by DJ_Tanner
hooliganj wrote:
The statement that Monumental was a Kickstarter exclusive was made during the campaign in June 2020. According to the updates they were doing the final file-prep for printing in Jan-Feb 2022. That's a year and a half during which they could have changed their mind and decided to print extra copies for a retail release. I don't think it was part of the plan when they were raising the money, but a choice they made based on the amount of money they raised.
More disturbingly, May 2022 is when they first announced their financial problems. To me the real question is what happened between January and May 2022 when they went from optimistically committed to an over-print for Monumental and prepping distribution for Namiji, and then grinding the whole process to a halt 4 months later. Production prices did spike after the pandemic, but they were already high in January. Perhaps they got stiffed on a contract, or maybe someone was hiding the real costs along the way. Given the levels of animosity between the company and their audience, we'll probably never know.
I mean regardless of the ire of the backers with FF, they certainly were not planning on being forthright about it. Even in your more generous assessment, they had all that same time, and more, to inform the backers that they had changed course and never did. End of the day, they used the exclusive tag to encourage backers and then, at best, they piggybacked on that scale, and at worst used the backer funding, to produce the retail copies. So openness/transparency, much like sound business decisions, are not the strong suit of FF.