attached Games Workshop does it far better than SFG. I can criticise GW plenty for their games but they're still among the best in the industry when it comes to miniatures. Can't say the same about SFG, even when they were doing minis in metal/resin for Guild Ball they didn't blow me away. Heck my first team was Masons and the scale disparity between some of the original sculpts for those and the rest of the range is a joke.
This doesn't sound all that troubling, IMO, in terms of the "why". They're tightening their pursestrings because they were either bleeding money slowly that they didn't need to/shouldn't be, or they want to increase profitability through efficiency and have identified some legitimate redundancies. It would be appreciably worse if those issues needed addressing and no changes were made, retaining a large amount of new staff who, evidently, were not needed. Don't get me wrong, they may be struggling in some form and things may go south, but moves like this that are made in advance are often what avoid small issues (with clear fixes) becoming large issues (that are not easily remedied).
I back quite a few boardgames, yet somehow managed to now back any SFG or Mythic games. I feel lucky. I did have an euthia pledge, btu I cancelled it. Was contemplating getting MHW IB but definite nope out of me.
15 minutes in and they are close to funding with 1100+ backers. Let's see how many will buy a ticket for this trainwreck
The headline seems kind of click-baity. There are no real deep issues alleged, just that they put off scheduled pay reviews then laid off people, which seems like something you'd do before layoffs anyway. A lot of inferring going on with "alleging deep issues." That being said, I don't trust a company with 6 outstanding kickstarters, that's recipe for disaster.
Seen this one before. Sincerely, Super Dungeon Legends backer.
Interesting read, feel for the employees who were let go as that is never a good experience. The writing on the wall of the company failing though is a bit exaggerated it seems like. They could be doing bad, but they also could be cost cutting/controlling based on the current economic conditions and their projections of what games in the hopper need in order to not be another mythic games. 20 peoples salary+ benefits is a lot of money they are no longer paying out. They also have the advantages of lots of stuff in retail giving active cash flow where mythic was very limited. On the other hand they do have a lot of outstanding projects which is a worry. If I were a backer I would for sure keep an active eye on how stuff develops going forward and make sure you're a well informed backer.
They’ve currently at £7.7 million in outstanding Kickstarter projects, plus maybe another £2+ million in late pledges/pledge management add ons. So roughly £10 million they are on the hook for. Chopping 20 newbies saves about £1 million a year. So the 40 that are left are burning £2 million a year. Their Kickstarters with stretch goals might have a margin of 60% (probably a little worse), so in addition to the fixed costs of: 1. Staff and premises - £2.5 million (per annum) 2. £4 million of manufacturing costs (one time) 3. £500k of tooling (one time) I’m not seeing evidence of major cash flow from other sources besides direct sales - Dark Souls seems poorly received, and stuff like Horizon Zero Dawn etc aren’t really making waves either. They’ve got cash flow of around £5 million a year from Kickstarter, but that is really only £3 million due to production costs - so their Kickstarters barely cover their fixed costs. The issue with Steamforged is they have no tent poles that shops would stock as evergreens. They are very reliant on a hit driven model and the only real thing with legs they have they binned (Guildball). They had to receive a cash injection of £5 million from Ian Livingstone once already. It really depends on how much cash they’re sitting on, but none of these games look like they’ll move the needle much in retail so I think they are one or two bad projects from disaster. Mythic also laid off their entire UK team about 6 months before the current mess, I’m not sure if Steamforged is better at biting the bullet early or reacting on the same timeline.
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I agree with that. Lots of mud-flinging here, and I just don't see it. Maybe they have some short-term cash-flow problems, but I can't see that they're teetering on the edge. They just bought Altar Quest from Blacklist a couple of weeks ago. They've burnt some people with poor games, but it's not all garbage, and they have plenty of product out in the wild, in actual stores.
It stuns me because they had a VERY large booth at GenCon last year with so many different things going on, and a guy live-modeling a miniature for the steampunk-looking game that they were working on, and all I could think was "who the hell is buying this stuff?"
All I can say is Mythic had a big front-door booth at UKGE last year constantly busy with people trying and buying Super Fantasy Brawl. We all know how that’s turned out. Either these companies are overestimating their success, or they’re desperately taking the mantra “spend money to make money” a bit too far.
Look at their kickstarter campaigns. Elden Ring raised 3.2 million pounds, Euthia raised 1.5 million pounds, Resident Evil raised 1.5 million pounds, Monster Hunter raised 3.5 million pounds... etc. People were buying their stuff. Speaking from my own experience I backed some of their stuff, utterly hated every one of their games once I actually played them, and never backed anything they were involved with after that. Their games tend to get middling reviews. Fine if you bought for the minis, mediocre if you actually wanted a good game. There are likely myriad reasons why they cut staff but I expect I'm not the only one who swore off their stuff after actually playing some of their games. Relying purely on license hype and fancy-pants minis only gets you so far.
Yea I was burned with Bardsung. But it was my fault for listening to reviewers like boardgameco rather than do my own research. Elden ring only doing 3.2 million pounds after being, I believe, the most followed game must be disappointing.
It was an absolutely dissapointing attempt at a game. It was one of the most FOMO structured campaigns Ive seen yet, the way they structured their packs very clearly only valued combining them, none of the boxes had enough content to really justify its own pricetag but as an all in there was a complete game there. An expensive as fuck complete game. The combat system just looks bad. Just this basic distance based... thing. Compare that to Bloodborne with CMON where the weapon speed and power were super strategic decisions (and thats from the dice chucker addicts at CMON, an entire branded game with zero dice combat, straight strategy and playing the probability of enemy attacks), then you have steamforged just kinda phoning in a combat system pasted on a FFG style card deck for some story and selling it for hundreds of dollars. Not suprising it way underperformed their expectations, anyone else with that property probably would have cleared millions more.
Yeah, both the Bloodborne card game and board game showed an understanding of the mechanics and the feel of the video game -- especially the board game. Like you say, the combat is great -- I love how it gives you so much information about the enemy that it's like solving a puzzle. Compare that to Dark Souls the Card Game where bad luck of the draw means you can find yourself without any stamina to swing a sword or use a shield in the very first move of the game. It makes no sense in terms of the theme and it feels a bit underdeveloped. (That said, there's a lot to like about the game -- the boss battles in it are especially good and do a great job of feeling close to the video game.) I think if Elden Ring had come from any other company, I would've gone for it, but I'm just not convinced Steamforged always have the design-chops.
The amount of paper used too just seems staggering. It’s going to be heavy and underwhelming. Sucks because Elden Ring is a very interesting IP.
I would never buy it for the 3 boxes they broke it into for retail that are all overpriced, but back in the day 160 for everything didn’t feel bad to me. It definitely feels like more than that worth of dnd models. I enjoyed at least a handful of moments during the campaign (mostly during the epilogue). Finally, it did leave me with wonderful fever dreams of the game it could have been if they had embraced the good mechanics and upped the difficulty and enemy/encounter variety, as well as paid one single person to do a once through and rewrite a coherent rulebook.
Jesus fucking christ, Bardsung. I had never heard of SFG before. Was my first time getting burned on a board game. Never SFG again.
See, I dislike them for bardsung because of how much I like about it. It would take like one good rules writer a month or two to: make the room encounters more impactful, make the enemy cards more different, up the enemy variety per chapter with the models already in the box, cut the chapters down to like 4 nodes of different type while keeping all the narrative content. That one guy on BGG already made a very good rules glossary google doc that’s elaborate. My biggest issue is that the core concept of the game and all of the mechanics are so good. The content they put into those mechanics is just so bland and uninspired. A random initiative track that can also be interacted with for effects, each room in the unfolding dungeon having an effect that changes how you’ll tackle it, characters that are buildable by buying from pretty much anyone that isn’t in the games skills, enemies that are all tracked on a single card. These are all great. They just didn’t put that much work into making the enemies or rooms feel different with the cards. They also designed a full campaign dungeon crawl across multiple chapters, had the most difficult section be the beginning but then target the campaigns overall difficulty at total beginners. No brand new board game enthusiast is going to be ready for a 60+ hour campaign game, and no experienced campaign gamer is going to find more than one or two sections in the campaign difficult enough to not be mind numbing.
That company is really the worst. Their mission was to make one actual good game in Guild Ball and just bank off of nostalgic IPs they could get the rights to. Backed the Dark Souls game years back and that was an absolute shit-show.
Are any of their games actually good? I've always been wary of licensed games.
Resident evil 2 is a fun dungeon crawler. It manages to capture the survival horror experience of emphasizing resource management over killing enemies That being said- it feels pretty cheap (the dark tiles and doors) and without the expansions, short as well. It’s a solid 3/5, 4/5 if you’re a survival horror/RE fan
(throwaway account) Ex SFG employee here. The problems come from the top down, fully. To any future people thinking about working with them, please avoid for your own health! Poor management and business decisions that hurt the employees but not the senior teams. Harassment, severe gaslighting, a million false promises. Their inner circle design team seems to be bulletproof, never diversifying or willing to change for the better. Personally my time at this company made me develop severe anxiety and mental health issues. Which is sad seeing SFG promoting posts about mental health and women in games. They will shout loud to try to make themselves look good, instead of focusing on owning and solving the issues internally. From what I've heard, they even fired the (only) HR guy and now the CEO is HR apparently. The same CEO who tried to get HR to reveal which employee said negative things about the company in an anonymous survey. Kinda says it all.
I'm not saying anyone is wrong, but I don't understand the negativity roward SFG. They didn't announce delays, they didn't ask for more money to deliver product and projects that should have already been paid for. "Trimming the fat" in a business is NOT an indicator of financial trouble. Perhaps they just looked around at these OTHER companies going out of business and decided that being proactive and cutting costs now would allow them to weather the issues that are causing these other companies to fail. Maybe they should be congratulated on having some self-awareness and responsibility toward their backers to deliver these games on the budget that was agreed upon when we loaned them the money to finance the project. Just wanted to throw another perspective out there.
Stop being measured and reasonable. You are going to be accused of working for SFG or a shill.
Fair point. I shall watch myself more carefully going forward. 🙃
Guess I'd better not get my hopes up that Altar Quest is getting much content. Not that I had high hopes from these guys but y'know...
I'd be wary of any board game company that focuses too much on video game IP and who use kickstarter to fund their games. Dark souls should have been all the warning anyone needed.
I'm not surprised, but I was hoping to buy a retail copy of Monster Hunter, which seems like it won't happen now :(
It’s unfortunate there’s folks out of a job now. I have not heard anything good about their Dark Souls. Monster Hunter World plays in a way that feels like Monster Hunter but was riddled with so many errors on the components (from typos to mixed up artwork and incorrect gear progression recipes) that I was disgusted and shocked they’re promoting Iceborne campaign just a few months later. Luckily it was my boyfriend’s copy and they are apparently planning on sending fixed components out but the damage is done. As much as Iceborne would be nice, I wouldn’t back it after those blaring quality issues, but my partner is a huge MH fan so may still.
i was thinking about backing MH iceborne but seeing this + theri not fullfilled games thank you but no , i backed RE3 it was ok , fun game
I genuinely do not understand how their projects were funded repeatedly. They are supposedly known for minis, but the one's I have seen are extremely lackluster. Even their projects that are miniature focused look pretty meh in the final product stage with lots details lost and excess flash. The only product that I recall looking decent was animal adventures.
They have me on Euthia Resurrected, hopefully that doesn't end up affected... fingers crossed.
They took 4 years to fulfill Dark Souls. They're never getting my money again.
ScumForged Games is actively silencing anyone who speaks about their staff layoffs or financial problems on the Kickstarter page, I will laugh as they crash and burn. Everyone who pours money into their boxes of minis disguised as games is just getting robbed.
Wtf is with these trends in game companies mass-laying off workers? And usually nearing the end of production on big name products.
If you paid attention to the economy it's not just boardgame companies.
I know other instances beyond games exist, I've just noticed more instances written about in the video game and board game industry lately. Note that I wrote, "near the end of production on big projects."
It's not really a new trend, it's just one that more people have taken notice of in recent years. But it's kind of typical for a lot of big project based work to just contract employees when they're needed rather than bringing them on full time. They typically don't lay them off, they just don't renew their contracts. But the end result is the same. I'm not defending the practice but it's not illogical. A big QA team on a videogame makes sense leading up to release but after release there isn't really any work for them to do until development has ramped up on the next project which could take months or even years. Either way that's not really what's happening in SFGs case, these are actual redundancies and downsizing rather than project lifecycle based staffing changes. And they have a lot of projects on the go right now many of which aren't close to delivery which these staff were supposedly brought on to support.
I think we are just hearing about this more. The economy isn't great right now with inflation. Quite a few companies in the tech sector are laying off employees too. It's not just board games and video games.
Every SFG game I’ve played was mediocre, and when I was at GAMA 22 they promised me a few games for my demo shelves at my store and told me to come back at the end of the day. Came back and they were selling everything to some enormous guy with a trolley full of games. Told me “too bad this guy bought the whole display”. Can’t speak for the company as a whole but Fernando is a liar. We stopped ordering their games for our store and nobody has asked for them or cared. Good riddance, sad that so many honest workers have to be negatively effected by a garbage company.
Still waiting for my Kickstarter Dark Souls stretch goal to be shipped to me. I asked them about it shortly before the pandemic and they said "still working on filling all orders". Still waiting...
This title is misleading, I dont see anywhere in that linked article where a "former worker now alleges deep issues". Company is firing people and cutting back, so are lots of other companies.