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I wanted to share a new Kickstarter campaign with you all.
The goal is to re-release classic video games from the 80’s and 90’s via a player that works on mobile phones, tablets, and smart TVs. This includes 100s of popular games from Amiga, Atari and others.
You can learn more about it on the Kickstarter website: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...nfinity-player
Thanks for letting me know, but do you honestly think this will be funded?
100.000$ in 14 days, with 10 backers so far, I seriously doubt that.
This is making all the mistakes in the book. Obviously an attempt at a moneygrab with hardly any research made. The video is aimed at a non-existent market using a Nascar sponsorship to tempt with free tickets for high pledges. When 98% of the target demographic is European. And at the same time it insults the existing market by saying "who owns a Commodore these days?" in a tone that suggests it's ridiculous that anyone does. Only just about anyone who'd be interested in this.
Go back to the drawing board. Work with the existing community, not against it.
One more time the aim is make money, you didn't look to the community to see who supports Commodore or Amiga. Bad homework
You will not get any support from a true fan.
Who else instantly thought.. "Retro Infinity Player!" = WinUAE/UAE code based emulator hidden inside app installers with the original game ADFs? Basically the same as .exe packaged self executing game packages.
No mention of licensing the games for use or where the code has been created to emulate them.
As everyone else has said, this is a very poor attempt to make some cash out of the retro community. A community that is more clued up than most and already know they can emulate most Amiga games for free on their mobile devices.
Do some homework and you will discover that a large percentage of Amiga games are still owned and copyrighted. LucusArt based games are a great example of this as they will get whole projects closed down if their IP is found to be used. You have been warned.
Basically, give up now.
Amiga games inc owns lots of rights to games already. 250 plus and some were on the ill fated Blackberry Playbook. Still going to fail though.
But really, who owns a Commodore computer these days?
I do :).
I wonder who the current backers are.
I can see that the first comment is posted by a guy from Finland, the scene was/is still quite big there, f.ex. Tony Wilen ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Stephen Coates
But he also mentioned that "But really, who owns a Commodore computer these days?" sentence straight away, although I don't know why he eventually pledged?
Probably just to watch the trainwreck. When you've pledged you get progress updates.
This whole project is a complete mess.
If you go to http://www.amigagamesinc.com/ it contains a nice boing ball animation, but little else. Their Facebook and twitter links go to broken pages.
Now if you go to http://www.retroinfinity.com/ it all looks very similar, with the same about us message, the same contact form and the same broken links to Facebook and twitter.
And the only information both sites state is:
"On Aug 19, 2013, Amiga Games Inc. became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Writers’ Group Film Corp. (OTCQB: WRIT) a Los Angeles-based content distribution company."
Neither site has been updated since 2013. So doesn't look good for a kickstarter project just launched. If they can't update their sites in 3 years how long would it take them to produce anything for this project if they ever got the backing, which they won't.
Also have any of you visited http://www.amiga.com ?
That really made me laugh. What a mess. The front page still shows Blackberry based Amiga games and nothing else, so it hasn't been updated in a long time, especially considering how long ago the Playbook failed. And the rest of the site still refers to "amiga anywhere" which I never understood what it really was other than whoever purchased amiga.com attempting to cash in on the Amiga name and their links are just for American sport sites. Another page goes to the Blackberry store site, and other parts of the site are just completely broken with server errors.
This is meant to be the site behind this project and Amiga.inc. The company this kickcstarter project claims they have the Amiga rights from. Oh dear.
They also state they own the "rights" to most Amiga games. We know they don't actually "own" the licenses to most of the games they mention because many of the IPs are still being used by their original developers. Think Worms or Alien Breed for example. Or HD remakes have recently been launched, such as Speedball 2, Superfrog etc. So what do they actually own rights to? They state for cross platform on mobile devices, as well as game consoles and PC. If this were true the original IP owners would be asking a fair amount for such a re-release of their software cross platform. And if they have had the money to buy rights to so many games, why do they now have the need to raise this money via kickstarter? I'm wondering if they only original licenses games for use on Blackberry devices and the real reason behind this project is to raise money to reapply for licensing for other platforms.
Finally they state they have obtained rights to hardware and software. Interesting statement considering no one really knows whom owned what these days, other than Cloanto. I might contact Cloanto and ask them about the legality of the "licensing" Amiga.inc have to use the kickstart files in this project. Would be an interesting answer I'm sure. I personally thought Amiga.inc went bust some time ago and all they owned was some rights to Amiga OS. I think originally they had some idea to make Amiga OS into some sort of mobile OS platform.
What a complete mess this is.
Or even a hoax?
Indeed. I'm going to be contacting Cloanto to see what they know about this project.
Update. Mike at Cloanto has now been contacted to ask about this Kickstarter project, and also the companies behind it. If anyone knows the real legality of their claims regarding Amiga OS, Kickstart roms etc they should.
OK. Some more updates.
Account holder
The original poster's account for this kickstarter has now been banned on here. Upon investigation I discovered it has been registered with a bogus temporary email address.. so it looks like the account was registered here as a spam account to post this kickstarter.
Kickstarter project
Upon my own investigations and industry communications I cannot find anything to backup the claims made by this project and as far as I can tell they do not own any rights to anything to make this project viable.
From leading Amiga insiders, to the best of their knowledge this project doesn't contain any Amiga emulation. The question therefore would be how would they be running these Amiga games?
In addition, in communication with Cloanto, The Blackberry set (not the games per se, but some ROM/OS/trademark use) was under license from Cloanto, but they opted not to renew it.
The two companies linked to this account as far they know only have a trademark license, but that is limited by the terms of the previous settlement agreement with Hyperion and the coexistence agreement with Cloanto, i.e. "no emulation". I am not aware of them having a ROM or OS license.
This therefore indicates this Kickstarter project is bogus and a scam.
Opportunity to redress this issue
I invite the original creator of this kickstarter thread to contact me directly using the forum's contact me form if I have got this wrong.
Well done for finding all that out Harrison :).
Any idea why they would set such a high goal in such a short space of time though? Its very unrealistic, as they would have to scam a heck of a lot of people to meet the goal.
Good work Harrison. If it's ok I would like to spread this info? Pointing to this thread.
Yes, that's fine with me.
Kudos from me too for finding all this out, Harrison. Maybe you should alert the Kickstarter guys too? They don't like scam projects much at all. ;)
Indeed.