Modren

Oh yeah yeah, didn't mean to imply they made a lot of money, like I said it's basically nothing.
Did they really have 60 employees? I didn't find a lot of info about them.

i think this is a really interesting point when looking at the crypto world, which is full of scams and not-quite scams. one thought i've had is that a natural failure state of a financial scheme is to end up as a ponzi - the logic is maybe if we just dip into customer funds a little bit it will tide us over until we make a good trade and are in the black again. at the end, the money's gone. this was basically the madoff scheme as i understand it as well

did they set out to rip people off? not always, i do think some of these people believed they were legitimate at the outset at least. did they end up ripping people off in a way that's basically the same as a ponzi scheme, a classic scam? yes. it was certainly fraud, was it a scam? not sure

similarly a struggling game studio launching an unfinished flop looks like a rugpull, but it's not really the whole story. at least in this case they didn't walk away with or otherwise burn a bunch of other people's money, which goes a long way toward making it not really qualify as a scam to me

anyway thanks for prompting some interesting thinking

It feels like a rugpull without the final step. Best case (also occam's razor probably what actually happened), the Fntastic leadership were that delusional and were biting way off more than they could chew. That meme of a small group of industry "vets" building a dream MMO on r/gamedevclassifieds. They had a publisher(Mytona) that made casual titles, stuff that appears on my Kindle's ad screen. In a rug pull, they usually try to run away with the money, but instead the publisher is trying to give out refunds. I wonder if they were expecting an Early Access miracle or something. It feels like they were trying to build a narrative of a scrappy studio punching above their weight class, but with our current daily inundation of scams in our communications, as well as other early access mishaps, it just seems people were more willing to just point at a failing game and call fraud.

I'd argue, as someone who bought it, that propnite was an instance of deceit since their communication with players in the early days of its release was "don't worry, don't worry, we're going to fix things and add more content" and after enough time had passed that everyone forgot about it, they started promoting TDB

for all we know, the intent for TDB was to meet the bare minimum-viable-product expectation and drop it all the same, the only difference being that they realized even that was overscoped and cobbled something vaguely game-shaped from what they had

like others have said, just because it failed doesn't mean there wasn't dishonesty about what the ultimate intentions were. I read their subsequent choices as an attempt to hide that a grift attempt was made

and then it alllll blurs together horribly since there's a whole cottage industry in helping people who suck earnestly and with their whole ass pivot to selling $50 tshirts when their life collapses as a result of how much they suck

I see one of these mmos pop up at least once a month on Steam in my recommendations.

that's the thing, I've seen plenty of those over the years (hell, I was on a dev team for a while on a game that never even got released). the difference I've seen is that there's usually some sign that the decision made sense given their circumstances and/or was at least part of a good faith effort to deliver some part of what was promised

I think back to spacebase DF9, which did have a similar backlash at the time, but they made a legitimate case for why they were doing it given their history and present situation. it still represented a template of a good faith effort

if this dev was trying to avoid heat, then why release the thing at all? just shitcan it at that point and fade into obscurity along with countless other vaporware. I agree with you on the fact that they couldn't wait out the negative reception on this one, because that's historically what they've done on past releases and could get away with since they were much lower visibility (speaking as someone who made the mistake of buying propnite)

Executives are terrified of lawsuits, because it interferes with their scam! I am being a little sarcastic, but not entirely. The executive scam is always, in my opinion, to tell as few people as possible the whole truth, whether those people are inside or outside the company, and cash out as well as possible for themselves and any shareholders. This absolutely, repeatedly, includes telling no one inside and out fucking shit about anything until ship dat of a product and then throwing everyone under the bus.

I admit that it is good for developer resumes that the game shipped at all, but you don't go "oh, no" and close a company overnight. This would have been known and gamed out (in the loosest definition of the phrase) months ahead of time.

I doubt leads knew. Maybe some upper non-execs had some inkling. There are a few exceptions, but most executives will lie to your face for months if not years once shareholders are involved. They may be following the letter of laws (again, lawsuits causing issues), but following the mere letter while riding your exit strategy out still makes you a piece of shit, imo. So, sure, let's call it a scam. Many worse words could likely apply.