I have formally complained to the States Attorney General in Washington State.

?

 

I will also do so in Texas, if need be.

I have also reached out to Kickstarter.

 

I doubt the attorney general would put our lack of physical rewards on their list of priorities.

But I am curious to see what Kickstarter says. There are certain expected obligations for their platform.

 

Second this!!!!

 

Personally I am not too bothered about actually having the physical rewards in lieu of having a great game. However, the game was not a success so the extra budget that went forwards towards it was wasted and ultimately has *puddi* off backers who did go for the higher packages. For me buying the game early access at $175 (which is an incredibly steep asking price, even today, yet alone 2 1/2 years ago) and NOT getting the physical rewards is certainly a headscratcher. Given that adequate time has passed and no announcement has been made regarding the physical rewards plus the fact that they were reportedly never accounted for in the budget by Archetype makes me much more inclined to report this misbehaviour to kickstarter + r/shittykickstarters. If Bugs/Archetype ever wants to get investment money for a project again, I will make sure everyone who is interested in investing (This is the correct term for projects on kickstarter, it is an investment in the projects' success, with no actual % return), knows how the Midair story turned out and how they did not deliver to backers.

Furthermore, as a general rule I have made it a point to never invest in Kickstarters because of this exact reason. Goodwill should not be your only or primary factor to invest in a Kickstarter. I invested back in August 2016 primarily because I knew bugs from back in the days of InstantAction and all the good that he did with limited resources on Legions: Overdrive. I invested because I knew with a real budget he could make a good tribes game happen. He made a good LCTF game, then completely forgot about it and tried making another game on top of it - the warning signs were there really from the weird cores added in Legions, such as Boost and Warp and the complete lack of understanding of what hand grenade boosting would do to the game flow - but I was too young and inexperienced in what game design especially in tribeslike to recognise the tell tale signs of complete lack of understanding of what a tribes game needs in order to succeed in a modern market. In short I was wrong to trust Bugs and I am saddened that he has failed himself and his vision of having a unifying tribes game, but he needs to only look at himself and his management decisions to the reasons why it was not achieved - especially in realm of indie publisher funding and distribution instead of trying to go it all alone.

Overall, what I am suggesting is that what good things Midair does have going for it are because of the king of code, Mabel. Any success Midair has had has been because of Mabel and despite of Bugs. As soon as Mabel left, this project went completely off the rails and speaks to Bugs lack of management skills of personnel. The fact that Mabel left quietly with no announcement that he was leaving speaks volumes about the type of culture that developed within Archetype, which prided itself on being a community focused game developer.

If anyone has Mabel's contact details I would be very interested in sending him a message to assure him that what he did was fantastic and to apologise for the hard and frankly rude comments I made to him a couple of years ago.

And finally, in WristFractures' terminology, god bless you all and have a good evening.

 

Yes, Mabel definitely and very much knows his shit. Bright guy.

 

Received my initial response, will update when I actually hear something of value.