So uh yeah, the dev of NES indie Project Blue came forward on Reddit
pretty much confirming that the limprint pub First Press Games have ghosted them on payments and ETAs on their Famicom edition for Project Blue. In this AMA are a bunch of examples of laughable delays in communication, ghosting of payments, and basically reconfirming the 3 year delay for customers is not at all due to the dev... But because FPG just ghosts everyone for weeks on end.
If you preordered Chained Echoes through these guys, then uhhh, welp
Per the AMA from the project blue dev...
"I apologize for the length of this post, but I just want you to have a full idea of what working with these guys is like.
They have not shipped the bulk of the value that they received from Kickstarter in 2020. Like, almost all of the money is in the special editions.
Contractually, they had a certain amount of time to produce those editions, which had expired by summer of 2022. At that time, at the latest, editions were supposed to be made and we were supposed to be paid, in full.
Around that time I sent them an email outlining several concerns that I had, including unshipped copies of special editions, unpaid regular edition royalties, (which they began ignoring pretty much immediately after release and which I have only ever received after spending hours and hours writing emails trying to get paid) and many other things.
They are obligated to provide us with sales reports (which they have to this day never done) and pay us automatically, on a regular basis. I have, 3 years later, never once received a payment from them without having to spend hours of my life getting it.
Shortly thereafter I replied to the message asking again for a reply and was once again ignored. I sent another which was also ignored. How would you feel if you had a contract with somebody and they chose not to honor it, then you contacted them multiple times asking for resolution, and they just... never responded?
And they continued ignoring me and putting me off for the entire month of August, into September. For example, the first message I sent was on the first of August. They ignored it that week, went on "vacation" for the next, said on the 15th they'd 'get back to you' but did not. Finally on the 29th I sent a rather angry message.
At this time they placated me by replying to one of my demands and sending the promo copies they owed me, which was probably their cheapest option.
All throughout September they continued filibustering and not replying the more important financial requests. I have received excuses as lame as "we don't have internet access when we're not at the office" which is just absurd.
On Sept 2, I was told they would work out the remaining issues, it would take "no longer than a few weeks". On September 20th I asked for an update. No reply. Sept 26th I again ask for an update. Again, no reply.
On October 3rd I sent an email where I showed some pretty clear frustration and was told "we will get back to you in a few days"
On October 7th and 8th I again asked for updates that were ignored. At this point, "a few weeks" had become 5 weeks. On October 10th I again showed some real frustration and was told that "we told you to wait" when in fact that had promised me a reply "in a few days". If it seems as though am I'm being impatient, remember it's been over two months of "just a few days" at this point.
Finally in mid October I get the regular edition royalties they have not been paying for the last 6 months. So it took me from August until October to get the money that they were supposed to give me automatically. And they had managed to still not deal with the larger issues of dealing with special editions and the royalties on that. And this shit went on and on for the whole month of October and into November when I finally cornered them on special edition money that we should have received IN FULL months earlier.
And at that point I finally was able to work out a payment plan for something that 1) we should have gotten all of, and 2) we should have gotten without having to spend 3 months of my life arguing over.
That's just a sample. The whole last year has continued more or less in this fashion. To this very day, some of the issues I outlined on August 1st, 2022 have not been responded to nor dealt with. So I apologize for the headline, but I feel like it is really an understatement of how miserable it is to work with FPG.
I wonder if you would prefer "First Press Games forced me to give them an interest-free loan?"
As an addendum I just want to say, I make music as well as games. And so I work with a total of like 6-7 publishers. And every single one, except FPG, I have a friendly relationship with, that mostly consists of them sending me money without me having to cajole them, and us having friendly banter about things that we mutually appreciate."
So uh yeah
the ghosting to customers isnt just to customers
its to devs wanting their payment too WHAT THE FUCK
@gosokkyu i think you covered FPG when they did that blazing rangers game? May wanna let people know that they probably aren't getting anything from these guys...
(tagging doesn't ping anyone here fwiw, so you're lucky I caught this just as you posted it)
Yeah, I'm very casually acquainted with the creator of Blazing Rangers and these claims do make me want to ask how their experience has been... my suspicion, just based on how I've seen things play out in other situations, is that FPG may have reserved their more exploitative conduct to the smaller western devs that they surmised they could bully with less blowback, and that the JP devs might not have any interpersonal issues to speak of.
I'm not too invested in any of this limited-print stuff—I keep tabs on it to a degree, but virtually none of it is in any way appealing to me—but FPG's chronic failure to deliver is a bummer because whoever was choosing the games had a good eye for STG and I would've liked for there to be a boutique publisher out there who actually knew their shit, but we've instead been gifted with a company that expressly fucks over people I like. Ugh.
