"Interesting insight" Topic

it's pretty obvious without it being said which company is involved here, but for those on the slow side, it's Defiance Games and Tony (again)
verycutegm.com/?p=637

I am so happy I avoided that kickstarter…

I'll buy the "hardsuits" at a fleamarket or from a retail store, but I would sooner feed wads of cash to a woodchipper than a Defiance "web" venture.

At least the Woodchipper wouldn't use my money to cheat other people

As is now becoming common with this company, the blog has been deleted, just like their own forum keeps being locked and Facebook comments get deleted. KS forum is just blatantly ignored. Looks like spin is always preferable to honesty. I'm not sure whether this guy is just incredibly incompetent or a real con artist. The more I see, the more I move to the latter view. I have total respect for small companies who regularly appear on here with ' sorry guys, family issues, going to close store for a while, get your orders in quick… Etc' , but these jokers are something else. The hobby can do without this kind of garbage. Glad to see rust forge got his cash in the end, but as DG were broke, where did that money come from, KS?

that's ok… this is RICH: link

Basically they went into the kickstarter, then finished it, and waited a MONTH before they even started CONSIDERING what post-kickstarter "fulfillment" system to use.

That tells me they never even put any thought into how to carry through with their promises…

…though whether this in evidence of malicious intent or mere criminal stupidity on their part is by no means settled in my mind.

Who is this Tony guy and why does he have a bad reputation?

Lloyd, where have you been for the last ~4 years?

Ok, a quick history off the top of my head:

Tony was the guy who created Wargames Factory, and needed a large amount of $$ to get the products moving. So he 'sold' a controlling interest of WGF to the Chinese company that was handling the plastic-molding. Events happened, resulting in a huge rant against the Chinese company owner (you can search Tabletop Gaming News for the rant) as Tony was forced out of the company he had founded due to a failure to pay the Chinese factory for product that was very slow to appear.

Then Tony created Defiance Games, since he or the artist still owned certain copyrights for the various minis (rather than WGF). Defiance was not good about delivering product, announcing new things that were barely beyond 3d art as to be released in a couple months and taking people's $$ for them (this battlesuit was one of those items), delivering months or even years late if ever, and finally Tony was supposedly bought out of controlling the company by a different set of creditors who were forced to keep the DG name for some reason.

And now there's this Kickstarter fiasco.

And now the choir is tuning up. Again.

Who is this Tony guy and why does he have a bad reputation?

Probably the worst businessman to ever run a miniatures company.

Is he no longer with Defiance then? Both he and Howard Whitehouse are very quiet on TMP these days.

Howard is actually quite active on TMP and as far as I know he is not directly involved with Defiance games. As far as buying from Defiance my advice is if you like it wait till you see it in a box on the store shelf, otherwise you are likely to be in for an adventure.

Never heard of him or any of this stuff. I spent the last four years doing nothing but historical gaming, thank goodness.

Page Not Found for me . . . Maybe the lawyers have moved in?

It's already been taken down, however there is a copy of that blog page on Frothers in the Defiance Games KS thread if you wish to read it, probably on a few other forums as well. The more people get to know how Tony operates, the less chance their is of other people losing their hard earned cash. As opposed to 'legally' stolen cash that Tony collects.

Why I don't get involved in Kickstarters.

"Darred Surin wrote:Update with Me and My Supposed Dream Job
Nov07by verycutegm on November 7, 2013 at 9:24 pm
Posted In: Blog, Personal
So a while back I had mentioned that I landed my dream job with a war game company which produced miniatures similar to those of Warhammer 40k. I haven't said anything about this for sometime, but they say writing is therapeutic and maybe this will make me feel a little better. I will not be using real names, this is more of a venting thing than anything.

Allow me to start from the beginning, earlier in the year I was a laboratory technician in a hospital in the research division. There were elements in my environment which brought down the overall morale of the workplace. These things were out of my control and didn't affect me directly, but those who were affected then affected me. I dreaded going to work everyday and repeating the same tasks over and over again without reward. There wasn't any chance for me to achieve a promotion or receiving more money.

For a few months I had been doing some volunteer work for a war game company. Let's call this company Spice Games, because why the hell not? George, the person who got me involved with the company, found out how miserable I was at my tech job and I begged him to have his boss hire me. Tim, his boss, gave me the low down on what I would do. I would be a sorter, which meant I would be sorting parts. My pay wouldn't be as much as it was as a tech, but eventually I could be on a more creative part of the process. I would get to write! I could live cheaply for a while but I'd be doing something I've always wanted to do.

Shame on me I should've done research on Tim, but I digress. So I work with George, his son Mick and, his friend Henry. Things go swimmingly for a month, but I start getting really suspicious. For example, we are not shipping out enough products to sustain us. By the way George and Mick haven't been paid for two years. Things are always going wrong mostly, because of Tim. Tim is never in the office; George, Henry, Mick, and I are doing all the physical work.

Then one day Tim goes in and tells us that we are taking the next week off because he doesn't have money to pay Henry and me. Literally there isn't any money at all. At this point it is clear Spice Games needs a change so we go to Tim and offer to take manage the company. Part of out plan was to do a Kickstarter. We had a lot of concept art and most of the legwork for the Kickstarter project done we just needed a little bit of money.

During this transition of management we requested Tim to give us all information on distributors, contracts, and bank account information so we can run the business smoothly. We gave him two weeks to give us this information. Tim is slow to do so. I mean we never got a lot of what we asked for.

Long story short Kickstarter is wildly successful and we finally some of the information we requested. That is when we found out Spice Games is heavily in debt. I am not going to give an accurate number but it is huge. This company has been around for 3 years and has nothing to show for it. There is also another thing, people that have done work for Spice Games are emailing us now asking us to pay them. A lot of these people are angry. By the way we haven't been paid for managing the Kickstarter and other tasks we were doing because again no money yet.

We had asked Tim is stay out of our way and to manage things. But he pesters us continuously with new ideas for the Kickstarter. These ideas are either useless or way too expensive to produce. The ideas would've hindered us.

We should've left at that point. We were foolish to think we could fix it. Then we get a break we get investors who are willing to give us money if Tim is out of the picture. You see we found things out about Tim. A simple internet search was all that was needed. I have never seen someone who is more financially irresponsible in all of my life. It is still astounding.

It was then we decided to try to buy the company from Tim. So Tim who is willingly to let us take the company gives us a ridiculous offer for the company which would involve us taking the company debt, all of it, and he would still get 20% of the company. Never… at this point we're all tired and tell Tim we will work on the Kickstarter for a short amount of time, because the money from the Kickstater would only pay us for a couple of months. It would be Tim's job to find new employees to do the rest of the work.

We were drained and tired. All of use are worked up and so wound up. Tim found someone foolish enough to take the company off his hands where he would still be a partner leaving the rest of us in the dust. At this point I just want my back pay.

I am happy to leave. Working with George, Henry, and Mick were the happiest weeks, but Tim was a nightmare. He always dragged his feet, he didn't work like the rest of us, and his excuse was he was in meetings all day, which I knew was probably a lie. The new company George, Henry, Mick, and I will create will be much better and hopefully it'll be more fun.

This is the short of what happened. At the moment I am unemployed and looking for work until the new company gets on its feet. There was a lot more crap that went on but I don't have the energy to talk about that anymore."

…so no hardsuits then…?

…bummer.

who's up?

Morrigan, I personally wished Tony the best of luck when starting Defiance Games, because to all apparent information there were some seriously questionable business practices on the part of the Chinese.

When Defiance started to have the same troubles as plagued the Tony-run WGF is when I started to change my tune to questioning the info about the Chinese takeover.

While I am loath to attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to incompetence, once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. And the THIRD time is either enemy action or some other form of deliberate malice.

@billthecat: Antenociti's also bought production rights to a very similar design from the same designer. They are a bit pricier, but they aren't vaporware.

Tony has approached us about doing a number of items for him over the past year or so. I'm glad we avoided this head on collision like the plague!

While I am loath to attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to incompetence, once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. And the THIRD time is either enemy action or some other form of deliberate malice.

Do not underestimate truly talented incompetence, Lion. Exhibit A: The Austro-Hungarian Army during the Great War. Exhibit B: The Imperial Russian Army and Navy during the Russo-Japanese War 1904-05.

The third time is most often the incompetence reaching its "logical" conclusion.

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

Here's the thing that everyone's missing. Wargames Factory is now a fine and reputable company. The "Evil Chinese Boogieman"(tm) that so "treacherously" exercised their contractual ability to absorb the holdings of a business "partner" who had been cheating THEM, is now (despite knowing NOTHING about miniatures gaming) one of the more trusted companies out there.

The "evil chinaman" (not MY words) honored the obligations of the company he acquired, and EXPANDED it, adding a WWII line, upping both the qualities of the existing lines (going so far as to retool the skeletons for strengthening the joints) and putting out some damn fine 28mm plastic.

Oh, and they have partnered with Dreamforge to do their scifi "not-40k" thing. Giant stompy robot and stormtroopers. Somehow without "cheating" or "stealing" THAT company.

Meanwhile let's look at Defiance and THEIR track record of decline…

(I'm no mouthpeice for WGF, but there are a lot of casual racists I've run across, and that card being played of "the yellow peril" angered me when I saw it. Racism's always been to me just one more "picking on the little guy" behavior that rubs me the wrong way. It's easy to pick on a marginalized group. I'm 6'6" and 300lbs. Pick on ME.)

Just got pointed this way, since I heard of Darred's blog posting via one of the fictionally-named people in the story.

From contact with the people involved over the past weeks, that's the way I'd understood it as well.

I'd been involved in Wargames Factory when Tony ran it and – since he's a very likeable, plausible person and had (mostly) paid me for my work, I defended him at the time the smash-up happened with the Hong Kong-based supplier/partner. The fact that the new owner didn't pay my back wages really influenced my decision, without my realizing some of the things Tony had done to contribute to the failed partnership. Serious things, as it later turned out.

So when Tony started Defiance I was happy to write a set of rules, run demos and do some forum moderating. But it became clear that Tony was repeating all the errors that he'd blamed on the Chinese end of the business, and that his casual financial approach seemed irresponsible. So in mid 2012 I stepped away – I wasn't getting paid, investors I knew personally told me they weren't getting repaid – and I took my toys home quietly. I didn't say anything. A friend and I started a new, small company to publish rules.

In the last couple of months I've been in contact with the production team mentioned in Darred's blog – all people I believe to be good folks with the best of intentions – in order to provide contacts with some suppliers who told me by phone that they were owed considerable sums of money from many months before. Aside from confirming the wisdom of my stepping away from DG, this also indicated to the team the actual state of finances. As Darred said, their efforts to find a way of continuing to operate DG have been undermined by the founder of the company. They offered to stay and see the Kickstarter through, but are no longer willing to do so.

I'd left my Beta version of the set of Sci Fi rules (which seem to be well liked) on the DG site, but I've asked for them to be taken down. I'll revise them and offer them again under a different name at another time.

That's about it, to the best of my knowledge – Howard

I think it's insightful to go back and read this thread:

TMP link

Glad to see you're not supporting Tony any longer Howard, being associated with him tarnishes one's reputation. Rust Forge and Proxie were wise to cut short their 'association'- when they announced that Defiance would be selling their projects a lot of people including myself were shaking our heads.

Howard,

IMHO you did the right thing as soon as you had enough facts in front of you. I gave Tony the benefit of the doubt as long as I was reasonably able – but not my money until I was seeing solid results and consistency thereof.

As neither materialized, I gave Tony no money beyond the cost of a single box of Shocktroopers before he was removed from Wargames Factory.

Personally, IMHO WGF is not perfectly lily-white in this affair (ie., your back wages), however Tony's consistent failure to handle matters in a consistently professional manner has IMHO utterly wrecked his reputation within our little community.

Sad, really, as he did have some very nice ideas…

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

thanks for the trip down memory lane Dr Mathius, I love this comment from someone who was named 'No longer support TMP', which reads 'So when average people go up against a multi-millionaire, it is David v Goliath, but like in that myth, David, or in this case, Defiance Games will win.'

ah yes, the benefit of hindsight. I wonder how many of the Tony supporters on there still support him and think the ? If there are still people like that I have a bridge for sale, and also £25.00 GBPmillion in seized drug money my mate in Nigeria needs to get out of the country.

I'm with BigNickR, a lot of casual racism in that whole sorry saga.

Haven't followed the kickstarter troubles, but it's all sounding a lot like a ponzi scheme in this instance.