LimitedRunDoug

Honestly with his conduct to me last summer + stuff I heard over the years post shiren + the notion of a co-owner suddenly leaving a company they founded after a buyout I’m almost certain he got fired lol
Probably got a nice payout tbh, so I wouldn’t worry about his finances or whatnot (and I dont care to speculate further honestly) but considering last fall he bragged here that he fully intended to stick by after the buyout and then suddenly leaves months later… Yeah it wasn’t voluntary lol
More telling that josh didnt even retweet or mention him at all lately when he made that statement and uh, hmm, I figured he’d do that for a guy who helped found the company and shipped the first copies of breach and clear himself

I feel kind of icky even saying this but if I were LRG and located where they are I'd probably bank with someone a lot larger than the banks that have failed like PNC that has local offices.  Given their size, I'd imagine they could even use a couple different banks like where I work.

 

I doubt they've been impacted by all the out of state smaller bank failures and like bojay said even if they were it would have been for a few days at most.

Nah I think we panicked but we checked and we use a major bank that wasn't affected.  

Doug, is there any work being done on shortening production durations? I know that's not as much up to the publisher, and larger publishers with larger production runs probably have priority after factories, but after shipping, production times would be great to cut down on if possible.

Yes, we are starting pre-production on a lot of stuff sooner than before. We are also trying to order other components based on forecasts ahead of time. Nothing is allowed to go on sale now unless pre-production is done outside of a few random projects where maybe the IP is owned by a larger corporation who may randomly change their mind on something or be late on approvals. 

As far as the Eskimo Bob releases, we are just selling them for another company basically. They had these releases planned and asked for us to sell them and provide a little support. I'm also a fan of the series. We release stuff all the time we ourselves are fans of. Doing these games doesn't impact anything else we have planned or in the pipeline. 

Going to try and beetlejuice Doug again...

 

Any word on a time table for the email notifications and tracking being fixed?   People are still randomly getting packages with no notification emails or notifications in their accounts.

 

Seems the jedi ce's are being handled differently since people are getting emails for those, just nothing for standard editions.

 

Also with no tracking info being done at all they don't even show in the email notifications the post office will send (if you sign up for them) to let you know what mail and packages are coming in.  Which if on your end they are putting tracking on things, then there's hundreds... thousands?.. in tracking fees that isn't actually being implemented.

As far as I've seen everyone still getting packages with no notification are part of the original batch that went out with the bug. The latest stuff to ship should all be fixed. But I'll keep checking!

Side note to all of this, I went over to look at the Alien Isolation page, just to see what all is included and make sure there wasn't an update.  I run noscript and adblock+ so I control what runs and how much image tracking is used... and the script side of the site is bonkers.  There are 32 separate scripts being loaded from different locations and 28 items classified as ads by AB+.   I didn't dig into the ads to see what they are if it's tracking stuff or what.   What a mess.  It works, but just a comparison Amazon.com uses 3 main scripts.   Google uses 2 and has 9 ads on the regular search page.  A better comparison was iam8bit which has 21 scripts and 22 ads.  Fangamer is only 5 scripts and 8 ads (also a shopify sight).  Just strange how disjointed and overly complicated the website is coded.

We aren't keeping this version of the site. There is a new one being tested right now that kind of goes back to being more simple and gives us more control on the backend. A lot of us weren't super happy with the new site and noticed some things didn't work as intended. 

Alien Isolation will be using a 32GB card so there shouldn't be any downloads required. The game is only 17.8 GB. 

It would be smart if they set up a separate shipping team (within the main shipping team) for in stock items even if that's just a day or two a week (mon/thu?) that the members of that "team" come together to ship out all the instock (not preorder) items they can and otherwise work on the main shipping team.  Or they need to move in stock items to the store or just stop doing in stock items and farm that over to amazon who have the logistics to push this (though I'm sure that would kill the margins having to feed the Amazon beast).

This is actually the case now (a team for in stock items), and we should start seeing the results soon!

That's correct.  Target might as well be paid on order as it does hold charges 6 times a week.  Ubisoft store charges on order.  Most big stores don't, but there are plenty that do.

We have been looking into doing it that way. I think we have a few tests for this approach planned. 

As a diehard skeptic I am just as much on the side of caution as anyone.   That said, I'm willing to give the benefit of doubt to Doug.  He doesn't have to come here and say a word let alone address anything.  But, I have no pending orders and can afford to sit on the sidelines, eat my popcorn, and wait and see what the results are.  Shipping Slips are added now and they broke things in shipping by implementing new stuff.  The more complex CE's of various sizes are being reduced and we already see that with some titles starting to implement the standardized plastic boxes (which while I don't buy CE's, but the standard boxes feel like an improvement).

 

 

Signing too many games is an issue we won't likely see any movement on in the short term since they sign things so far in advance of them showing up in this thread.  Maybe Doug will chime in on around when this change should start to show.  Like do they have six more months of serious load before it starts to taper back, three months... a year... that would be nice to know even if it's just a number like 50 more titles before things are dial back.

 

Side Note:

As for Trip World, I'm now leaning towards passing on it only because of the game not LRG's growing pains.

 

My thoughts on Trip World:

Spoiler

I played the eu gb version of it last night. The graphics, sound, and physics are all really excellent (totally living up to the hype), but the overall game is damned short and quite linear with only the occasional side path.  I finished the 5 levels and got the ending after about an hour and a half.  If this were 1992 on the GB, I'd be pretty impressed by the technical aspects alone, but in 2023 it seems a little lacking in stuff to do.  Especially comparing to similar platformers with character transformations like Kirby (which I find quite basic but more complex than Trip World), Shantae (which blows them all out of the water, though is end of GBC days and early GBA days), Wonder Boy (which also uses the transformations in creative ways to explore), and of course Wario Land which is probably the top tier of using transformations in a platformer for puzzle solving.   My hope here is that interest in this will be great because overall it is a gem and a hell of a proof of concept.  They could easily sell me on a much bigger sequel using the same assets they are using for Trip World DX... but with more open areas, more creative platforming, and better level design.

It definitely won't show volume wise until about Fall I think? We are pivoting to bigger titles and more Carbon games. 

Like we said before the CE volume will start to be smaller going forward except larger titles. A lot of things will now go in a standardized box format for fans who want a little extra. 

Frankly, at this point, as someone with other pending orders, the ongoing logistical issues and now potentially shipping mismangement, have reached a boil that I will not make further orders from LRG until I actually see improvements in practice.

I like what I've heard, but as far as I'm experiencing, I haven't seen any difference. Once LRG can get back to a reasonable production cadence (and of course, fix what is apparently a shipping logistics/IT problem), I'll take another look at what they're putting out.

And let me say I appreciate what LRG does. I jumped in when LRG was just a kernel publisher. I like that LRG helps bring physical copies of smaller/mid-size games for the niche folks like me.

But appreciation goes both ways. I understand there are challenges since Covid ravaged supply chains, but I also think the honeymoon afforded that period is well over. And I think it's fair that a reason for some of these ongoing problems is due to mismanagement and poor communications.

So at this stage, I don't care how hyped a game is or whatever discount they give me. No more orders until I see the improvements, starting with my existing orders. Period.

I can guarantee that we are listening and the changes we talked about are taking affect right now. The new system and money spent on re-hauling shipping is going to help us long term. We are just running into some system issues getting everything transferred. A lot of the issues brought up even just today were already addressed. We are running at full speed to fix everything and we have already seen a huge increase in how fast we can move items out the door. 

You know, joking aside, I really like this take on things. I also absolutely love what they do, and I definitely don’t want to see them go away but we go from year plus delays with almost no communications to “ope, guess your order shipped, who knows?”

It’s incredibly frustrating and engenders very little consumer confidence. Like, yeah there is definitely a lot of games out here I’d like to own in a physical medium but given the way things have gone over the last couple years, “how long until/will they just go absolute belly-up?” Seems like a valid and constant concern.

Goofin’ aside, having a co-founder of the company come in here saying “well we know Bird King Vita is going to make people mad no matter what” and “I’m not the CEO” doesn’t exactly convey a lot of confidence in their commitment to the brand either.

Maybe they just don’t care anymore and they’re running out the clock on their Embracer deals to resign with golden parachutes, but it’s just disappointing to go from Josh and Doug both posting in the these forums as fellow game-players and collectors to the most cliche pass-the-buck statements is just disappointing.

The CEO comment was just from a place of frustration with someone. We definitely do still care and aren't "running out the clock". We have been doing a lot of things behind the scenes to fix these issues. The transfer of systems was a big deal for us as a company and what thousands of other companies use, including our parent company. It should smooth out very soon.

I say this knowing Doug reads this thread, but what seems obvious is that Josh and Doug aren't business people. Most companies, when they grow, if the founders know their limits, hire people to manage things. That never happened with LRG and the hole just kept getting deeper.

 

That's not a slight against Doug or Josh. Not everyone has a talent for business (and there are those that do, myself included, that would rather not be in general business at all). 

 

There might be a requirement to stay on with Embracer, but if I were Embracer, I'd get people in there that know how to run a business proper as soon as possible.

Josh and I must have done something right since we built this from the ground up and got Embracer to notice and acquire us. We also have meetings with them and go over everything the company is doing. They are happy so far and see how much effort we've put into fixing things. As far as employees we aren't two people, we are 90+ employees now and a lot of that was recent to address the volume we have. We definitely want to get things out in a timely manner and we've started enforcing more rules to make sure items are ready on the backend too before we sell things. The company has really done a 180 internally and that was from a real place of care to make our customers happy. We don't like that things take forever, we are trying to speed that up drastically and we have slowed down on signing so many projects to give us that breathing room. 

We are taking a look at what is going on with the new system. My fear is that it's pulling from billing address instead of shipping address. So we are looking into that as we speak. 

Super glad to have a partnership with Sunsoft and hope we can do many more projects together! 

My guess is because then they'd have to wait until all of them are sold to start manufacturing.

We had planned a different open preorder approach but were asked to do it this way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dougie, tell me more about this 3DS release

We should have something to announce probably this summer? 

Doug, please update us on TG16CD Rondo.

Currently being worked on. We just figured out all the localization stuff and are progressing.