Is Revolution 60’s PC Release Just a Giant Scam?
I am a fan of narrative-driven games, and am someone who always likes checking out unconventional ideas in video games. It’s for this reason that back in 2013, I checked out Revolution 60 — a game for IOS by one Giant Spacekat Studios after a friend had recommended it.
Overall, it looked like an enjoyable game. While the game had some minor issues visible from the trailers, I thought it had a lot of great ideas that could have been that much more impressive if the dev team behind it had just a little more time and money to throw into polishing it. When Giant Spacekat announced an intention to remake the game for PC as well, and launched a Kickstarter for it, I was intrigued. The Kickstarter itself came extremely highly recommended by several big names, including Brian Mattucci of Tangent Worlds fame, who vouched for Giant Spacekat’s ability to make this project happen. I was already interested in Revolution 60, so I donated straight away, and the game met all of its backer goals and then some, so the game was coming to PC as well!
The game’s IOS port released in July of 2014, and though it wasn’t a perfect game, it was very enjoyable and you could see a number of areas where I had hoped the game would be improved for the PC release. All indication was that Giant Spacekat was doing everything they could to get the game out within the next few months. Sadly, this is where things would take an unpleasant turn.
Now, again, I’ve backed several other games that went through Kickstarter at this time, including Mighty No. 9, and Shantae: Half-Genie Hero. During their development, Mighty No. 9 saw delays, but hardly a month went past wherein every other game-related Kickstarter I had backed had given status updates. I didn’t even realize until almost six months after the July launch announcement that I’d had yet to receive any updates about Revolution 60 from the company.
This was odd — delays are far from unheard of when it comes to KS projects (Mighty No. 9, again, was no stranger to that!), but a complete lack of updates? That was weird. Checking out the Kickstarter, I saw that there’d been no updates on the project whatsoever, and multiple backers asking why there had been no updates.
The only response that there had been any progress whatsoever was a single comment by another backer (and not Giant Spacekat) — that the game had been delayed because of additional upscaling work. Finally, about a month later — in December of 2014 — Giant Spacekat revealed that the game was “essentially done” and had to do a ton of work to make it usable on PC. There was no acknowledgment of missing the announced August launch date.
The company said it had lost a few months due to dealing with people leaving nasty comments and threats. I can see how that would cause some delays as the team gets distracted watching the freak show.
As of March 2015, the company seemed back on track and gave another update, explaining that all that was needed was to update some skeletal meshes, “rerender the opening movie, and then we’ll ship it.” There was no specific deadline listed, but it sounded like it wouldn’t be that long.
Getting a deadline would take five months, when, in August 2015, a Kickstarter backer pointed out that the company had made a recent update to its Tumblr announcing the release would be in two months, in October of 2015.
A pattern of behavior was starting to emerge from Giant Spacekat by now: There had once more been months without any major or significant updates given, no acknowledgement of the missed release date, and when we did finally get one, it wasn’t given to the Kickstarter backers, first and foremost.
When Giant Spacekat did respond on Kickstarter, it was only after the backers had started to discuss the Tumblr announcement, which, again, had come to us from a backer, and not the company itself — and even then it looked like the only reason they were responding was that several of the backers, fed up with the delays, were threatening to report Giant Spacekat to Kickstarter for violating the terms of use.
Giant Spacekat’s August update, however, included an release date for the first time in months, and it looked like, finally, things would be progressing in a better direction. Unfortunately, this was not to be.
The October 2015 release date came and went, and with no fanfare from Giant Spacekat. In fact, there was no updates from the company whatsover for another two months, when, in December of 2015, Giant Spacekat claimed that the game would release “when it was done,” and explained, once again, that they were committed to getting the game out “soon.”
That update would be one of the last ones we recieved on Kickstarter. Again, roughly five months passed without any updates from the company whatsoever, and several backers started talking about refunds.
Even I was considering it at this point.
Finally, in early May of 2016, Giant Spacekat claimed they were submitting the game to steam and that the PC version would thus be out soon, and informed us all to tune in to Brianna Wu (the head of Giant Spacekat)’s Twitter and Facebook if we wanted additional updates. Exactly like the first three times, the game never launched despite passing multiple launch dates that Brianna Wu herself announced on Twitter, including ones in both May and June of 2016.
At no point has Giant Spacekat ever apologized for these missed deadlines or indeed, even acknowledged that they’ve even missed a release date.
When I saw how Giant Spacekat had essentially blown off multiple release dates, I started examining Brianna Wu’s Twitter account in an attempt to try to figure out why the game had taken so long.
What I found was shocking — I saw a whole lot of examples of Brianna Wu attending conferences and speaking engagements, or playing video games via her Twitter, but not a whole lot of update information about the game we had invested over $12,000 in.
In fact, more alarming than this, Brianna Wu seemed to be exceptionally hostile towards anyone who asked about Revolution 60 on Twitter, going so far as to accuse several backers asking about it of being trolls and blocking them outright — including a friend of mine. It’s for this reason I’ve chosen to remain anonymous in this post.
We are fast coming up on almost two years past the original launch date in August of 2014, and almost a year past the October 2015 launch date, which is still listed on Giant Spacekat’s Website. As if to drive home Giant Spacekat’s complete incapacity to care about its promise to its financiers, its head recently pitched the idea of a version for VR, adding untold months to the development time:
At this point, I am left with one of two logical conclusions about Revolution 60’s PC release. Either:
1. Brianna Wu has openly lied about the game being “almost done” repeatedly, and we should report her to Kickstarter for violating the terms of service, OR:
2. Brianna Wu has squandered our investment and we should report her to Kickstarter for violating the terms of service.
Regardless of the case, Giant Spacekat has shown complete and utter contempt for the people who financed her Kickstarter, and indeed, the many devs and techies who went to bat for the reliability of this Kickstarter. At this point, only seeing the game actually be released before August would be satisfactory.
Giant Spacekat Studios has made all too clear that they do not respect their investors and have shown increasingly little desire to release the game despite contractual obligation to do so. If the game is not released by August, I intend to contact Kickstarter about pursuing legal action for a refund, and I will encourage my fellow backers to do so as well.
