Because nobody would ever assume this liability, the project would be dead if that were part of the deal.

probably due to some type of personal relationship btwn Jpop and Bill.I can't help but think Bill is helping Jpop "survive" this mess.

we never got an answer on who composed that last ditch,don't sue me, letter/contract.

Why would anybody buy out John's liabilities? They are about $1.3 MILLION. Everything he has is not worth $100K. That's everything.

But the thing is, he's offering to "make people whole" and also pay the vendors, so essentially he's taking on the debt anyway. Why not do it above-board and legal?

Well, because this way he can SAY he will but he's under no obligation to actually do it, and in the meantime he can snake out what little value there is at Zidware before it gets locked up in litigation.

I guess I'm just a pessimist, but that's the logical conclusion.

After Jpops shop is cleaned out and moved to Canada,whats the recourse for US investors?

What,if any, laws cover the moving of "assets" to Canada.

I don't think he "snaked it out," I think he "saved it" from what John is currently doing...see website...see blog...see walls missing art from a recent visit...

One item is saved and Bill repeatedly states "It belongs to all of the owners."

Sorry, duplicate. Ugh!

More words. Right now it belongs to Bill.

Anyway, there's another two of them back in that shop, plus who knows what else.

when it comes to pinball I go with "snaked it out"over "saved it" every time

https://m.facebook.com/john.popadiuk?refsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fjohn.popadiuk&feed_ufi=comments

Some real defenders on Facebook.

So it was the 'bad advice' we gave John that caused this mess, and pinsiders are a 'pack of dogs' Unbelievable:
image.jpg

No business person in their right mind would ever take on the full liabilities of a company that they are buying. Too much hidden possibility for failure. Lawyers, bankers, and investors, won't allow this.

That is why the new company always has a slightly different name and is formed to acquire the assets of the failed company not the entire company.

If Bill is offering to "make people whole" then he is doing this selectively by choice. This "goodwill" makes sense as it allows him to salvage some customers and faith in the pinball community. I'm sure the extent of his debt coverage will be a learning process for Bill and for the rest of us.

Don't expect there to be blanket coverage. That doesn't make good business sense and after all, that's what this is all about.

What I don't get is... with the advancements in pin games like PinballArcade now.. and the proven market for it.. why don't these idea people focus on making a VIRTUAL game first... get the concept, desirability, rules, art, etc all done and proven.. THEN take on the 'pinball is hard' portion of physically making games.

Yes, Yes, I know.. you can't design the same kinds of games without physically playing them... but you sure can build a game that plays well virtually, and you can prove it without huge amounts of capital costs. Then go and refine the game into an even BETTER physically playing game when you prototype it and take it onwards towards production.

MMR was less risky because.. it was MM! It was a known commodity. We hear a common number about taking a million dollars to bring a game through development... surely it doesn't take a million dollars to create a virtual pin.

Flush out the concept, make some money selling it recouping your costs, then shop it to be physically produced. Yes, the virtual pins will cannibalize SOME of your market potential... but its not going to displace your potential.

I demand a thread just for this!!!

Quick question:After MG is shown at NW where does this prototype go?

Where will it reside?

But the thing is, this deal as structured - the license - will be revoked as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. This is virtually guaranteed. If you buy the company and assume the debt, you at least maintain control of the IP. Or, alternatively, you let it fail and pick up the IP at auction, but that's way more messy.

But the third option is, get the physical assets out of his hands before the collapse and have the ultimate collectable. The license fails, the deal evaporates and everyone is out their million dollars, but one lucky guy has a flipping game.

There's a simple logic to the argument. Occam's Razor and all that.

Honestly I felt people were jumping to huge conclusions based on the photos to start with. Because one room of a building is empty.. we assume no one is there? Less we forget the actual working space is in another area and it's a one man operation?

Not saying he was there... but the # of conclusions drawn from them were insane and very wishy-washy.

Thats why I asked the ? in my last post.It will also be in Canada which could mean something or nothing

It'll be in NW Canada, which is where Bill is.

Some might argue that SkitB abd Jpop did indeed sell a "virtual game"

But, seriously, Ive thought the same thing.... as a Virtual cabinet owner, Ive wondered why they havent leveraged the platform for development, game testing, rules testing, etc.

On a related note, there are also some gifted folks that are creating original designs and tables in that community.... it seems like there might be some room for some cross-over there as well.

The license will not be revoked due to the bankruptcy. And at any rate, even if the license was only valid for the next couple weeks, it allows Bill to complete the 1 game, bring it to shows and test the waters to see if it would be worth buying the IP.

Bill & PDXMonkey play a game of MG against each other...winner keeps it.

I hear you on the silo. Zidware was looking for a "hardware/software solution" and talking to us about one since this time last year because P-ROC was "too expensive" and "people kept abandoning him." But reading these comments about hardware/software remind me of Gerry's comments made somewhere about someone ripping off his work after getting his support. Of course at the time I thought it was a jab at us, but later learned he was referring to someone else who was ACTUALLY making hardware to take advantage of the software in the P-ROC community and cut Gerry's controller out of the BOM. Which even though I know Gerry has zero love for what FAST is doing and we are accused all the time of "ripping off P-ROC", I still think it's a shitty move to try and take advantage of the P-ROC communities willingness to help in software developement with the assumption it would be run on a P-ROC, only to target other hardware with it in the end. Just bad business and not how you treat people.

I knew based on Eric's posts on Pinside that he had been involved to some degree at some period of time, but didn't learn of applejuice's involvement (though at the time it was just as an unnamed developer) until after our visit last fall.

I am glad to hear that applejuice had a flipping game a long time ago because it is truly not hard to do. I never understood why getting a "flipping whitewood" was being treated like a major milestone. In reality it's the "I can work on a pinball game!" minimum requirement for for saying so. This is why I was so confused about the game supposedly not flipping yet. I told John to send us a playfield. Not because we were unwilling to go out to his shop, it just wasn't necessary. We had left hardware with John when in Chicago and yet were never connected to people doing the actual integration work. I can talk someone through getting a flipping white wood going with our FAST hardware over the phone in a few mins, so it would have been so easy.

Bleh. Over and over again, we have learned how much more effort was put into making it harder for people to be productive on these games than actually than just coordinating their development. All John had to do at any time was just stand back and say "this is my team!" and just let everyone do their work. He could have coasted on that for years and years and been the rockstar he wanted to.

Aaron
FAST Pinball

In that case it's Monkeys...he's a damn good player.

Running the business (even poorly) or building other products with revenue they took in on promises of future deliverables is not illegal. Stupid and destined to fail.. yes. Illegal? No

JPOP can argue he is part of an elite handful of people in the world with the experience to do this kind of work - with a resume including the industry greats. He's doing this full time... do you think a judge wouldn't agree he couldn't pay himself an elite salary?

You'd have a pretty high standard to cross to paint his actions as criminal or not inline with the corporation's interests.

Or they could just smack each other with stacks of money, loser is whoever passes out first.

It's not 2004 anymore guys... page rank is way more balanced than simply having the name in the URL and/or repeating the name a dozen times (like someone did in the skit-B thread... amazing)

having the thread linked everywhere is far more weighty. So tell everyone to link their facebook pages, blogs, etc.

True enough, but paying oneself a very high salary, and selling games that you know won't get into people's hands, is not only 100% wrong, no matter who's moral compass you are looking at, it's fraudulent.

I like snarky ben

John was on the Proc forums for a while, fishing for information (and volunteers)
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=628

Or put another way... taking product off your webpage you no longer are promoting.. or stop promoting things you are no longer actively engaged in. Removing stale advertising is not destruction of evidence.

Sometimes this site likes to make monumental leaps in the 'consequences' of things that could never ever hold up to scrutiny.

Is it ? I am being serious. Lets say I start a legit company. I ask money for a game that will be delivered in 2 years. Lets assume I raise 2 million. I get a big office, pay myself a reasonable salary (80k a year) and hire a bunch of expensive programmers. 1 year later the game has completely failed and there is 0 money left. Was is left to show is a few million lines of codes and an alpha state game.

Did I scam people or just had a poor business plan to start with ? What would be criminal of failing a business ? I am not trying to defend JPOP in anyway, but wasn't this mess a failure from the start ?

Don't worry, THIS is still up:

http://biblepinball.org/

Coming just in time for Rapture!

I'm going to suggest to Pintasia that as soon as the game is fixed up, ramps, missing parts, etc, you shoot & post a video of a game being played on it. Do this BEFORE you move the game to the west coast.

There is a lot of cynicism and pessimism, for good reason, and a TON of pressure of debuting the game at this show. If the game can be shown playing before you bring it to the show, it will take some of the pressure off of expectations.

It seems like a recipe for disaster to keep things on the down low this last week, and if the show doesn't go 100% perfectly it will be another shit storm.

And if you can't shoot a good video, then what's the point of bringing it to the show? It'll just be a clusterF again.

Happens all the time. Kickstarters fail like that on a daily basis. People funded a startup that wasn't successful, they didn't order games.

I've been thinking the same.

The big difference with SkitB is he actively misled and misrepresented the license issue. This might not be so clearcut.

Back when the SkitB issue was hot I recall chatting with a friend who works in the local DA's office... I explained some of the issue and he was FAR more incredulous that so many people would ship off money (some writing checks!) to SkitB then he was at SkitB's failure.

Guess he just doesn't understand pinball economics...

Ok, let's put it this way.. your construction company is building an office building. If you failed to pay one of your employees, does that employee have the right to lay claim to the building because you didn't pay him? No

When you are building, you are not the employee... you are providing a service/product on terms of payment/delivery. (you also have explicit laws protecting your business from nonpayment) When you are a employee (even contracted) you are working for the employer, not yourself. Virtually all employment agreements include clauses that say the company owns everything you do or think of while employed. The difference would be is if these guys built stuff as their own company and then sold the RESULT to zidware.. then they'd be more like a supplier who didn't get paid. But if they were building things as contract employees.. or did not define explicit ownership rights/licensing rights.. payment is moot. They were working for zidware, on zidware's product, under zidware's direction.

It's a failed business. The problem lies more in the deceit and coverup of the state of the games these past couple of years, promises of "reveals", terrible customer service, lack of transparency, etc.

There was probably a way for John to fail with some grace and understanding. That went out the window some time ago.

I think they can just set the bar low. "Come see MG in its current state." They aren't pledging to have the game done or anything. Whether Pintasia's plans work out or not, at least there has been the flood of new information about the state of things.

Aaron
FAST Pinball

Stay Tuned

What is that current state? The faster we know it the better. Because if we wait for the show, and there's a lot of "all this for THAT?", there is probably no recovery from that.

Expectations have been repeatedly set HIGH because we've been told time and time again from people "inside" that the game is "near complete", yada yada.. So if it's anything less than that, that better be disclosed quick as a way of getting ahead of another shit storm.

Really? You've concluded that the explanation requiring the fewest number of assumptions is that Bill is investing tons of time and money finishing Magic Girl and dragging it (and Zombie Yeti) half way across the country not in a desperate (and likely doomed) attempt to get the game into actual production, but instead in a needlessly convoluted false manufacturing scheme whose sole purpose is to create for himself a one-of-a-kind collector's item, and simultaneously make him a pariah in the pinball community? I'm not sure that the application of cold logic inexorably leads to that result ...

Think this through again -- if all Bill wanted was a personal copy of Magic Girl, here's what he'd do: pay JPop a few grand for a non-exclusive license to make a single copy of the game, including copies of all the necessary art files, code and schematics (JPop almost certainly would have gone for this given his money problems). Then sit back and have a copy built at his leisure with no worries about having assets sucked back into the nearly inevitable bankruptcy. Much cheaper and easier than the scheme you've attributed to him.

And let's not forget.... this is a game that still has a $16k price tag on it.

...and a plan that expects all RAZA and AIW buyers to fork over more money to get in on the $16k game they didn't order. I still don't see how the these people are going to get any satisfaction from hanging in with Pintasia's plan....that's 100+ people out of a huge sum of money, and they're not going to let Jplop get away with it.

Being 'wrong' is not fraudulent. If his intent all along (even if making poor judgements) is to build the games.. it's not fraud to fail to deliver them. He didn't setup a fake company to dupe people into giving him money. He convinced people to give him money to make his visions real.

Taking orders even when the company is on the ropes.. could be argued as legit as well. The company needs more revenue to stay afloat.. so why not take the revenue if it can be argued it will legitimately help the company reach the goal to generate more revenue.

The worst angle he is probably exposed on is the lack of transparency and if there were factors that he failed to disclose that would have made the business no longer viable and instead was taking money to help himself vs the company. But again, a very high barrier to cross.

We must remember we are dealing with terms here that have legal definitions and standards.

Failed businesses - even poorly ran ones - do not equate to fraud.

Good neighbor? Common Good? "the right thing"? - certainly none of these... but founder that runs his business right into the wall.. even if he accidentally steered into the wall.. is not fraud simply because he failed.

blegh

well pintasia has only said 'flippable' - and we've seen what code Jim has done previously. It shouldn't be that hard for level headed people to understand it's not going to be much more than a flippable whitewood with basic scoring... but instead this whitewood has art and inserts. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

We've all well established John has no credibility... so why would anyone work their expectations up over what he's said? Only the people that WANT to be riled up. Manage your own expectations... don't demand someone else do it for you.

Even though most people aren't expecting a finished game, I'd imagine for some (even as forgiving as pinball folk are), that nothing is ever going to live up to the expectations of a mass produced 16k game that took 4 years to develop. Remember when duke nukem forever came out 12 years later? Everyone hated the rushed programming with linear levels, and there were competition games that were far deeper and more detailed (with better loading times). It was in the bargain bin for $5 after only being out a few months.

Yes, I am being serious. I did not say anything in my post about criminal. I stated wrong and fraudulent. From what we have heard here, john was trying to sell pins, he knew full well he was not going to fulfill. That my friend is 100% wrong. 'Character' is what we in the civil world Judge (rightly or wrongly) people. I would go as far to say, that is one of the few standards we have left. Once we start questioning poor 'character', say goodbye to society, and say hello to chaos. A quick look in the dictionary, indicates that character refers to integrity and honesty. There is quite a bit of evidence lately that would indicate that not much 'character' has been shown. If society says stealing things (taking something, but not providing the goods paid for) is not wrong, I would say that is a problem. John may not have started out that way, and he may be a terrible businessman, which he has admitted to, but his behaviors in the tail end of this fiasco, is very telling. I am all about forgiveness, and if I had lost thousands, I would be very upset, but I would end up forgiving John, if he was remorseful. People can change. So can John, but at this point in time, I would not trust him. I would feel sorry for him. He would have to earn back trust. Lots of people are fraudulent, dishonest, and are not in jail. What the judicial system is willing to go after people for, and what is truth, is totally different. That's a whole different subject, I won't get into here. Forgiveness is a big deal. The faster people here forgive John, they will be happier for it. Holding onto grudges will only affect the person who holds onto that grudge. that's my 2 cents. It won't be easy to forgive either. It's like building pinball machines...it's hard.

I know you mean well and are trying to protect Zidware customers given your experience with Predator, but I'm afraid that you're once again giving suspect legal advice. If a Zidware/JPop bankruptcy is imminent, which seems pretty likely to me too, then there's no obvious benefit in rushing to pay a lawyer to get a civil complaint filed. Bankruptcy "pauses" almost all pending civil cases anyway, so you'd be out your legal costs and in no better position than buyers that just wait to file a proof of claim with the bankruptcy court.

If you want to try and stop the removal of assets (obviously already occuring) then the quicker you act, the better.

If you want to start the greater eye of scrutiny on this liscense 'deal' between jpop and pintasia then the quicker the better.

There are LOTS of reasons that it is worthwhile to pay a couple hunder to have a claim started.