Follow-Up — The Revolution (60) Begins
On June 29th, 2016, I posted an article about Revolution 60, a Kickstarter I backed, explaining the issues that we backers have had with the project and the devil-may-care attitude Giant Spacekat Studios has shown in the handling of its Kickstarter backers. For nearly two years, Giant Spacekat Studios has proven completely incapable of providing its backers basic update information, despite multiple claims by its head of the game being either ready or almost ready for launch.
Before I continue, I want to say that I’m both surprised and thankful for the feedback that my fellow backers have shown about getting the word out about Giant Spacekat’s ongoing failures to launch the game. People are increasingly comfortable talking about the project’s ongoing issues, and are less and less afraid of speaking out them. Backers are starting to come out of the woodwork to discuss the game’s failure to launch, on Twitter, Reddit, Medium, and even the Kickstarter page itself. I also made an update on Kickscammed about the project’s failings:
http://kickscammed.com/project/revolution-60/
Giant Spacekat Studios has once again, in response to backer pressure, given us a grudging update. Unfortunately, this update is pretty much exactly what every backer who brought up the endless delays expected, and it’s clearly directed at trying to stop the backers from revolting.
In the update, Giant Spacekat’s head is in rare form, once more claiming that anyone who brings up the game’s countless failures to launch is a troll and harasser, intending to hurt Giant Spacekat Studios. She then goes on to claim — again — that she could “push a button and ship it today if she wanted to,” but then explains that she needs to do marketing, trailers, and so on, since the Kickstarter accounted for only a small part of the game’s budget.
Unfortunately for Giant Spacekat Studios, this is not the first time she has made this claim, or indeed, dozens like it. The game has been in a state of “essentially done” for well over a year and a half. If the only issue was marketing, developing trailers, doing press releases, and so on, there was already over a year after the failed March 2015 release date, and the head of GSX has repeatedly claimed that the game is “done” during this time. Putting it simply: If she only needed marketing, she’d have done it by now.
But what came of the content she had promised in the July 2nd update?
The “video” she promised in the update turned out to be a Twitch stream that did not have any archival recording data, so the only people who got to see it at all were those who got to the stream when it was up. Going by Brianna Wu’s twitter feed, we can see that the stream was around thirty minutes, meaning a lot of people didn’t get to see the stream.
What backers who checked out Wu’s Twitter feed were given instead was that her stream had its chat harassed by trolls. Brianna Wu purportedly has an employee whose role is to deal with Giant Spacekat’s online trolls, which Brianna Wu’s patreon goes towards — which I learned about courtesy of Medium user Ryb10381 in the comments of my last update. However, Brianna Wu seems intent on trying to use online trolls as the reason her game has failed to launch, going so far as to claim this on the July 2nd Kickstarter update.
It is a lie. Giant Spacekat appears to be going out of its way to not release the game.
Looking at the various websites Giant Spacekat has, one can easily see that Brianna Wu has failed to update:
The official Twitter for Giant Spacekat Studios, @gsxoffice, hasn’t updated in almost a year.
The official Giant Spacekat Studios Tumblr hasn’t updated in about a year as well.
Even the official website last updated almost a year ago.
The evidence against Giant Spacekat having any intention of releasing this game become even more suspect when you start analyzing its head’s Twitter account. Brianna Wu’s coverage of the game on her Twitter feed are often months apart, and prior to the July 2nd update, the last major time she discussed the game was her earlier May 7th claim that the game was going to Steam.
Almost everything else in Brianna Wu’s twitter feed has been discussions of politics, current events, technology, her Rocket FM podcasts, and frequently, whatever video game she’s playing at the time.
This is not something that has changed as of the July 2nd update, and she has not discussed Revolution 60 at all since. What she has done is cover the exact topics I mentioned above, and also talk about all the fun she’s having playing MMORPGs and VR Games.
On its own, I could forgive this as Brianna Wu discussing her hobbies and a life beyond her development studio, but Giant Spacekat has been trying to avoid discussing the game for over a year and a half now. Paired with the fact that Brianna Wu has shown intense, often unreasoning hostility towards anyone who asks about the game, the implications are all too clear: Giant Spacekat Studios has no intention on delivering. It has shown outright contempt for its backers, and for everyone who put their own credibility on the line by vouching for the ability of Giant Spacekat to make this project happen.
The game is currently completely unavailable on all platforms, even on IOS which had the original version back in 2014. This is because Giant Spacekat Studios took the game down from the iTunes App Store in preparation for the release of the Special Edition — back in January of 2016.
With no version of the game available, and Giant Spacekat Studios looking increasingly like it’s trying to avoid releasing the game entirely, Giant Spacekat has completely failed to deliver on even its most basic Kickstarter goals. I implore all backers of the project to report Giant Spacekat Studios to Kickstarter and/or demand refunds if the game is not released by August 31st, 2016.
Brianna Wu has used up all excuses for why the game cannot be launched, if she can just “press a button and do so” at this point.
