Carl: Why go to IGG without a prototype available?

Mike: Well, yeah, well I will address half of this question–

Steve (interjecting): And the [indiscernible] part is up to John.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, let me answer the quick question- Why did we switch, kind of, at the last minute?  This really goes back…to me it was probably two and a half, three weeks, ago, Carl, I was in the NeoGAF forums and I saw that someone posted a thread, or a comment over there–again this huge long forum dedicated to our system which is great – and someone had said, ‘Hey it says right here that Kickstarter requires an explicit operating demo.’.

John: An explicit demonstration of a working prototype.  Yeah, when we saw that, we said ‘Well that’s…we are not ready to show an explicit demonstration of a working prototype.’.

Mike: Carl, I didn’t even realize that policy was a thing, because as I had just posted today, there have been very recent hardware projects…

John interjects: Well, and, Kickstarter gave us a pass.  We read that policy, we went to Kickstarter and said, ‘Is this a real thing?’  They said, ‘No, you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to show a working prototype.’.  Steve and I sat back and said, ‘Wait a second, okay you are giving us a pass.  You are at least giving tacit acceptance to these other projects but your public stated policy is that you must have this explicit demonstration of a working prototype.’

Steve: It is on their website in text and I am like…

John: It just seemed dishonest to us that Kickstarter’s official policy, as they state, is something that they are not even enforcing.  So we decided that the only honest way we could run a development campaign is not to on Kickstarter.

Mike: That was really it.  It was sort of a last second discovery, two to three weeks out.  You know, we didn’t announce it right away because, again, we were trying to go through this process of, well, are they going to give us an okay, are they going to give us a written, you know, approval that we can show people.  We knew that would be a controversy.  In the end, you know, behind the scenes, IndieGoGo had been courting us for the last few months.  They called me and said they were very proactive about it.  Kickstarter could care less, right? They were fat, dumb and happy with all of these things.  You have got IndieGoGo over there who is a still a very large credible, viable, crowdfunding source that has been around longer than Kickstarter.  They are not as prevalent in the game world, which is true, and that was always a concern of ours to this day.

John: Another thing that attracted us to IndieGoGo is, we are trying to operate as much as we can within our local economy.  IndieGoGo is based right here in California; Kickstarter is out in New York so ,you know one, we have got the time zones that help us to work together and two it just helps keep some of the money in the California economy.

Mike: Yeah, and again, they had given us some nice accommodations, and they did show us articles that even TechCrunch wrote that stated that their median average for hardware campaigns is more than Kickstarter.  So, you know, there has been a lot of great hardware campaigns started over there.  Nobody should be thinking it is a scam site or that is where scammers go.  That site has been around a long time.  I mean, Gamester81, they have done two projects over there that were successful.  There is nothing wrong with it. Yyeah, they do operate a little bit differently, and when they take the funds.  People were confused, Carl, that they were only offering flexible funding.  I mean right when we said this we said ,‘Oh they get the money no matter what? This is B.S.’ In 2011 they added fixed funding so they are just like Kickstarter, they are no different.  The only thing different is they do charge when they make their pledge rather than at the end.  I can certainly see where that is something different, that may be causing people to wait.  Which is bad, because you know with Kickstarters, or campaigns, you want that momentum, you want everybody to go in there into a feeding frenzy at the beginning and, um, you know, part of me thought, we spent a lot of time and effort growing this Facebook group and you know, this thing has been written about all over the world.  It has been viral already, so I thought…  You know, part of me was thinking, ‘Okay well, you know what, normally I would be scared of this if no one had heard of this.’  But being that everyone knows about it, bringing it over there, you know, they will come.  You build it, they will come.  I thought I could count on people following us over there, because if you want it, this is where it is at.  And, um, so that kind of eased my mind a little bit going over there, you know, since we already had a community of people waiting for this to start.  I can understand the hesitancy for people to get in and I, again, think this will be a real shame if we lose this thing because people just wait.  Because, again, it is the momentum we need that will get the media talking about this and everything else.  You know, again, they can cancel their pledge, you know, if it gets down and whatever.  Right now we are in a negative self-fulfilling prophecy over there.

We still have forty days left, or forty one days left…

[Unintelligible period]

Steve: I want to add something. Also, the reason I like the IndieGoGo thing is because they were willing to cut us a deal that we passed off to the console price.  Let everybody know that, you know, because my personal big problem was with how much the other campaign [Kickstarter] wanted to take, it is a lot of money they want to take.  I am like, ‘If these guys are offering to help us in this area, then we can reduce the price down any amount,’ I was thinking for the consumer.  I was like, ‘And they [IndieGoGo] are willing to help us promote this thing?’ It was all of the stuff we needed to hear from the other campaign [Kickstarter].

Mike: So yeah, like when we hit thirty percent of our campaign goal, Carl, they were going to send a specific e-mail out to their two million registered users about our campaign, only our campaign.  The reason they wait for it to be thirty percent funded is they want people to go there and see that it has already caught fire.  Versus sending them to a campaign that is dwindling or at zero right at the beginning.  They have discovered that if they wait till it is around thirty percent funded that they have a bigger adoption rate for people to discover it and buy into that campaign.  So, again, they are willing to do a lot of really neat things for us. Again, no one should worry about using IndieGoGo.  The bottom line is, if it is not funded, they get their money back, and that is that.

John: I just wanted to throw out, we are not into a negative mode right now.  People are still pledging.  We have got a lot of people who are chipping away, word is getting out.  It took us a few days to try and straighten out our campaign a little bit, get our page organized a little better.  We are going to keep adding to it, we have a lot of interesting things we can announce and show, but we are going to be doling it out and hopefully get that snowball rolling down the hill and it will get really big.

Mike: And the last thing kind of, Carl, too is that five six thousand people, that is not a lot of people. You look at some of these other game crowdfunding campaigns whether they are games or other hardware that have brought in twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand, sixty, seventy thousand people.  So yeah, in our minds, yeah, two million was a high goal but the amount of people was not that high.  So, again, we wanted to satisfy the demands of our developers and give them a good starting base.  Right now, we are getting lots of people adding games to their pledges.  These developers are selling these games which is awesome.  You guys can all go into IndieGoGo and click, it is visible for everybody to see, you can see where everybody is donating or contributing to this thing which is kind of amazing they let that out to the public.  You can click right on there and see a list of everybody coming in and what they are paying.  It has been real heartening, people are buying the games they are buying extra controllers.  It has been really great, and we wanted to add value, Carl, into this campaign by giving them those campaign-only colors.  For that extra fifty dollars from the early bird level of two ninety-nine, which is a great price for this console, at fifty dollars that is where we really need to be to cover everything, so we thought if we need to go in at three fifty let’s give them their choice of colors for free.  We are not going to charge any extra for that.  So, they can come out of this campaign with a console that is never going to be made again in that particular color.  A lot of people can care less about that, but as gamers we know there are a lot of people that like to have that kind of exclusive thing.  So we have given them that opportunity to kind of add value to their system this way. If they did want to sell it down the road, it is going to be worth more than a system bought outside of the campaign or a black retail version.  Again, that is really, really cool.  All of the games that are part of the campaign are in custom campaign colors that are never going to be produced again too.  So, you know, when these get out into the wild, if we get the chance, or our developers get the chance to [unintelligible word] these games, you are going to be able to identify the games that were part of this campaign because they are going to be red, or gold, or silver, or translucent purple, or whatever, it is going to be really awesome.  We are just trying to have a lot of fun with this.  Gaming is about fun. I don’t know when the industry became so cynical, it really has.

Steve (interjecting): I know what day it was, but anyway…

Mike: Yeah, yeah, gaming should be fun.  We really want to say we appreciate everybody, again, whether they are the haters, I mean, we struck a chord.  People are passionate.  We don’t want to fault people for that.  People want this system.  We want to deliver it to them for the best price that we can.  Again, we are very appreciative that there are seventy-five pages of discussions over on AtariAge about this.  Even if they are terrible and dragging me through the mud, and everything else, people are talking about this.  I think that is very important, you know, people are passionate.  It is all because of what we are trying to bring out and, um, you know there are a lot of people that are now being influenced by some of this negativity and a lot of it has nothing to do with the system.  From day one on AtariAge, people were bashing it and bashing me and dragging me through the mud and I don’t know what–

John interjects: [chuckles] Nothing new there.

[John steps out for a quick break]

Mike: I mean I have done a podcast for eight or nine years and I know we’ve got lots of listeners that have enjoyed that over the time.  We have got our magazine that is out there, you know, we have delivered. We are starting on issue ten which just blows my mind.  We have awesome writers over there, I mean, these guys wouldn’t write for me if I was a schmuck.  I mean these are industry writers, we have a great team over there.  I have tried to surround myself with a great team over here and then our whole plan all along is to tie the media in the magazine to have content in there dedicated to our system.  We have got subscribers in over thirty-five countries, we have been shipping twenty, thirty thousand issues through Arcade Block.  We have got lots of readers, it is a great mechanism for us to help promote our developers and our ecosystem, um, you know it all fits together.  It is a beautiful, beautiful thing.  Why people are out there trying to, uh, you know, the constructive criticism is great but all of this hate, there are literally hateful–

Steve (interjecting): We don’t need to go into this.  The whole thing is, this thing costs money to build this.  From what we have access to, this is how much we are trying to get this as inexpensive as possible.  I mean, I don’t like seeing things costing three or four hundred dollars or whatever.  I wish it could be a hundred or two hundred dollars, we would love it to be there.  We could not bend the variables [lost to Skype issues not heard at time of recording] invested in us or whatever that would change the cost structure a lot.  But we don’t have it.

Mike: Yeah, this is the thing where it has to come from the organic growth from the crowd, right? Because if we went out to investors before we started this, and this has been a big crux of ours, we have had lots of conversations about crowdfunding versus trying to…doing this somehow on our own or whatever.  The problem is, and we’ve got lots of connections in the [industry] and lots of people that are retro, or the gaming industry, that want to see this brought forth but to go out to [investing] angels or VC [venture capitalists] and say, ‘We are bringing out this new cartridge-based system,’ they don’t get it.  You know what, Carl, maybe there is no market for this, maybe that is what we are seeing.  Maybe that is what we are seeing, but I don’t think so, and I would hate to write off this, I think people need this, I think the industry needs a shot in the arm.  [Unintelligible sentence].

You know, everything is going to go to the cloud, you know, the next set of systems that are coming out are separating gamers even more from their games.  At least for a segment of gamers that enjoy the classic mechanics and gameplay and graphics, we want to have a system that is going to be there for years and years.  Despite what the industry is doing over here, we don’t care.  Let them go that direction.  Let everything go to the cloud–no one is going to own nothing.  You know, we have grown up in this industry as, Carl, so have you, you have grown up playing cartridge based games.  We don’t want to see it done out.  Because of the Jag and because of these two great people that are sitting in front of me, John and Steve, you know, and all of these other supporters we have got and all of these developers that want to get on board with this thing, it is all there.  We have done as much as we can from a hardware level, from a development level, everything is in place.  It has taken a year or two to get it to this point.  Again, this is what it is, this is what we have got, this is the price that it is.  We really want people to support this and back it, not only for us but for our developers, and other developers, and developers that don’t even know they are going to be making games for this ten years from now, hopefully.  You know, this is what it is all about.  If anybody can find fault with that, I don’t know what to say.

Carl Williams

It is time gaming journalism takes its rightful place as proper sources and not fanboys giving free advertising. If you wish to support writers like Carl please use the links below. https://www.paypal.me/WCW https://www.patreon.com/CarlWilliams

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