The Tragedy of Yogventures - A $500,000 Kickstarter Disaster

I think its utterly INSANE that 500k was raised and not a single person, at any point, was working full time on the project

As an indie dev, this makes me sick to my stomach. If I'd have been given 500k you guys would damn well be receiving a game back

Yeah they had no idea how much stuff costs, this was a $10M game lol.

sounds to me that young people got ambitious and failed and didn't know how to handle it right considering they were young, It sucks how things like this happen but it's the world nothing is perfect.

So I have experience as a modder and worked on game projects. Based on my experience, I think the initial idea of this project was too grand. In my opinion, they should have started with a Minecraft mod. It would be cheap and easy to make, since the game engine already exists. It could also serve as an initial proof of concept for a game project. And with a smaller start, a new team can get used to game development.

Kickstarters can in fact go wrong. You're donating money to them to make the product. Remember the word donating.

Too ambitious for first game
gotta start small and build experience and make lots of mistakes

They are greedy scam artists that took advantage of their fan base. They are disgusting.

A 500,000 dollar SCAM* there. Fixed the title for ya.

That would have been a bad logo in 1994

They should of just made a yogventures mod for minecraft and had the donation for helping building the most advanced minecraft mod.

God, does nobody do feasibility studies these days?

More a case of, fuck it we'll make a game.

The video they made popped in my head thanks for this!

I was a back of this project, I honestly forgot about it until Yogscast popped back up into my suggested videos today. I remember playing TUG too when they sent that and it was all very disappointing but I was also super glad I was a low entry supporter.

Damn I feel bad for the developer, dudes life was basically ruined because of this game.

Entirely yogs fault.

From what I understand, they were originally gonna use a pre built engine, but it didn't work out and they had to start all over

Really wish I was 10 years older.
Working at Ubisoft myself and in communication with so many super high skilled game developers beyond that I would have loved to get something like this going.
The moment you said "this would be their first game" I immediately knew what the rest of the video would be.
If you've never made a game or even a demo then you have no chance of handling a project like this, especially a project for someone else.
The only project they should have completed as a first game team is a game of their own creation, not as a contractor.
Additionally Yogs should really have hired a game developer, not someone aspiring yet to be a game developer, the project was beyond ambitious for any newcomer.
A lot of the functionality on that list can be done relatively easily now, and the scale of their ambition would easily be realised with appropriate funding, it wouldn't even have to be as much funding as this.
Wrong project, Wrong team, Wrong time.
Really saddening, glad they got back more recently getting some games built under their brand.

Physical rewards were one of the biggest scams

Once had a collogue who was way into Star citizen, I had no idea he was until I made a ''comment'' about the games long development. This guy went to conventions and likely put in a lot of money into the game. I'm glad for him that the game at least let to something, but ''cult followings'' can be scary sometimes.

Yogcast made themselves the villain with the no obligations comment. They deserve 100% of the criticism they got, and still do. At least the developer owned up to his failings, he deserves respect for that at least.

Yogventures! Also known as the 3rd biggest scam of all time, right behind NFT's/Metaverse and Cryptocurrency taking the #1 cake.

Yogventures is the reason I stopped watching / loathe the Yogscast today. Straight up doomed their project; ignored the outrage; forced everything under the rug

Jeez you know it's bad when the main programmer puts out a message saying "don't punish me guys I've been punished enough. My wife divorced me"

Yogscast really went down hill. All they do is play Gmod now. It's been like 4 years of gmod

Don't hire a n00b to do l33t work.

Is this related to the stuff that happened between TotalBiscuit and Yogs? I remember TB absolutely murdering them in a video about lack of transparency... but maybe that was a thinly veiled product promotion...

RIP TB. A guiding light in the dark times.

Reminds me of the failure of the swat kats revolution kickstarter. Even netflix turned them down despite over 100k being raised for the series to come back.

roblox ripoff?

yogcast is to blame they not even delevery a single phisical reward....

I’ve played a lot of early access games that are amazing

$500k is too much for that kind of game. i work in a game development company as technical 3d artist and programmer and creating what they envisioned could be done in 2-3 months with proper optimization and good graphics. from what i saw, they really did so bad in optimizing the game. like really really bad. it's like the code or process they used to make the game was made in 1990s or just a group quiz for game dev students lol. honestly a scam. we made collaborative games from other gaming companies that are successful with extremely lower budget

The free engines themselves aren't shitty, although the assets certainly are.

my time in portia is a great kickstarter

You can't develop a dynamic, open world game with a six figure budget. It's crazy that anyone had any faith in this project to begin with.

$300,000 for 6 developers over a one year period? That's an insulting low salary, even for an indie studio. A CS undergrad could easily find a $70,000 job right out of college.

I'll never forgive the Yogscast for what they have done to poor Fitzthistlewits

I hope it doesn't happen but I feel like Hytale is heading in the same direction.
It's clear that Hypixel Studios are in over their heads, they released the trailer in 2018, there have been a lot of delays and they started from scratch only last year.

The game looks like a complete disaster, but I hope the game development scene context at the time is taken into consideration too. In 2012, Unity, Unreal Engine and 'free' alternatives were definitely not at a point where a 5 year old could make it. That's certainly the case today because the game just looks like a monkey drag and dropped cheap Unity assets into a third person demo in UE4, but in 2012, game engines were pretty shit and most studios were using their own proprietary engines.

Seems to me like the Yogscast wanted a vanity-project self-insert Minecraft RPG, convinced their fans to give them half a million dollars for it, and then ruined a developer's life trying to make it come to fruition, while they walked away scot-free. Tragic indeed.

While this is shitty, in no other market is the consumer so butt hurt when a product is shit, you don’t have to pay for a game that doesn’t exist, you don’t even have to buy a game in the first year of release, you can wait until the reviews are out and spend your money after that. You really can’t be mad when you gamble and loose

Eyyyy Hurtworld! I was one of the 3 programmers that worked on that game. Nice to hear people still remember it, even in this case as something that disappointed them in how it turned out. We were a team of 3-7 with almost zero gamedev experience going in, just trying to make something cool. We never did a Kickstarter - it was always money for something you could download and play. It didn't end up being Rust 2 or a phenomenon, but shit, I'm still proud of its little life as a community and a game. We worked hard on it, it was hugely ambitious and honestly I didn't think we'd ever get as far as we did with the funds/experience/time we had.

It's your fault

Yogscast really wanted to make the next Minecraft with only 500k.