Goodman Games appears to be doubling down and moving ahead on their upcoming City State of the Invincible Overlord project, ignoring extensive negative feedback from their community that this is a profoundly bad move for them to do.
If you’re just catching wind of the topic, go read my first two posts on the issue:
- UPDATED – Goodman Games Saddles Up With Racist, Anti-Semitic Publisher…and Their Reasons Make No Sense
- Goodman Games Addresses City State Controversy – Take Two
Long story short — City State is owned by Judges Guild, the current owner of which has made extensive racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic comments. Goodman Games once swore they’d never publish any other Judges Guild products, but they seem to think people forgot they ever said that.
Goodman Games is jumping through all sorts of hoops to try to make this palatable to their customer base, offering to refund backers of a crowdfund campaign that Judges Guild defrauded a decade ago, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Instead of listening to the feedback from their customers and cancelling the project, they’re chugging right along with it.
I just don’t get it. I like Goodman Games. I’ve purchased several of their adventures in the past.
But this is an absolutely baffling business decision.
This Project Benefits Bigots, Even If Goodman Games Swears It Doesn’t
Goodman Games has made three videos so far swearing up and down that Judges Guild gets no financial benefit from this project.
The fact is, that’s simply not true.
If a company like Judges Guild fails to deliver a promised product, as they did when they failed to deliver on their 2014 City State “Pathfinder Edition” Kickstarter, that company has defrauded their investors.
If an outside company who had nothing to do with the promised project (in this case, Goodman Games) then comes in and decides to offer refunds to a project they had nothing to do with, they are providing an inherent financial benefit to the company that failed to deliver by allowing that company to save face and restore goodwill with their mistreated customers.
There’s even another financial benefit being paid to Judges Guild by advancing this project:
Revoking creator privileges, including the ability to run another campaign on Kickstarter, until they’ve made a good faith effort to bring their project to a satisfying conclusion for their backers.
That’s what Kickstarter’s guidelines say about actions they take against creators who fail to deliver on their projects. Given that Judges Guild hasn’t run a new Kickstarter since they failed to deliver on the last one over a decade ago, it’s almost certain they’ve had their crowdfunding privileges revoked.
But note the language in that last sentence. “Until they’ve made a good faith effort to bring their project to a satisfying conclusion for their backers.”
If Goodman Games works with Judges Guild’s mistreated backers, then Judges Guild can appeal to Kickstarter and argue that they made a good faith effort to bring their project to a satisfying conclusion.
And they’d be dumb not to — Kickstarter is the largest crowdfunding platform on the Internet. Regaining their crowdfunding privileges on Kickstarter is a much larger financial benefit than the royalties they’d make off a single licensed project.
Goodman Games Releases New Details On Refund Project
In a video and blog post released last night, Goodman Games shared new details on their plans to refund backers of a 2014 City State Kickstarter after Judges Guild failed to deliver.
You can watch the video here:
Here are a few highlights:
- Goodman Games spends a lot of time saying “this is the right thing to do.” It’s not, but go off.
- Goodman Games is offering a 10% discount on their new Backerkit campaign to people who backed the 2014 Judges Guild Kickstarter. So if you want a refund from 11 years ago, you’re encouraged to spend more money.
- The blog post includes a whole bunch of technical details on the refund process.
Goodman Games Is Losing Long-Time Customers
The fact is, Goodman Games’ supporters and customers strongly disapprove of this project. Here’s what people across various platforms are saying:
Here’s what some commenters on YouTube videos about the project are saying:
And here are some comments from Reddit:
It’s pretty clear that there is broad displeasure with this project, even from people who are long-time customers of Goodman Games.
Goodman Games says they won’t publish future Judges Guild projects…but they said that before
In other statements about the new City State of the Invincible Overlord project, Goodman Games has said they have access to other Judges Guild IPs, but that they don’t intend to publish them.
But given that they said the same thing in 2020, I’m not sure that holds much water.
If Goodman Games is willing to move ahead with Judges Guild products’ after saying they wouldn’t, I don’t have a lot of trust they won’t do so again in the future.
Bottom line: Goodman Games is killing the trust and goodwill of their customer base in order to open the door for a bigoted publisher to regain crowdfunding access. There’s simply no other interpretation of their decision to move ahead with this project.
