Richmond, TX
Quoted from ZenTron:A lot of people have become successful and wealthy due to dumb luck. My point wasnt about the rise from middle to upper middle or upper class though. It was that some simply have more money and can afford to lose it. I paid $4870 for a NIB IMVE but with my budget i dont have $8,000 to drop on a speculative pin project. I can tell you there are enough members here to come up with $100,000.
$100k is only about 12 $8000 machines (with some deficits made up by those LE and LLE models and the smaller categories), so it's not unreasonable to assume they could sell that many presales, but what is nuts is how they went about it. Unlike the other boutiques, who might be able to get at least that many sign ups over time, by going through kickstarter, they were getting 100% of the money up front instead of on a refundable payment schedule. I think if you ask the other boutiques how that kind of proposition would go down with the moneybags pinside collectors you are describing, you might get a weary laugh.
Unlike your $4870 you spent on a machine you can see and know will arrive in a few months at most, asking $8000 upfront for a machine like this that only exists in promises from people who we had little reason to believe in the first place is a very different proposition. Add to that the context of this project coming at the tail end of a preorder era with tons of broken promises and missed deadlines where collector enthusiasm and patience is wearing thin, and you have an even less likely scenario. Add to that the abysmal PR campaign these guys ran, and all the continual digging displayed in this thread, and I am left with a ton of skepticism. I think those presales would have to come from mostly outside the pinside community, which is possible considering the wider audience a kickstarter staff pick gets. But still, that much money showing that little with that demo video? Still doesn't add up.
Even if this is 100% legit despite ALL the evidence we have seen, there is still the total lack of logic that they can actually create that many games and ramp up actual production on just that presales cash. So even if they get all that money, it's still highly unlikely they get to shipping games without additional capital.
Seriously, there are plenty of other projects out there that are much more fleshed out with none of the stink and suspicion on them, who have refundable payment plans who would absolutely benefit from this kind of blind faith investment. If somehow this is legit and these guys sucked $100k out of the market that could have supported hese other projects, then I hope to god they can figure out how to actually deliver those games. In some ways, a bot-scam to milk a fraction of that money might be preferable as it limits the damage, but it would do serious damage to the new pin market. Maybe we are all wrong and we will eat our words when games actually ship, but seeing as how this forum is their primary audience, they have a lot of work to do if they hope to sell many more that those initial pre-orders.
One tip, you might actually look up who the people you are lashing out against are before speaking.
