I'm sure Wick is more of a "big picture guy" as opposed to a rules designer... if this is the picture:

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Quote from: Jaeger;1083402Well, now that was just stupid.

Depends on if he produced the product payed for or not?

Few years ago I helped with the investigation into a supposed KS publisher for Doom that came to Atlantic City who took the backers money and instead bought movie making gear and started making indie movies. Instead of paying the artists or making the game. He got caught and now his income is being monitored towards paying off the debt.

And many a year ago the creator of SuperDudes took the money for the physical card game and instead invested it in a new business and all the customers never got a thing. Got away with it too as of last check.

Quote from: Omega;1083408Depends on if he produced the product payed for or not?
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Not all of it...

Quote from: remial;1083343well, funny thing, he used a bunch of the money from the 2 kickstarters to invest in other stuff for the IP, boardgames, video games, a potential movie, things like that.  All of which cost money. Money that the bakcers had assumed were going to be going to authors and artists, not Wick's vanity.

If you are talking about the War of the Cross boardgame and the cinematic trailer, those were stretch goals outlined in the initial project and were exceeded.  It's all right there on the kickstarter page.  Here is a clip.  It was all very transparent and up front.  Not some back alley vanity project that no one knew about before hand.  Unless you know something I don't.  

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If you are talking about the cRPG that Stewart Wieck attempted to kickstart before his death, I have no idea if any of that funding came from JWP.  However, given the fact he was kickstarting it, not John Wick or JWP, suggests that he was the one funding it and, more than likely, paying some sort of licensing fee TO JWP (who owned the property).  Again, I don't have any behind the scenes info on the project, other than that I followed it (I didn't back it).

So I suppose backers could have been blindsided by all of these projects, but only if they weren't paying attention.  Not because JWP took the money and ran.  I have 7 nice, full color hard cover books sitting on myself that were produced by the kickstarter before they hit financing issues.  But if you can give us a ballpark of how much money went to these other vanity projects, I'm all ears.  Because everything you outlined was pretty much front and center and announced in the clear blue.

(Full disclosure: I backed the KS at the physical core book level.  So I have PDFs of everything produced.  I bought physical copies of the sourcebooks after they were release.  Because I like books and I like the game.)

Tom

Quote from: Blusponge;1083457If you are talking about the War of the Cross boardgame and the cinematic trailer, those were stretch goals outlined in the initial project and were exceeded.  It's all right there on the kickstarter page.  Here is a clip.  It was all very transparent and up front.  Not some back alley vanity project that no one knew about before hand.  Unless you know something I don't. ...

Ahh, so just the original kickstarter being its over extended too good to make financial sense self.

Still kinda stupid. But in fairness the history of the hobby has shown that RPG guys are not necessarily good business guys. Wick has plenty of company.

Quote from: Jaeger;1083473Ahh, so just the original kickstarter being its over extended too good to make financial sense self.

Still kinda stupid. But in fairness the history of the hobby has shown that RPG guys are not necessarily good business guys. Wick has plenty of company.

Yeah it seems like you need the creative guys to set up the company and then get the conservative guys in to run it.