On Re Rebel Trading (Trading as Spartan Games) In Administration

[danieldwilliam]

I've just received the interim report on the administration and winding up of Spartan Games.

Spartan Games made several table-top minature model games. I backed a Spartan Games Kickstarter in December of 2016 for some money. About six months after this Spartan Games ceased trading and went in to administration. The assets were sold to Wayland Games. Wayland Games are carefully but slowing going about relaunching the Spartan Games lines.

I've seen the financial and management accounts of Spartan Games before they started the Kickstarter. Personally I'm of the view that a company in that perillous financial state shouldn't have been going about launching Kickstarters. I think Kickstarter probably need to do something about their due dilligence processes or about the pre-launch information that its clients need to provide.

The administrator tells me that he has pretty much finished realising the assets and that, as expected, there is not going to be enough money to make a distribution to unsecured creditors. There is a small amount of spare cash but as there are about 1,500 unsecured creditors the cost of cutting the cheques is more than we'd get so the administrator has applied to the court to not have to do that.

So, I'm down a few hundred quid - which is a nuisance and a shame but, fortunately, no worse than that.

Comments

[mountainkiss]

When this happens to people, they won't back future enterprises until / unless they can be assured that this risk is being handled differently. So Kickstarter will have to change or die, I think.

[danieldwilliam]

Yes, it's certainly put me off.

And I think whilst not every Kickstarter ends up being unsatisfactory each individual only needs to be on the wrong end of one that goes wrong to become downbeat about the platform. If due dilliegence is not acceptable then eventually most frequent users will end up being on the wrong end of a Kickstarter.

[mountainkiss]

That’s what I was trying to get at.

[andrewducker]

I wonder if there's space for "Kickstarter insurance". Insurance companies would, presumably, audit, and charge based on likelihood of completion.

[danieldwilliam]

There might be.

You might be able to get some sort of deep learning algorith to look at previous Kickstarters and work out what the signs are of a Kickstarter that is likely to fail or likely to deliver and then price an insurance premium accordingly.

That would probably have an impact on the funding chances as the difference in insurance premium would indicate which projects were likely to deliver or not.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure you'd need (or particularly want) a deep learning algorithm. Standard insurance practices should do it. Or even asking a few basic questions like "How much will this cost?" and "How much money do you already have on hand?"

[danieldwilliam]

You could probably get by without a deep learning algorith but that would allow you to offer the insurance very quickly and without the co-operation of the project (who don't benefit individually from the insurance).

[andrewducker]

For reassurance, I reckon I'd be comfortable with "Our AI has calculated these five factors give you a good idea of the reliability of a campaign".
And then some kind of checklist.

I don't think I'd trust an opaque black box to tell me if they were trustworthy.

I would also be more likely to back a campaign that had a "We have delivery insurance" statement on its page. Which gives campaigns a reason to cooperate.

[danieldwilliam]

Having a delivery insurance option (at a relatively cheap price) would encourage me to back the project.

What the pricing should be I've no idea? Although that's probably easily calculable using traditional insurance methods.

I think the potential problem with the checklist approach is that it might allow gamification - if you know that five factors will be measure for insurance purposes then you might be tempted to polish those but perhaps they are not polishable.