Yooka-Laylee has been one of the most divisive games
in recent memory with most falling somewhere between having neutral and negative feelings.
I made the case for it being a bad collectathon, but right now I want to look at whether it
was a good kickstarter or if there were some less wholesome intentions from playtonic or
potentially some elements of a scam.
I want to be clear it was not a scam, there are kickstarters who never deliver their product
and those are scams, but that doesn't mean Yooka-Laylee cannot be scammy.
Playtonic asked for 175,000 pounds, a little below a quarter of a million in US dollars,
for the base game no bells and whistles.
That is a lot of money for an indie, not massive game, but giving Playtonic the benefit of
the doubt, they were all experienced longtime developers.
These guys had numerous great games under their belt and they always had been paid pretty
well.
Some of them had families, they can't realistically pay themselves change and still pay their
bills and take care of their family; they are going to have to still pay themselves
close to what they had been paid.
Starting a studio isn't cheap
either, you have to buy computers and program licenses, you have to buy or rent an office
and pay the electricity and heating bills.
They may have actually asked a little low, but any specifics about this base goal are
just speculation.
Maybe they could have more than managed with that base goal.
For an additional 100,000 pounds or just under 140,000 US dollars, they promised on boss
for each world and that the boss music would be good.
Considering there are 5 worlds, that is 28,000 dollars for each boss covered in this goal.
I find that a little high, not completely out of line, but I think plenty of devs could
get a boss and some made for 28,000 dollars, at the very least, each boss would have a
solid concept and be very polished.
Something not true for the bosses in Yooka-Laylee.
The first boss is a sentient ramp and has rolling logs with terrible collision that
can catch you in the air.
If for whatever reason you are unable to use the roll move to travel up the ramp, you will
be locked, unable to jump, into sliding down the ramp, almost always hitting a log you
can't see and taking damage.
The second boss is an ice block you don't fight, you instead light torches and wait
for him to melt.
The other bosses are a little rough and sometimes cheap, but come a lot closer to being a polished
and solid fight.
The music is great though; David Wise has been pretty on his game since Donkey Kong
Country.
Ultimately, I don't know where the money went for this one, but I don't think they invested
anywhere close to 140,000 into these bosses or their great music.
For an additional 55,000 pounds or a little over 75,000 dollars, they promised a quiz
level immediately preceding the final boss.
I could see a quiz game based upon Banjo-Tooie and Kazooie taking close to this.
You might have a quiz board game again and video questions where you have to program
a camera to seamlessly load another world and navigate through it.
Plus they have to come up with 7-10 dozen questions about the worlds.
What we got however were 3 brief quizzes on a board that consists of a straight line and
instead of video questions, they threw up screenshots and instead of many questions
about the world, you get a few and many about how many of each collectible you have.
They did not spend 75,000 dollars on the quizes.
Transformations with completely unique control schemes and abilities from Yooka were promised
for another 65,000 pounds, which is almost exactly 90,000 dollars.
I believe they spent nearly 90,000 on the transformations.
The work necessary for transformations is actually quite a bit regardless of if they
are executed well.
They have to model, texture and animate 6 additional characters including Dr. Puzz,
and produce new sound effects.
Most of the transformations do control relatively uniquely, which was a common criticism of
the snowplow, and they have very specific abilities that yooka doesn't except both the
plane and yooka can fly, so some are looser on having unique abilities than others.
40,000 pounds or 55,000 dollars, hold this for a sec, a lot of kickstarters will just
pick values and offer something new as a thank you and the whole game will be better for
the additional money, but looking at these values, Playtonic wasn't doing this, they
were thinking about what they would need to implement these additional features and asking
for only that; we started with 100,000 more pounds and have seen 55 and 40,000 since.
Anyway, that 40,000 pounds would give us 2.5D and 3D mine cart challenges.
For including 3D, this sounds low to me, at least the way we read it as sections calling
back to Donkey Kong Country and DK64's mine cart levels.
What we got were exclusively 2.5D minecart challenges with the mobile-esque challenge
of collecting gems.
Not surviving gauntlets, which they did not explicitly promise, but nevertheless.
I think they spent most of they money to make this, but had more than 5,000 dollars left
over.
Here is where things get interesting, for 100,000 more pounds, 140,000 dollars remember,
they promised a co-op mode and we got one...
technically.
It makes Mario Galaxy's co-op look engaging.
The second player doesn't seem to be able to do anything except move a cursor on screen.
Looking it up, the second player can collect certain quills by pressing the right button
if Yooka is close enough to the quill and chooses not to collect the quill.
The second player can also capture and store butterflies for later use.
That's it, the second player can't shoot anything at enemies or sting them.
They 100% did not spend much on making the co-op.
I think I could go into unity or unreal and program the same or a slightly better co-op
mode in a single afternoon.
I think I know why we don't have something better, at least significantly better, I can't
give a scenario for why they didn't rip-off Mario Galaxy at least.
Yooka-Laylee chugs, framedrops are everywhere on every platform.
I think having a second character on screen might have dropped the framerate to 3 frames
on most consoles, 5 on PS4 pro and 10 on a suped up computer.
But still, where did this money actually go?
You have a 140,000 dollars that didn't get spent on what it was earmarked for.
130,000 pounds now or 180,000 dollars was next to add 4 mini-games.
They later asked for 100,000 pounds for another 4 mini-games, so let's just group those 2
goals, 230,000 pounds or close to 320,000 dollars for 8 mini-games.
We can't say which 4 went to which goal, so grouping them makes sense to me.
This amounts to 40,000 dollars per mini-game if you divide it evenly.
I doubt any single mini-game in Mario Party has cost over 10,000 dollars if you don't
count any general assets used in multiple areas of the game, so these mini-games should
be great, they recycle almost 100% of assets from the main game; you have 40,000 dollars
to invest into getting a solid concept and perfecting it.
Some of them aren't terrible... but others are.
Most are mediocre like Kartos Karting, but then you have painfully slow-paced and droning
games like Bee-bop,
Jobstacle course, and Hurdle Hijinx, the latter which is also very buggy.
Looking at those, I struggle to think they exceeded 4,000 dollars unless there were like
20 mini-games developed and scrapped that we never saw.
For 50,000 pounds or about 70,000 dollars, they promised to localize the game into Spanish,
Italian, German and French plus an unspecified number of backer requested languages, which
seem to be Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese.
Altogether roughly 7 and a half languages since Italian and Spanish share a lot of basic
words and are kind of like brother languages.
This is a little low for that many quality translations, Yooka-Laylee isn't a text heavy
game, but i think they underestimated a little.
An additional 60,000 pounds would see 2 of the character designers for Banjo-Kazooie
and Tooie return to design a few characters.
One of these designers created just Dr. Puzz and the other was eventually hired and as
far as I can tell designed every other character except Yooka, Laylee, Clara, Rextro and Trowzer.
These two facts make evaluating what was spent very difficult, did the designer getting hired
nullify the goal or was the 60,000 pounds used to hire him.
Next, for 125,000 pounds or almost 175,000 dollars they guaranteed all versions of the
game would launch simultaneously.
This did not happen, they cancelled one platform the Wii U, said the Switch would replace it
and seemed to tease that meant the simultaneous release as well, but they did not release
the Switch version simultaneously.
When asked if the Switch version would still release simultaneously as the Wii U's substitution,
they always clumsily evaded the question and refused to acknowledge the question was even
asked.
The game that released on all platforms except Switch, was much buggier, lacked multiple
features, and was very unpolished than it is now and was in need of a series of patches.
It got mostly negative reviews due to not being in a state reflecting a complete game.
It really validates the question of why was the stretch goal promise broken and the other
versions not delayed since they were not ready for release either.
I can't really say any of the money went to fulfilling this goal since it was not actually
fulfilled and an unready game was shipped.
100,000 pounds more guaranteed a shader that would make the game's textures look like N64
textures as well as bring us a rap video.
Reducing the quality of the game should not cost much, and no way is the rap costing that
much.
I've done most of the stuff that went into making that rap video, writing some lyrics
is not hard or costly, making a rap beat with no melody is not hard or costly, saying the
lyrics is not a high cost of difficult task, and scripting a cutscene does not cost much
or take much time.
Also, the shader never made it into the game and as of now in early 2018, we have not heard
anything since release about them patching it into the game.
Questions again are being clumsily evaded and ignored, maybe it will come one day, or
it might not happen, just like the simultaneous release.
Again, I can't evaluate this at all, but giving them the benefit of the doubt that one day
the shader releases I don't think they will have spent even 50,000 dollars on this.
Another 100,000 pounds meant we'd have a 100% let's play made by Playtonic and we'd get
developer commentary...
I think integrated into the game, but neither of these have happened.
It might be a let's play where they cut between playing the game and talking about the development
process.
I don't know though, usually people do LPs to make money from the ad revenue, I'm not
sure about compensating someone 140,000 dollars to make an LP, why is this a stretch goal?
I will watch this if it ever happens if they are super critical of their game though.
If they try to sweep the flaws under the rug, no thanks.
You'll love this next one, cause for 300,000 eur... british money units or 415,000 american
money units, we were promised an orchestral soundtrack that has not happened and according
to Kirkope, is no longer planned at this time.
No longer planned!
Well, I'm not holding my breath at all for the shader or LP and dev commentary.
They just ran away with close to a half million earmarked for an orchestral soundtrack; it
probably went into an offshore account for all we know.
Kirkhope, probably more like kircokehead.
But really, I think we have our answer to the question at the start, but let's see how
far we can get down this rabbit hole.
Ok last goal, 500,000 pounds or nearly 700,000 dollars for them to make unspecified free
DLC, assuming they don't cancel the DLC like the soundtrack.
Have they taken this money and run, probably, but they at least said one day the shader
might come when the game released and that hasn't happened.
There's a lot of money they could actually put into the game, but who can say how much
is cancelled.
They raised 90,000 more pounds and an unknown number of pounds through paypal, but it was
at least 37,000.
So they had at least 127,000 pounds or 175,000 dollars that could go into whatever needed
it.
Taking away taxes, they had 1,701,683 pounds or 2,357,886 dollars to go into the game setting
up the studio.
We've audited their goals, but let's take a look at their initial pitch.
Ooh, bold text...
"More than five distinct worlds" That's funny, because not counting the overworld there are
only 5, so this didn't happen.
If they had said 5 or more, than yeah, it's accurate to the final game.
A pinball racecourse...
I haven't found that and I can't find record of it, I guess it got cut, but why would you
cut that?
They said they would have a huge cast of memorable characters, which I guess is kind of true
since several are clouds and like 4 are shopping carts and 2 are shovel knight.
World expansion can be ignored?
There are only 83 pagies without expanding any worlds and you need 100 to finish the
game.
There are also details pertinent to this exploration that came after the campaign had ended.
A month and a half after hitting every stretch goal, Playtonic announced that they had partnered
with Team 17 who would publish and assist with the game.
This partnership meant that publishing and quality assurance would be financed and covered
for them, in addition Team 17 would take over localization and translation, meaning that
stretch goal could go directly back into the game.
Team 17 was also set to handle some of the business side things, like firing backers
who backed to voice a character and negotiating payments to other companies for various services.
It's hypothetically possible Team 17 could have skimmed money and scammed Playtonic.
They had every opportunity, but Playtonic could have just as easily decided to cancel
things and pocket the money for a nice little windfall.
The one thing we have found is well over a million dollars of the kickstarter's funds
are unaccounted for and the game doesn't reflect having well over a million dollars more than
expected.
Somebody stole money from Yooka-Laylee, or dear God, these guys should not buy anything
else in their lives if all of the funds were somehow spent, but they aren't the US government,
so how could they spend all that on this game?
So the answer is yes, we did get taken for a ride and a lot of our money was stolen by
Playtonic or by Team 17 even though we got a game out of it.
We weren't thoroughly and completely scammed, but we were scammed quite a bit by one of
those 2 companies.
I'm sure someone could also come up with some conspiracy theories like the whole kickstarter
was just to start they studio and they wanted to get the game out with minimal cost and
effort to shut people up, but either way, we didn't get back something they invested
all our money into.
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