ere at Cliqist we make it a habit to camp out on Kickstarter all day, hitting refresh in order to see what new campaigns pop up. Sometimes they’re fantastic, other times they’re a little sad. Then there are campaigns that are just confusing; such is the case with the Last Year Kickstarter by James Matthew Wearing. When the Last Year Kickstarter launched on November 4th it seemed like yet another campaign destined for failure. Sure, there was some fantastic artwork to go along with the intriguing game concept, but there was a complete lack of game footage or screenshots. On top of that, the developer information raised some alarm bells; which I’ll get into later. After a brief email exchange with another Cliqist writer it was decided that we wouldn’t feature the game; it was just too risky. A number of other sites did though, including a number of big name sites far larger than Cliqist. The extent of our coverage was in our weekly Kickstarter recap, where the entry for Last Year states “An interesting concept of a game that several sites have been reporting on breathlessly, unfortunately there’s no game.” I checked back in with the campaign about a week after it launched and it looked dead in the water, having only raised about $4,500cad of its $50,000cad goal. Unfortunately, even when a campaign looks pretty, sounds cool, and gets some solid coverage, it still doesn’t happen.
But it did happen, and that’s the worrying part.
A few days ago I was going through a list of campaigns ending soon and noticed that not only had the Last Year Kickstarter met its funding goal, it smashed it. How was it that a holiday season campaign with no developer and no game to show had raised over $80,000cad? After some digging I started getting a sinking feeling: is the Kickstarter for Last Year a scam? Is it something worse? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t as simple as it was with Areal, Dark Skyes, and other Kickstarter disasters. Let’s take a look at the evidence and see where it takes us.
[divider]The Campaign
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t first glance the Last Year Kickstarter doesn’t look suspicious, in fact its pretty average. Sure, the backer rewards aren’t anything to write home about; you may not want six copies of any game, but at least you’re not being promised something that seems entirely unrealistic. The artwork looks fantastic, the game sounds great, and the developer touts an impressive body of work. The bizarre backer levels are certainly a curiosity (having all the tiers so close and not including a couple high level ones isn’t the way to do it folks), but they point to someone in need of campaign help, not a scammer.Unfortunately, a closer look reveals a number very real issues. The great looking artwork was all that anyone had to go on for a few weeks. There isn’t a screenshot to be seen, except maybe for this one that makes a clumsy attempt at a UI overlay.
Is that worth $50k?
How about some gameplay footage? Check it out.
Ok, so calling it “game footage” is stretching things pretty far. And in case you’re curious, yes, that’s all of the game that’s been shown, and even that wasn’t released until November 25th.
Someone asking for tens of thousands of dollars on Kickstarter with nothing to show isn’t new, it happens every day in fact. Usually those campaigns don’t go very far though; at least they haven’t since the Kickstarter golden age of 2 years ago. The thing that’s unique about the Last Year Kickstarter is that nothing has been shown, and yet backers and game media are fawning over it and not asking questions. But hey, it’s not uncommon for developers to make a killing on Kickstarter based on their name alone. So who is the developer of Last Year?
[divider]The Developer
[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ames Matthew Wearing is an industry veteran with a number of triple A titles under his belt. He’s partially responsible for bringing such gems as Assassin’s Creed 2, Crysis, Far Cry 3, Assassin’s Creed 3 (hey, I love it!), and many more to market.What the main page of the campaign fails to mention is that James worked on those titles as an audio guy. What does being an audio engineer have to do with making your own game? James addressed that in an update on November 9th, stating in part:
“…being a sound designer doesn’t auto-make you an animator or a genius programmer but you do learn how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. At least thats how I learned.”
Sounds great! This would be the point where we see some examples of James’ design or coding work; but unfortunately there’s nothing; just those pretty pieces of concept art and some “gameplay footage.” Running a Kickstarter to pay someone to develop the game for you isn’t unheard of, but it’s not a great idea. It’s even worse for backers when there’s no word on who the developers are. James has been asked multiple times for details on who will be developing the game, but it’s been radio silence. What happens when these mystery developers need more money due to delays? What’s the backup plan? It’s at this point that a detailed financial plan would come in handy. Let’s take a look at that, shall we?
[divider]The Budget
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]’m not sure how to put this politely. There is no detailed financial plan for Last Year. None. A backer named Mukilan Suresh asked for one though, but look at how that turned out.
Notice how James is very involved in the comments section, and in the midst of answering several other backer questions flies right past the one of real substance. Donating money to a project without having a rough idea how that money will be spent is insane, especially when the person collecting the money hasn’t made a game of their own, and hasn’t shown a proof of concept. Who would give money to that sort of project?
[divider]The Backers
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s of this writing there are 3,570 backers of the Last Year Kickstarter campaign, contributing a total of $99,713cad. Those are some pretty good numbers, especially when you consider what a slow start the campaign had.So who are these backers? Between November 4th and December 1st a total of 288 people backed the Last Year Kickstarter. Then, very suddenly, on December 2nd 523 new backers jumped on board. This can’t be chalked up to the usual rush we see in the closing days of many campaigns, this one still had 17 days left.
via Kicktraq
via Kicktraq
Another curious element of this sudden influx is how unengaged those new backers were. The comments per day had a slight increase as a result of hundreds of new people jumping on board, but not what you would expect.
via Kicktraq
When Kickstarter launched their redesign a couple weeks ago they made it more difficult to see who is backing a project. Thankfully you can still get a list by adding /backers to the end of a campaign’s URL. What’s the backer list for Last Year look like? Scroll down to a couple weeks ago (based on backer per day count) and you’ll see something along these lines.
A sea of backers with no profile pictures, no location, and no other backed projects.
I tossed the backer list into an excel file and did a random sampling of 100. I found that 63 had backed no other projects, and 24 had backed one other project. Of the total 3570 backers, 1359 haven’t backed any other projects, and 853 had backed just one other project. Of the 100 I did an audit on, 92 joined Kickstarter in December of 2014. Is it possible that Last Year has drawn tons of new people to Kickstarter? Sure, but it’s difficult to see how that happened. While the game has received a fair amount of press, nearly all of that happened in the first week of the campaigns launch, and then once it got funded. There was very little press activity in the days leading up to the backer boost. James made a post to Dorkly on December 2nd that proved to be moderately popular with 142 comments, but it’s unlikely that it drew hundreds of people to give thousands of dollars to the campaign.
Are there a large number of straw (i.e. fake) backers in the Last Year Kickstarter? My feeling is that yes, yes there are. I could certainly be wrong, it’s possible the Last Year Kickstarter is the world’s first example of a campaign hitting its stride 4 weeks into a 6 week campaign as a result of almost no press.
[divider]Outrise
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]eaving the backer questions aside, it looks like James is going to get his money. There’s only a day left in the campaign at this point, and it’s unlikely tons of people are going to pull out. What sort of game awaits them? An “asymmetrical multiplayer” game in which a group of players must work together to fight off a larger, player controlled, opponent. Sounds great!
Looking into James’ work history we find a game he’s billed as the Project Lead on called Outrise that’s described as an “asymmetrical multiplayer” game in which a group of players must work together to fight off a larger, player controlled, opponent. I didn’t even copy/paste that last sentence, the games are that similar in concept. To be fair, while Outrise and Last Year have similar high level descriptions, they’re certainly different games. One is a sci-fi game, and the other is horror. One received a ton of press last January from several large gaming sites, and the other is asking for donations on Kickstarter. One has a Facebook page and a Twitter account that haven’t been updated since January 2014, and the other is asking for donations on Kickstarter. One appears to be dead in the water, and other is asking for donations on Kickstarter.
So what’s the point? Plenty of developers start projects, only to eventually cancel them for various reasons. While it would be nice if they let their fans know when that happened, they’re certainly under no obligation to do so. Last Year is different in that it’s not just a dream project, it’s a dream project that’s being funded with other peoples’ money. With Outrise James has shown that he’s willing abandon a project without telling anyone. Will he do the same with Last Year?
[divider]So what does James have to say about all of this? I sent him the following email a couple times over the past few days, and even posted the same questions to the Kickstarter:
Unfortunately he has yet to respond, and I doubt he will.
That still leaves us with the big question. Is the Last Year Kickstarter a scam? Believe it or not, I don’t think it is. However, I do believe it’s something worse than a scam. In Last Year we have a campaign that backers and media are buying into without doing any sort of due diligence. People love blasting crowdfunding as one failure after another, and while that may be unfair there’s a certain level of truth to it. Over the past few years we’ve seen a number of scams, but we’ve seen far more examples of developers getting in over their head both financially and development wise. My fear is that instead of asking questions like “What did people expect, there was no game to show!” or “They gave $100k to someone that wasn’t even the actual developer?” ahead of time, they’ll be asking them a year from now when Last Year is MIA. There are too many cautionary tales on Kickstarter, and unfortunately Last Year is destined to be yet another.
It may also be worth looking at this video from Dec 15 from the Super Best Friends channel- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpcdhqiFf9E
This is why I chose to back this project.
Thanks for the link Dave! The lack of skepticism in the video is alarming. I will say though, I agree with him saying that he hopes the game turns out great, it’s a really cool idea that could make for a fun game. Can’t wait to hopefully play it one day, although I doubt we’ll be getting a review copy 🙂
Well, I am one of those people who have no profile picture, no previous backed games and no detail on my profile. Because I made the account to back Last Year. In also posted a maximum of two comments on it before I left on holiday, and so I have not been involved in any more discussion.
);
[…] funded horror survival game Last Year a couple times here on Cliqist. First there were some concerns with how the game was being funded, and how prepared the developers were to deliver on their […]
The huge influx in backers, according to some older backers, was because someone posted a pic about it on Imgur and it ended up on the front page. That might explain why so many backers are new.
Good callout on the imgur thing, although I was skeptical when I saw it still. It has a ton of views, but a lot of the comments simply talk about not backing and just upvoting. But hey, I’ve definitely been wrong before, so maybe the imgur thing brought in a ton of people new to Kickstarter. Still skeptical though :/
I can’t say I agree that it’s suspicious that it gained a lot of attention later on. That happens a lot with projects, especially when the creator is not already well known for creating big name titles (audio work does not count). It’s the concept that really takes viewers by storm rather than the reputation in this case. As for why it gained backers so late into the game, it just simply went viral after existing for a long time. That happens all the time. Just look at the youtube videos that went viral years ago. When someone posts something to imgur, it’ll pick up pace and then end up on reddit, 4chan, facebook, etc. And then youtubers will start to notice and start pushing that on their viewers. I can vouch it’s legitimacy because I have been in contact with Mr. Wearing through email about the project. I am looking to audition as a voice actor. He said he’d consider it and that when the script is done, he would send me a few lines to record what I’ve got in context to the characters he has in mind.
So, that Last Year game’s kickstarter page is currently locked down because of an IP dispute from Crystal Lake Entertainment (Friday the 13th). The game certainly had some nods to that film, but as someone who didn’t back the kickstarter, but looked at it while it was in progress, I figured it would be one of those ‘change some assets and get back to work’ things, but wanted to check the news for info.
The closest I found, though, was this. Which was an interesting read, and those kinds of sudden rises makes me suspicious, too, but a lot of your ‘evidence’ wasn’t worth bringing up except to pad your article.
In the sample from the comments, you show a long line of questions being answered and the one question being ignored, but just from that image how are we supposed to believe that he wasn’t answering in chronological order and that answer would have come further along? And the suggestion that comments didn’t pick up at all after the boom in backers seems patently false (http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/lastyear/last-year-5-vs-1-multiplayer-survival-horror/#chart-daily) even if I might expect more.
Also, the fact that so many of the accounts don’t have profile pictures set up? I’ve been on Kickstarter for almost three years, backed over 700 projects, and I still haven’t used a profile picture because, frankly, I like the little square design more than anything I would want to add. It’s a pretty useless piece of flair in a website that for many of us is a place focused entirely on the projects themselves, while we’re just along for the ride.
You had plenty to be suspicious of without these leaps that held you back.
You definitely raise some good points, and I’m by no means an expert. However, when looking at backers (for example), it’s not just a matter of looking at the profile pictures, but also the numbers backed. If I saw someone in the backer list with just a generic name listed, but dozens (or hundreds) of projects backed, then that doesn’t raise an alarm. The image certainly makes it difficult to tell the full story of that particular comment train. That’s feedback for me to ensure I do a better job of capturing more of the comments to help illustrate the point. The issue was that he was answering chronologically, but skipped over the one in question in favor of answering other questions. Multiple times throughout the campaign people asked slightly tough questions (budget allocation, status of his previous project), and they were ignored.
I actually did hear back from him after the article was published, however he didn’t really address the questions I raised. His comments mostly centered on me not being nice. I’ve offered to reprint word-for-word any statement he’d like to make, but he has yet to take me up on the offer.
Thanks again for the feedback. My apologies for gaps in the piece. In the future I’ll try and do a better job of getting to the real meat of the issue in situations like this (which in my mind is the developers lack of experience, status of the previous project, and financial planning.)
I know I’m late to the party. I remember reading somewhere when the lawsuit with the Friday the 13th studio was going on; that he apparently received nearly half a million dollars to make Outrise from backers. Rumor is the money was never returned. Which is one of the reason why Kickstarter had a revamp of their policy back in 2014 that would protect them against any financial responsibilities pertaining to projects on the site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LastYear/comments/2qbzzf/has_anyone_checked_out_james_last_project_outrise/ The possiblity of it being a scam is slowly growing, these people make good points. Plus, the fact someone says that James said that Greg Micek’s Claims were false are quite odd. Granted, I just joined Disqus today, and found out about Last Year today (That wording made me feel stupid, guh!), so you shouldn’t trust me, you should trust my gut when I say “Be very suspicious of this project”. And, not only this, but the person who said they talked to James? look at all their posts on reddit 😐 https://www.reddit.com/user/Nerzry
Yeah the jury is still out on everything unfortunately. On one hand James is updating backers once every 6 weeks or so, so that’s pretty good. There’s also the money he got from the Canadian Media Fund. Unfortunately there’s still no official website, new game assets, development team details, or engagement with backers from James.
I know I’m a bit late, but I believe I have found the reason for the sudden boost in funding for the game on Dec. 2. On a content aggregator website named FunnyJunk, most notable for getting into a lawsuit with The Oatmeal, one of the most popular users on the site, named joshlol, posted a description of the game with a link to the Kickstarter. He received thousands of “likes” on the post, enough to justify the huge leap in funding the campaign had. It all makes sense now.
Link to the post: http://www.funnyjunk.com/Last+year+5+vs+1+multiplayer+survival/funny-pictures/5374995/