Paprium: The Official Thread Mk 2

[axel]

The latest rumour is that a person could have been able to play a finalized version of Paprium (with ennemies) on a real Megadrive hardware before the famous French party. Obviously a French VIP in contact with Fonzie. Other people seems to know that person and trying to convince him to talk.

Not a chance... if he had anything resembling a working version it would have been shown at the party or at the very least in a video immediately afterward.

[Arm]

Not a chance... if he had anything resembling a working version it would have been shown at the party or at the very least in a video immediately afterward.

From the guy stating on the WM forum (no garantee this is real or not) : " I know some people who test it..", Some news a the end on this month i think ... ".
Translated from french: " he isnt part of WM and played the version with enemies which should have normally been presented" , "It was on actual hardware", "game should be in debug state". "I don't know why (it wasnt shown afterwards), we tried convincing him to do so..."

[paulojr_mam]

Yeah, I suppose the idea of a finished version existing raises more questions than it not existing, which makes it more plausible, by occam's razor, that there isn't a game.

[Stifu]

Yeah, I bet Fonzie completed the game a long time ago. At every full moon, he looks to the sky and thinks to himself: "Should I release it now? No, not yet... The stars are still not perfectly aligned. Thwarted again! Damn you, PayPal and Air France!"

[chilled]

The Paypal thing was a lie from the start.

They talked about it way before people started claiming things directly to Paypal, and I guess at the time they were still refunding people, so we don't know if the Paypal story is true or not and we don't have definitive proof of either so why state as a hard fact that the Paypal story is a lie? I don't think it happened as they told us but I find perfectly plausible that part of the funds were/are blocked by Paypal China. Anyway a this point I don't care anymore if it's a lie and an excuse for the delays etc but seeing written that it was a lie from the start seems a bit exagerated to me. If all this was a scam from the start the site wouldn't be online since the last big wave of pre-orders and the party would have never taken place, particularly considering it wasn't aimed at getting more funds (and I think you cannot pre-order since even before the party maybe? I'm not sure).

[Barone]

but seeing written that it was a lie from the start seems a bit exagerated to me

So, you know:
- The game is not fully developed yet.
- Beta testing is a distant dream.
- No PCB prototype works.
- You've burned through the original budget years ago.

What do you do?
- Launch a pre-order campaign.

You don't deliver it in time, of course. Who to blame?
- Paypal.

Like I said, a lie from the start.

[chilled]

So, you know:
- The game is not fully developed yet.
- Beta testing is a distant dream.
- No PCB prototype works.
- You've burned through the original budget years ago.

What do you do?
- Launch a pre-order campaign.

You don't deliver it in time, of course. Who to blame?
- Paypal.

Like I said, a lie from the start.

- You don't have any money left and you know your game is nowhere near ready, so:
- You launch a party with no money where you don't ask for more money or even more patience

Doesn't make sense.

[afro man dan]

- You don't have any money left and you know your game is nowhere near ready, so:
- You launch a party with no money where you don't ask for more money or even more patience

Doesn't make sense.

What makes less sense is Fonzie showing a clearly unfinished prototype at the launch party. What kind of shit do you have to be smoking to think that is remotely in anyway a good idea.

[chilled]

Lots of things make little sense coming from Fonzie, but many theories in here do also, as everybody (including myself) just pick the events that help prove your point, ignoring other things each theory can't really explain.

[Da_Shocker]

Has this been posted?

[Barone]

- You don't have any money left and you know your game is nowhere near ready, so:
- You launch a party with no money where you don't ask for more money or even more patience

Doesn't make sense.

It does. It makes people like you think he has a game to ship when he doesn't.
It's called "bluff".

[SEGA-Jorge]

- You don't have any money left and you know your game is nowhere near ready, so:
- You launch a party with no money where you don't ask for more money or even more patience

Doesn't make sense.

'Cept he was totally saying he needed help with publishing. I thought that was said multiple times, there is still an issue with completing the game, he was talking to multiple people from what I understood.

[Barone]

'Cept he was totally saying he needed help with publishing. I thought that was said multiple times, there is still an issue with completing the game, he was talking to multiple people from what I understood.

I wrote this while talking through facebook with one of our fellas here when the party was announced:



I thought he wouldn't risk the confrontation with the investors but he did. I think it was a mistake on his part.
In my mind, I think he got concerned once Luis and other people who had worked with him began to talk and reveal some info that put the feasibility of the project into serious question (refund requests).

First thing he tried was to send print material for people to translate. That was supposed to cease the rumors about it being vaporware and send (false) signs that the game was about to be shipped.
But the refund requests kept coming, so he had to do something bigger. Then the release party was created.

The place didn't allow people to really notice that the "game" he was showing had no proper sound and it also made it difficult to talk and question him.
The soda cans, the printed material, the arcade cab, etc. Things that would help make believe that the game is real.

What really backfired though was the state of the "game" he showed. As much as he tried to justify it, the videos were played many more times than his excuses; so that was for sure a bad PR move.
People bringing back old promises and claims about the status of the game from years ago also didn't help. The lies began to pile up a little too high.

And, on top of that, the unfulfilled refund requests. Once more people and some of the top investors began to make requests, his refund bluff was expose and the whole thing began to fall apart. Seeing requests unfulfilled on facebook and twitter, other people felt tempted to try to get any response from WM and then they realized how fragile all the structure really was despite all the soda cans, the arcade cab, the MMA fighters using leather underwear, etc.

None of his recent claims and excuses hold any water if you simply put together a timeline with all the relevant information (such as him burning all the budget early on) and all the claims that he has made so far.

The significant price increase of the game over the last years also doesn't look good to me. If investors copies were being sold at $50 each in the beginning, you shouldn't have the need to price lesser versions of it at $90, unless you're facing financial issues.

[axel]

His mistake was actually showing up to his own party. If he wanted to keep the illusion going, send over all the extra crap - cans, jackets, boxes, manuals, whatever. People who showed up could see the physical objects and it would look real. Then at the last minute he needed to fake a medical emergency, maybe he got some kind of bird flu over in China and wasn't allowed to travel. He could release a video running on an emulator or done in After Effects and keep the charade going a little longer.

[chilled]

Thanks for the write-up, it's actually interesting. I still don't buy some parts of it, but let's leave it that way. I guess if we scratch our heads a bit more we will end up finding how he threw a party in the most expensive city of continental Europe with no money, but that's really not that important. And yes probably every public appearance is staged and planned to damage control on recursive delay announcements, but isn't that sadly quite usual? you give (or fake) some good news just so the bad ones don't have such a bad effect on the whole thing. That's what most people do on an everyday basis. Not that I find it ok, far from it. And yes I pre-ordered in (2017 I think) after one of those PAs because, as usual, it gave the impression that the game just got real. Of course that's what the trailer was for at the time, and what the technical data (80 meg, add-on chip, etc.) was announced for in the first place, quite a long ago (as someone said, the developing phase is now longer that the actual console's commercial life in some countries).

I know he's looking for an external big investor, he said it himself, so maybe the party was just a showoff to prove to any potential investor his project is solid, I don't know. Real investors with real money are a bit more serious than that and they actually do some research before any potential funding so I don't think that was the reason for the party.
Maybe he knew he had to meet the people after all those uncertainties, delays, promises, etc. and he decided a party was a friendlier and safer place for him to do so. Anyway I find interesting that now we think it was a bad (PR) idea to go and meet and talk to investors, when there's 550+ pages worth of "where's Fonzie, why isn't he talking to us?" right on top of us.