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[Ryo Hazuki]

Over the last day or so I've been seeing a lot of Twitter activity and criticism over this new kickstarter for a project called EarlyNinja. It seems they want to create a marketplace for Early Access games that's better than Steam and can ultimately give players a full refund if the game isn't finished.

They have a sleek Kickstarter page and website but a lot of criticism from prominent devs and other industry members (Mike Bithell, Ryan Morrison and Chris Dwyer) have been raising questions about how much they actually understand the business and if an Early Access marketplace is viable, especially as they're asking for 15% of each sale on their potential platform.

They have also been criticised for featuring quotes from popular YouTubers about Early Access and featuring indie games on their site in a poll without asking the respective people involved.

Here are some examples below of the tweets below:

Early Ninja responded with this post:

What a night!

Dear Gamers and Developers,

This morning we started reviewing all of the messages left on our social from our headquarters in London (sorry for the delay in the response!).

Our first thought was

When we first started EarlyNinja two years ago, our aim was (and still is today) to empower both developers and gamers to improve the current situation of early access gaming.

Our platform, while offering superior protection to consumer purchases, has always had the task of improving discoverability and promoting hard-working developers to help them emerge from the clutter of the market.

We help developers by charging half of what major platforms currently charge, and with the figure of the “Sensei”, a dedicated project manager/communication consultant from our staff who regularly follows the flow of the game and its interactions with the gaming community. We are currently working on even more ways to improve discoverability for indie developers.

For this reason, we recently launched a “Voting Portal” (not to be confused with an actual store, as we stated in the subtitle “Which games should we offer? Vote on your favorites!”). Based on the tweets received during these hours we understand that the voting portal has been raising all kinds of questions and concerns. We will be implementing the rightful amends on the voting portal to avoid any further misunderstandings. We ask developers to send an email to the address below to discuss the matter.

We apologize for any use of material that might have caused offense. It was not at all our intention and it was done with the aim of gathering user feedback through a simple poll. The message was unclear from our end, but the scope was of getting hints regarding which developers we should have contacted first among the thousand in the early access genre available on the market to start our screening process.
To be clear: as of today, we are not selling, promoting or hosting, any of the games on our poll.

We strongly believe that our idea, together with both gamers and developers’ feedback, can have a huge impact on the current state of the market and help everyone create and play better games.

Sincerely,

EarlyNinja Staff

PS: we are available for any media/dev/gamer inquiries.

This was then followed up by a really detailed article from Mike Bithell:

Some thoughts (and advice) for EarlyNinja

OK.. so, I saw your kickstarter yesterday, I took the mickey a bit on twitter, because crowdfunding a platform to ‘fix’ early access tickled my funny bone, the irony was too much for a Tuesday evening. But this morning you’ve made a formal response to the backlash generally, and it made me want to put down some thoughts. I’m going to assume good faith, but I’m also going to encourage you to research the medium, and check in on how you’re promoting yourselves a little. Please take this as constructive.

(For those who want to catch up, here’s the response http://blog.earlyninja.com/post/156349028553/what-a-night .. I’d also encourage visiting their site, reading their introduction and watching their video)


I agree. Early Access has its issues. On this aspect of your pitch, I think everyone can agree. Nobody likes to feel lied to or let down by a product and team they’ve invested in. While there’s certainly been a great deal of improvement on this stuff from Steam’s side, I’m sure they’d agree that there’s always room for improvement. That’s our common ground.

You’re overestimating your service’s value to a dev. 15%. Really? You advertise this as half of competitor platforms. Let’s put aside that these platforms provide clients and hardware (your roadmap lists Q4 2017 as a hopeful date for a client, which seems optimistic, and will presumably not be as feature rich as GOG or Steam at launch). On a purely marketing level, do you honestly think you can bring a game on your service even 1% of the eyeballs of such a competitor?

On this aspect, I’m willing to give some wiggle room. We’ve all got to start somewhere. But with no client til at least the end of the year, that kickstarter doesn’t look like nearly enough runway to keep your company going.

I know, the sensei are where your value lies this is where, and I don’t wish to be rude, I worry that your team is unfamiliar with the existing games business. You’re describing someone who looks after a project and gives feedback to the team on how things are going externally. So a publisher side producer meets community manager. There’s a number of issues with that. First, experience. If I work with a publisher, I expect my producer to have experience and wisdom, having shipped a number of products. That’s an expensive person for you to hire (spoilers, you might get two for a year on this kickstarter amount, if you pay them very badly). Second, That producer is not someone I pay for, they are the publisher’s insurance on their investment in my game, and part of their running costs. Selling a producer to a game company as added value is like charging me for the plate in a restaurant: I accept that at least part of my bill goes towards crockery maintenance, but I sort of expect a plate regardless of if its being used as a selling point.

(side note: I totally go to some restaurants for the awesome plates, and I’ve certainly worked with some producers who massively elevated our games. But I’m sure they weren’t cheap to their employers..)

Oh, and how many of these ‘sensei’ are you hiring? Because if this idea is popular, you’re going to need a lot of them to handle all that foot traffic with any kind of personal involvement as described.

But you’re not a publisher, you’re a platform not til Q4 2017 you aren’t.

You’re offering free games for backers do you have any games to offer yet? Because if you don’t, how can you promise such an item? If you build it they will come? OK. So who’s paying for the game you give away? Are you planning to cut deals with the devs you hope are coming for those steam keys? How much will you pay a unit? Not much, presumably, or you’ll need to spend most of your kickstarter money. It’s not a good look.. especially when…

You’re using copyrighted materials and other people’s stuff to promote yourselves without permission you have grabbed a bunch of art from games you don’t own, and are using it in an attempt to get paid. I’d think you were being nefarious and picking on defenseless indies if I didn’t see Ubisoft IP on your mockups. That shows a lack of understanding on your part. No amount of caveats and small print about voting is going to make that legally or creatively ok. Stop it. I’ve seen devs tweeting you requests to stop using their stuff, your business will require good, trusting relationships with devs, this isn’t a good start.

Ditto on youtubers you’re citing some pretty big names there… did you get permission? It’s considered a little rude to even use review quotes to sell a game without an OK first, but here you’re grabbing soundbites from two or three years back which on the surface look like endorsements. Youtubers are going to be a big part of your business, hell, they’re a big part of all our businesses now. Using their likenesses / avatars and logos without permission might not be a great idea.

Holding milestone payments is one of those ideas that makes a lot of sense to a fan of games who’s never made one, and I suspect is the idea this was built around. Except it doesn’t achieve the outcomes you state. Crucially, milestone payments are front loaded, because in real game dev, the most important thing in the world (besides making something awesome) is steady cash flow. Even a month with no cash coming in can kill a team *gestures to every story about a studio shut down ever*.

Milestones work pre-release and in private because there is room for both parties to work together, adjusting plans, so that a game actually comes out the other end. Publishers don’t generally use milestones as ransoms, because it’s in their best interest to get a game out at the budget planned for. Your system doesn’t encourage that, you are genuinely asking a studio to hand you the power to shut down their production immediately.

And pay you 15% for the privilege.

Have you spoken to a lawyer about the contracts? No really, this is a big one. Your milestones are going to have to be maddeningly specific if you want to cut a project off from their cash, or you’re going to have to make the contract favor you so much as to be genuinely predatory. Assuming good faith and a genuine desire to treat devs well, you’re going to have to put together some massive contracts, and each dev is going to have to get quite a bit of legal aid to parse and commit to what you’re asking for. That’s going to cost them. Good news for industry lawyers though … also consider the complexity of international deals.

Is your price going up once you have a client? So, it’s 15% right now, and I give you steam keys. A bad deal for me, but let’s say I do it.. I think you’re worth that cost. I give 15% to you. Once you have your own client, your value to me goes up, because now you’re providing all those awesome services. Willing to commit to keeping at that price point?

and finally, most importantly

None of this makes early access games better. Not even a little bit. Right now, shitty early access games are caught and mocked very, very quickly. They die on the vine because the PC community is a beautifully communicative lot. That’s good for consumers, because it’s genuinely tough to buy something without knowing it’s bad (and refunds can be sought if a game sucks.. a fact you kinda don’t mention anywhere). Projects fail or succeed quickly, and everyone moves on.

Your system is for the long term consumer.. “What if this game fails to get finished or feature complete”.. and to them, honestly, the answer should be to accept risk or not pay. Adding a middleman to sit on funds and accrue interest until a dev hits a milestone is certainly a cathartic way to stick the knife in on a project that let you down, but surely it’d be easier to only buy games you want to play, or want to take a risk on? You could also end up killing a studio that is only a month away from a turn around. Gamers seem to be getting this, with a general righting of the boat (ignoring crap games) that’s kicked in since all those two year old quotes from pundits on your page.

…

I don’t think you’re bad people, you all look lovely in your team photo, but this idea seems riddled with misunderstandings about game production, and some ill thought out choices in terms of promotion. I’d encourage you to step back, readdress some of the core ideas that got you here, and relaunch with something badass that the development community and gamers can really get behind. Those of us who work hard to make great games (and occasionally succeed) will never shy away from a service that genuinely helps us to do so

Best of luck,

Mike

EarlyNinja then responded to this in a very blunt response by calling all the criticism a "Witch Hunt".

Full response: http://blog.earlyninja.com/post/156355277193/re-some-thoughts-and-advice-for-earlyninja

It seems there is definitely a lot of questions and a lot of people saying this isn't a great idea. This question was definitely interesting:

Also this:

This is all ongoing so I'm curious to see how this develops but it doesn't seem to be going well for them right now.

 

[Ryo Hazuki]

And already posted. My bad: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1337610