[fogger1138]

... damn. Only just seeing this.

[jason1551]

Well this thread was a kick in the balls.

Still holding out hope for something, but SW doesn't seem like the type to actually give a fuck about what he's done to those that tried to support him.

[ozzie92]

Hope…ha!

[Itchweed]

So no one has heard anything? Anything at all?

[TheRealDubya]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jabalong

amen. I hate how some kickstarter backers will start yelling about being robbed or conned by the project. If the project literally did nothing with no updates and nothing to show, then fine. But that would be the rarest of cases. And i haven't seen it with an action figure ks. But if the project shows work (factory prototypes, samples, etc), they didn't magically conjure up that stuff to con you. It costs money. What some ks backers lose sight of is you are not preordering, you are investing in a project, often a start-up, which may or may not succeed.

As for hellscreamerz, i have zero inside information, but i can offer this nugget with my two-cent commentary. Sometime last year, a bunch of unpainted hellscreamerz stuff (figures, heads, parts) showed up on chinese ecommerce site taobao. Some of it we had seen already in photos the project shared of their progress. So, again, no one ran off with the money, it was spent. Is it a bad sign that it showed up online? Maybe, maybe not. Stuff leaks out of factories for most toylines (it?s out of the creators? control, generally.

So, i picked some up just out of curiosity. My verdict? Not great. The headsculpts are nice. The figures are serviceable, but feel kind of a bit primitive to me (hard plastic, loose legs). They just don't strike me as being up to the level of other current independent toylines. And the accessories? My god, a gazillion bitsy pieces in so many colours.

This was my big concern with the project and a key reason why i didn't back it. There were just so many parts in so many colours, i thought how are they ever going to get all this done? It's hard enough for a start-up to get a simple assortment of figures off the ground. With hellscreamerz, it just seemed like so much potential for quality problems and frustration for the creator and the factory.

Now a caveat here, in fairness to the project, this stuff dumped on taobao, may literally be garbage, it could be the stuff that didn't pass quality control. But even so, as i try to assemble the parts, all the bitsiness of it just doesn?t make sense to me, particularly the design of the back/jetpacks. I could be wrong and it isn?t fair to judge a work in progress, but some of it just seems ill-conceived and overly complicated.

Now this is just my opinion. I?m not a toy expert. And while it?s a criticism, it doesn?t impune the creator?s motivations. I just suspect that the project was kind of doomed from the beginning due to having too big a scope (too many figures in too many colours) and too complicated designs (too many parts). The first rule of working with a chinese factory is a lot will go wrong. And the more stuff that you are trying to get through production, the more there is to get wrong.

Here's my guess, and it?s only an uninformed guess. Like many projects, they got through the big initial spurt of getting molds and samples made. And then you start facing the problems, what isn't up to scratch, the back forth, and that?s where projects grind down. Factories have done a big part of the work, the money is spent, and they want to move on to new stuff with new cash. You need really good relationships and ideally a go-between fixer on the ground, to navigate the problems and keep the factory motivated. I suspect the money ran out ($94k is not much for a project of this scope and complexity). The problems to be fixed mounted. Enthusiasm waned. And throw into that a pandemic.

I?m sure there is more to the story than this. There always is. Factories can fail. Factories can be unscrupulous. Factories can be not up to the challenge. Is the project still going? Maybe the creator thinks it is. Maybe the factory is telling them it is. He said, they said. Who knows. The thing about creators and entrepreneurs is they never want to say die. You would never take a leap on something like this if that was in your dna. So, they keep going, or feeling like they are still going, long after the writing is on the wall. A project like this is a dream for a creator who?s an artist, and dreams don?t die easily.

Maybe hellscreamerz somehow gets a second wind and resurfaces. But after so much time and clearly the money is already spent, i don?t see it happening. But what do i know. Just my two cent from afar.

adult, lived wisdom

[Sean_C]

That lived wisdom is probably of little comfort to the folks who flushed money away on this.

Which I wasn't one of. But...I've always been skeptical of the kickstarter concept.