Quoted from iceman44:It's frustrating only because it can be fixed. Most anything can if you are open to help.
Because John won't show anyone what the financial situation is, I think the only way you can say for certain that it can be fixed is if you assume the worst case scenario that all the money he has taken so far is gone, and from there you can still see a viable way to build the games. Any path that requires some of the money already collected will fail because he won't even tell you how much you have to work with, much less give any of it up if there is any left.
My guess is that, based on various reports from people here abut how much they are paid up on RAZA, at best you have about ~$4-5k per person left, so about $500k. Let's be generous and say all the AIW spots still owe The full $10k each, so $1m. $1.5m seems like a lot, but that's $6k per game at 250 games (and that is with generous assumptions about outstanding payments owed). It's hard to make regular games in well run pinball companies for 6k these days, much more so for complicated games with all this baggage and so many completely custom parts.
Going with the best idea on the table, converting everyone to MG, you first have to spend ~$100-$150k refunding $16k buyers back to the $10k price point, another ~$100k for a programmer, $??? For an animator for the screen graphics (this is my field, but I don't know the specs of what is needed so I can't price it), $??? for making JPOP'd Vendors whole, $??? For finishing the preproduction prototype to manufacturing specs, $??? For pre-manufacturing set-up and process training for your manufacturing partner, $??? For the BOM for ~225 games, $??? For your project manager, $??? For contingency and overages, and $??? For the mfg fees from your manufacturing partner.
I am assuming the fast guys filled in a lot of those question marks when they were trying to put together a plan, but I fail to see how any plan could work with the numbers we do know to even build out one machine, much less all three machines. Reasonable assumptions about all those numbers start to exceed $6k per machine real fast. If all the plans at this point worked on paper because they assumed John had x amount of money left, and would willingly hand it over, then I don't think those were very realistic. Unless I missed something and someone somewhere actually got some verification about how much money was left, and any real cooperation from John.