Exposing the DreamWorld kickstarter scam

[@Alfkdna]

Josh Strife Hayes recommended to check you out and I was not disappointed, solid content! Can't wait to see more from you in the future!

[@CallumUpton]

thank you sir!

[@catboiler]

@@CallumUpton I'm here also from Josh Strife Hayes. Nice work, my friend.

[@tonikotinurmi9012]

@@CallumUpton Same, pushing thumbs up on some other answers too for that youtube übereffect... ty

[@FriedChairs]

Same here. Thumbs up from me.

[@John_Conner_]

Yep same here, I'm going to watch the whole series you did because if Josh and Kira recommend you, i know this will be good

[@deralbtraumritter8573]

They're so lazy they kept the Unreal guy, and we're so lazy they said it was a "nod" to the Unreal Community...

[@heatherkettiegameswow3936]

it is

[@gamerguy-314]

@@heatherkettiegameswow3936no

[@Notpoop906]

@@heatherkettiegameswow3936 🤡

[@Expertspecter]

Just remember guys. The problem isn't that they are using asset packs. Not everyone is an artist. It's ok to use bought assets if you can utilize them properly. The problem is that they stole a bunch, bought some, and stitched them together in a very loose lie to hide their lack of skill at anything in an attempt to get money from you.

[@ShadowLegend300]

I mean, not everyone is an artist, but if you're promising an infinite open world mmo with thousands of biomes and claiming it will be a game changing product in the game industry and charging money for it, you probably should be one hahaha

[@Expertspecter]

@@ShadowLegend300 Oh, you need to hire one if that's what you're doing. You will have enough on your plate as the lead dev managing development. Lmao

[@LiMiT1337oO]

the gardening stuff they show at 0:58 is "Garden and farm" from Unreal Marketplace. even with the default UI :D the "candyland" is "Cakes and Desserts" from UE Marketplace. And the Pets are used from different packs of SURIYUN like "Cat Mermaid", "Cute Mushrooms", "Cute Whales" and "Cute Unicorns" :D

[@ian_b]

"The last Kickstarter you'll ever back"

[@DeathMetalDerf]

I doubt you'll see this but I'm here because of WickedWiz, and I'm definitely not disappointed. Keep up the great coverage, you're doing awesome. Totally worth the sub with notifications.

[@DonPunch420]

They probably didnt even buy the pirate island, there is a free demo of the set you can download on the store page

[@xellios]

Man this is some shady shit. I stumbled across this video after watching KiraTV's video on the same game. I've been going down a rabbit hole of MMO scam videos and I find this truly fascinating. First Chronicles of Elyria, and now this. As bad as all this you pointed out is, the worst part is the whole pyramid scheme angle regarding the Pre-Alpha. Crazy shit. Excellent job on the video. I am now a subscriber.

[@slopesgameroom]

I am 100% bringing this up!

[@CallumUpton]

please do! infact slopes dm me on discord Cal#1337 i have something you can use in your video that i think you'll like

[@NigelKennington]

Everything you say in the video is correct but a couple of technical points about kickstarting itself: 1. A superbacker is just someone who has pledged to 25 campaigns in the last year, it's *not* a high value backer on the current campaign. 2. You don't need to charge-back if the campaign is still live - you can back out at any time up to the deadline just by cancelling your pledge and the charge isn't actually made until the campaign deadline.

[@CallumUpton]

sadly i realized both of these after posting the video haha thanks for sharing though!

[@Mustyval]

I have studied game development, moved away from it and now I'm doing cloud solutions and I still have a passion to create games as a hobby. I' very technical and have tried to build many games and while I can get the game to function, I can never polish it enough to meet my standards and that's why none of my games have been public. When I saw what these guys are promising, I almost fell of my seat. It is literally impossible to do this with the amount of people they have. Think about it, a game like World of Warcraft, that has/had some of the best developers and have had over 15 years of experience AND have billions of dollars, cannot stop the server from lagging when there are too many people. It is not an issue that can be easily solve, the tech is not there yet. Also, the P2P tech they are talking about is just dumb. That is sending way too much info everywhere and its going to break the network.

[@cobaltshimmons386]

Happy New Year! I hope you're well and your passion is still alit!

[@yeahgirl11]

People who don't know anything about games in general assume that it's easy. I'm confused at why anyone would assume that only two people can make an MMO, much less a single player game that's worth anyone's time (game jam games are obviously excluded).

[@pixelissue]

check out the interview they did with Skiazos - In Depth Q/A with DreamWorld! Dev Team. At one point one of the guys says "to all those other people that have taken 15 years to do what we have done in 8 months, be more ruthless. Only do your most important things, leverage other people's work.."

[@CallumUpton]

if any other company took 15 years to buy assets i'd be asking where they shipped them from

[@SoldMySoul45]

@@CallumUpton Right? If it took 15 years to receive your assets, get your money back and rethink your life choices.

[@Popebug]

I think that the 15 years refer to learning and practicing coding, modeling, game design etc, not making the assets. Still super gross and smug, of course.

[@andrewhunter2520]

@@CallumUpton the fuckn moon

[@CallumUpton]

@@andrewhunter2520 the prophecy... it came true..

[@deralbtraumritter8573]

They should change the slogan to: The Last Asset Flip You'll Ever Need To Play (since they seemingly smashed all asset packs together. They make Sergey Teetov, Birdyev, Various Benson, and even Matt from Police 1013 look bad).

[@itsilvjot]

it was obvious that it was a scam, each scene in this trailer was a totally different game with different graphics, it was obvious that they only played random assets in the game regardless of his style

[@ErinTheGameDev]

This is such a shambles of a kickstarter! I saw this as an ad on Facebook and left a comment warning people not to back this obvious scam. Even after explaining why, I had fans of the game raging at me and saying that I had no idea what I was talking about. Anyone who has spent any time making games can see that this game is not coming out any time soon. I seriously hope that these are just two naive guys but considering that one of them is currently enjoying a nice holiday, I’m pretty sure this was just a big cash grab 😣

[@jonathansoko1085]

You know what ive been thinking of doing? To help stop ppl from getting scammed... Gather up a bunch of ppl like me who just do this stuff for fun, and show off examples of what nobodies like me can do in our spare time. To show people its not rocket science, and to stop being fooled by these fancy screen shots of store assets

[@hellspawn3200]

If I was making a game, which I am though might never actually release it, I'd at least have some playable demo before begging for money.

[@Tristan3D]

I wrote that on another video about this scam as well: --- This peer to peer, no central server thing, they claim could host millions of players is nonsense. The speed of light is really fast, and the Earth isn't all too big from a lightbeam's perspective, but when a system has to zip this lightbeam back and forth literally several million times within fractions of a second to update everyone in the game world, then this can't be real-time. There will a phenomenon kick in known as "light lag". To update a million people at the same time without a central node but via p2p on a planet with a circumference of over 40.000 km and a diameter of over 12.000 km? Yeah, that would require an alcubierre style of faster than light spacial warpfield to make that happen (and for all we know, the alcubierre warpfield metric is in violation of the known laws of physics). We're talking about decaseconds of lag time - not milliseconds. So, this p2p hosting of millions of people sequentially will never be possible in real time on Earth; not even in a hundred years, when technology might be supercheap to host millions of people in one gameworld. It's quite literally physically impossible to make a realtime MMORPG this way. You need a central server for that, and even then: A million players on one server would be a technological nightmare to manage. ---

[@pixelissue]

the snow/sand deformation clips are from Infinity Weather.

[@CallumUpton]

thankyou! i knew i had seen this exact clip elsewhere but i couldn't find it and didn't include it in the last video for that reason

[@JayJonahJaymeson]

It's pretty disappointing that studios like this ruin the idea of using assets for everyone. Premade assets are a fantastic tool for programmers who want to put something together but aren't particularly artistic themselves. It's really not hard to take a collection of assets and make them your own thing, but you constantly get these studios doing the absolute bare minimum just to make a buck.

[@Andicus]

I don't understand how people could look at the trailer and dump their money on it. The gameplay is so utterly bad and scuffed, how would anyone want to even touch the game? Even ignoring the red flags, the game itself looks horrible. Inconsistent graphics, inconsistent style, next to NO gameplay whatsoever (all they show is a character running around, no combat, NOTHING other than the simple building tool), completely random models, etc. It just looks like a terrible game. Actually, calling it a terrible game is a compliment. It's like a UE4 experimental project cesspool that you just dump assets into to see how they look. And as Callium had said, none of it is original. Literally none. You don't have to be a game developer or a professional game reviewer to know this game has negative potential. They simply provide 0 credibilities and offer an extremely fake sob story afterwards. The second guy comes over and claims he quit his jobs at Google, Facebook, and Apple? Or something like that? I don't even remember now. But he claims to work at these big tech giants that pay very well (which if he had these jobs he could simply have funded the project by himself??). If he was smart enough to get a job at these places, then he would have been smart enough to not quit for a terribly unreliable and impossible project like this. As I'm typing this, I'm realizing the video does cover a lot of what I just wrote. But whatever that's fine. Basically, you just need to realize that this is a great example of what NOT to look for on games.

[@JohnDoe-wt2zz]

You have good UE4 knowledge too, as a UE4 developer this makes me HURT. I could do what they did in 7th grade. Middle school. My estimation for their time putting all this together is 5 days, if they spent 1 hour or less after work working on this. Sometimes I look at people doing this kind of stuff and am tempted by the dark side too, they could pay a university full 3 year course easily with what they got from this kickstarter campaign...

[@hedition9346]

UE developers are in higher demand in both games and movies. You can make much more with your skills without having to taint your conscience.

[@JohnDoe-wt2zz]

@@hedition9346 ... Okay I may be decently good but I have 0 work experience (in a corporation) and am still technically a minor and not graduated (albeit both getting done this summer) I don't have the options to fulfill the corporate demand 😅

[@hedition9346]

@@JohnDoe-wt2zz Well, depends on where you live and what you major in, these probably will not be any issue. My advice - start early - learn scripting The game industry is filled (but not saturated) with excellent talents in UE, but they are much more demanding in technical skills. Movie industry Virtual Productions are fairly new and are much more accepting of young talents, though your artistic skills have to be pretty good. Good luck - 10 years veteran of movie vfx

[@terricon4]

0:22 in the trailer, 2:42 in your video is my Farming and Mining pack, and 0:44 in trailer, 5:48 in this video is my airship pack, the winged airship variant (love that thing, making a fun project in VR right now where you pilot it. Honestly flying an airship in VR is super fun and totally something I want to make into a more proper game as I have some free time). The airship is only visible in flying overhead, with a single person bellow it, good as it was not by default set up for multiplayer. No work needed there. The farming and mining oddly used different textures on the tools, and was used with voxel terrain plugin. Don't recall if that one works in multiplayer (Don't do much of that myself so... not something I remember about most assets), but I can definitely say you'll have a performance field day if you want to mix that with the pirate island asset pack (not mine, but quite well done and a good looking asset). As a developer my thoughts are this is yes either an intentional scam to just get money, drop a thousand dollars on marketplace assets (or maybe not, you can torrent many of them, I know several of my older ones are already in torrent networks from other people warning me), or at best three clueless people who want to make a game but have no idea what actually goes into making and shipping a working game. But given their claims and everything I'm leaning towards the former. Now, using markeptlace assets for your early prototypes and blocking out phase in a project is a great idea, and had they mentioned anything like that it would have sounded more legit... but they didn't, and just showed a bunch of things that in order to get working, especially in multiplayer, would involve a TON of back end work that I just don't think 3 people will be able to do to even a basic extent in a reasonable amount of time. I see this as like an attempt to remake Second Life, but in unreal engine and with modern graphics... but there's a very good reason Second life has simple graphics like it did. So ya, I don't see their idea working and their promises all sound really fake and often unrealistic or like they're being made by a clueless person. And random shameless plug, check out my other assets and demo videos on my YT if you want to make your own game in UE but with some nice starting points to save you time. Also for anyone who wants googly eyes in their game, I made that as a fun free april fools joke. kzbin.info/www/bejne/mpepep-JbLyna6s

[@CallumUpton]

hey man! thanks for pitching in on this, you've pretty much picked out the only assets i couldnt here. im really glad to see your input on this as i feel like a lot of people see this as an attack on assets and their creators. like you say, there is absolutely a time and a place for marketplace assets. i use them to death in prototypes and blockouts myself. btw, nice job on those packs brother!

[@terricon4]

@@CallumUpton Ya, I feel it's more just exploiting the work of creators to attack uninformed backers/potential backers, rather than an attack or insult or anything against the content creators themselves. I mean I'm working on an indie game that uses tons of purchased assets, mostly art ones, to help flesh everything out. Lots of it gets modified to some extent or another, but a key thing is that any external asset needs to be integrated into your own games systems. Every ship needs tweaks to support our physics based flight system, buildings or enviornments changes to collisions and stuff to support climbing on them. And so often you take two random marketplace assets, and they work fine on their own, but you stick them together... and they fundamentally DO NOT WORK! I mean the most common case I have people asking me for help with on my products and compatability is the survival game pack (not mine) and Interact and Possession system (mine). The survival game pack is a great core system with character, inventory, weapons, equipment, and lots of other things that can help you make a game of that type nice and fast... But it doesn't work with pawns other than it's own. That means my possession system, that has the player possess another pawn be it a tank, a plane, or a horse or something, breaks the Survival Pack. It's possible to hack them together but that is days worth of work on the backend of the survival kit so it can handle the player being in something other than it's own specially made pawns, and requires special changes to all future vehicles as well to support some of the survival packs features and not break them. It's doable with a lot of time... but random marketplace items do not often play nice together, made by different people who never met and never planned for their product to work with that other product they'd never heard of. And some core ones like engine plugin stuff just outright will crash if brought in together. My point being being that even for initial prototyping, you can't just throw lots of random packs together to make the starting point of a game like a lot of people out there do think. And it is that type of thought that everything can easily be shoved together and just work, that lets people more easily fall for something like this, even if they do know they are mostly showing marketplace packs. I mean they claim to work smart by taking advantage of what other people have done... I can agree there, but this still wont save you THAT much time and work when we're talking about things beyond core art assets and stuff in many cases. And then mulitplayer... their own custom multiplayer client cloud system, what type of special code would that require on every blueprint setup to run properly? Man, almost no out of the box products would likely work on such a system even if it does exist.

[@CallumUpton]

@@terricon4 i couldn't have said it better myself, i cant wait to see how all this unfolded after the deadline for kickstarter. i can almost guarantee this: "production" will stop, and these 2 bafoons will take a week off to decide what color tesla they're buying

[@david-6110]

Thank you for the great insightful conversation here! I'm more in the Infrastructure side and I'm really curious to know more about how an Unreal based game deal with an MMO-server-Side. I think both of you could make very interesting video about this. If those guys can't even produce their own code to joint all those different assets, I wonder how they could even deal with the server side.

[@terricon4]

@@david-6110 A UE4 MMO would first want some type of netcode plugin/modifiations for that UE build. Default unreal engine works great for multiplayer in like 4 person co ope settings, or with some simple tweaks even in like Battlefield style group multiplayer. But an MMO with possibly hundreds or thousands in the same area? It's default form isn't well suited for that, not optimized and going to be quite expensive on the server, and physics simulations between client/server would be basically locked off limiting the nature of a game and what can be done in it (purely client side physics/rubble effects are all fine though). Now, you can and some people have made special plugins/modifications to the engine build so it can better efficiently handle massive loads of players while still working ok with certain features of the engine. However, this type of work should not be underestimated, and their claim of cloud based loading is just... major BS sounding. That might be useful to help lower server costs for some stuff, but doesn't help the game run better overall, and only works in limited situations. For example, in this case they want a massive world where you go and find whatever people created in that location, custom buildings, custom characters, custom textures, custom pets, etc... Not in engine modifiers to color/mesh morphers, but custom imported assets from outside the engine. That means a player going to a new location might suddenly be hit with a few gigabytes of assets to download. And everytime players add something new in the area you need to load that in, suffice to say that's on hell of a performance problem (this is a major reason Second Life used and continued to use relatively simple graphics and much of the work for art could be made in engine in a lower cost/optimized for size method so it was easier to stream to people quickly). So having a distributed loading system so other players help move these assets to your own client will lower the server costs (in exchange all players experience worse net performance, but its still capped on the new person down speed, hard drive, and everything else speeds), however here's a question then. What happens if a player enters an area with no other players? Or they enter a location with other players that don't have good internet upload speeds, or that also don't have the data, the server still needs to actually be there and set up to stream all assets out itself, meaning it also must store everything in the entire game world, including every change everywhere all the time. Simple reality is, this doesn't fit with their claim that well, and besides being a huge thing to make itself doesn't fix the problems that the users will experience with their own network and computer limitations when suddenly hit with multi gigabyte load walls everytime you go to a new place, and probably several hundred megabyte ones randomly while playing in any populated area. Think of something like VR chat if you're familiar, you enter a map and you have to download the map data for the world, and then players that show up have avatars that are invisible and just head/hand markers for awhile till they load in. This is just with a limited number of players in a fixed map instance, all using strict limits on character textures/sized/limits/etc... Now sure you can somewhat ignore some of those limits on some characters, but the general point is even in small confined systems this is a bit of a delay, so imagine it when you load in massive high cost world chunks, and everything just moving around the world, not when using teleporters/load walls and stuff? It's possible, but if the graphics and quantity of things are really that high it will get out of hand fast for most peoples systems and internet in any new places with any number of players. Now, all of this is the server side and general engine stuff I've talked about, but the reality is EVERYTHING you put in a game, needs to have individual options/code set up in it order to work in multiplayer. Replication, if you want a cube to be sending updates on itself to a server, you must enable this option, that increases net traffic so this items is updated between the server and cients for location, physics, etc... As a basic task this does just flat out take time to add to everything. And for many things, you can't just enable the default options and call it a day, that gets, to put it lightly, super expensive and lag inducing real fast. If you have lots of objects, character, and other things updating then you need to set up custom code for when they update, how they update, and ideally make hacks on how they update to lower net costs. Take movement for example, most games don't just enable replication on location/rotation/velocity values and set that to be replicated every single frame/tick of the game. First, that is SUPER expensive network wise, second it's going to look janky and a mess to many people playing. No, you must set it up systems like have it five times a second by default, send the players current location, rotation, and velocity values to the server. Then you have custom code on that on the server for that asset gets those values and will set up that location as a point it passed, take the velocity and rotation values and figure out based on network traffic times from the client where the player would be on their end by this point, and instead of moving the character on the servers end and all other clients, it may set custom blended movement code so the character is now walking/moving towards that new target location. With this there's no instant teleoporty micro jitters, but smoother blended movement that's semi representative of the players location, if not perfectly accurate its good enough in most cases. But so its ever player accurate this means it needs to blend speed values so they might move faster at first, so it can catch up to the players intended position and not alway slag behind on everyone elses end. That's some custom code being put in there. This is also part of why rapid strafing works well in many multiplayer games, since when you first start moving in a new direction the server, and other client often overcompensate on the movement speed/distance to try to head to where the player will be moving if they are now moving in that direction. But since they flip back and forth quickly they might on their own game only be side stepping half a foot each time, but the server and others thinking they might have kept going in each change boosts that initial speed to catch up, but rapidly for each direciton resulting in them seeming to jump back and forth like a full two feet on each other players side. An extreme case but a great example of net code troubles and why many game assets are not easy to drop into multiplayer do to optimization and smoothing requirements.

[@DeeOdzta]

hell yeah, ruins real indie devs work and time - asset flippers

[@WolfBergMenace]

This is literally like someone installing 100 mods to Minecraft and saying they made a new game

[@jonathansoko1085]

I can confirm that that guy that commented that we couldnt get this stuff to work because it takes competency, is wrong. Well im here to tell you i have like 2 months of U.E experience of me just messing around having fun, ive put together higher quality stuff. That guys clearly an apologist for them. In 2 months of my teaching my self and googling things i have a few funcitonal levels of a game, that actually flows together while these guys do not. My point is, it doesnt take much skill to do this.

[@burningflag3679]

Here's the crazy thing. Changing Mani's skin (the mannequin) is something most tutorials teach you day one with the engine. Because its laughably easy.

[@Listersmate2]

Gabe Kaplin also used this project to try to slander his ex fiancé name....who actually left him for being an abusive & manipulate liar!

[@letheas6175]

This almost 18-minute long video is more minutes of content than Dreamworld will ever have. Thanks! Great video, terrible scam game.

[@kaistephens2694]

I can't believe this was meant to be your only video...... But the Madness that was Dreamworld had far more to hide......

[@DeadNoob451]

Man i underestimated just how crazy bad this really is after watching the Josh Strife video. I wonder when they will realize that you do actually need someone with 3D artist skills on the team even if you want to make an asset-flip. Oh well, i honestly think they are just going to vanish from the face of the internet before getting on top of that problem.

[@TheDrunkardHu]

Josh Strife Hayes sent me. Subbed!

[@AaronVictoria]

This is hands-down one of the best videos I've seen blasting this trash for what it is. I couldn't have done a better one with 10k USD. The internet should hire you as it's spokesperson for game scam prevention. You managed to find and cover every single asset and you noticed what I noticed about them not even being smart enough to script the characters into the project. Keep up the amazing work my man.

[@PeaHeadGames]

I was here before you go away ;) haha much love bro, they think they're going to make a mainly client side multiplayer game, they ain't no developers, anyone who's ever worked with networking knows you never trust the client.

[@CommissarMitch]

This is the video that basically made this channel and I am here for this journey we have been on. Gonna binge the playlist while gardening.

[@adamryason5509]

There's this small streamer (Tobydoo2) who has been playing the "alpha" and posting videos for 4 months. In fact, their videos show that this was referred to as "Elyzm/Elysium" back then and there is an Elyzm channel with two videos as well. The videos show what is actually being played around those times leading to the kickstarter...

[@CallumUpton]

yeah everything about this is troubling.

[@vincentweber1359]

I love this video for 2 reasons: 1) It's accurate. 2) It's widescreen. Feels soooooo good.

[@TheKindKitten]

0:00 A legend was born. :3x

[@riksoz]

Good vid I'm so tired of seeing this ad for this trainwrack

[@MisogynyMan]

I remember watching this about a year ago and thinking that wow these obvious scams seem profitable, if I was a POS id jump right on that. Laughing at that now with all the NFT stuff, Earth 2, and what I've learned about other kickstarters/Diablo Immortal/microtransactions from watching Josh Hayes channel and Kira. It really is a golden age for scammers thanks to the internet.

[@megachill]

Prof Dev / Architect here (27+ years) - Some facts: - UE4 Networking Engine could not handle this number of people simulataneously on screen. As a matter of fact Fortnite is using some very clever networking concepts to be able to have that many people in game at the same time. It would require a re-write / different netcode to do what they set out todo - Some of these assets are not compatible at all - Server Cost for a hyper scaling platform and service is at around 10k - 50k a month spending anymore really makes not much sense. You have to consider the engine limitation that you're simply cannot remove. There is a reason planetside is using a custom engine (Forgelight Engine - created by SOE) - all in all - outlandish claims What i am wondering, how do people still fall for this kind of scam. There are some really well thought and put out projects out there that have some real potential, but due to these kind of projects they are afraid to even go to kickstarter. Game Development is one of the hardest disciplines in the industry and a lot of junior developers have these massive dreams (we all had them!). When someone thinks of game development, they usually directly think of "I must do MMO!?!?#!". Right after that they are usually pulled back down to reality, by some senior or veteran developer. In the case of these two dudes this clearly did not happen. And then on top to try and scam people out of their money, is so god damn disgusting to me that this kind of thing gives indie developers a bad rep. Anyways i could go on for days, but good wrap up @Callum

[@strivionjacobs6383]

I can't believe you don't have more subscribers! I was really impressed by how you presented this content, super helpful!

[@CallumUpton]

thankyou! this was my first video but i'm definitely going to make more

[@strivionjacobs6383]

@@CallumUpton I didn't actually realise it was your first video! It was so well structured and put together I assumed you had been doing it for some time!

[@SleepyTaylor]

This reminds me A LOT of new mappers in some modding scenes. They just slap a bunch of assets and scripts that the community has released publicly, then they will do very little actual mapping and release it. Which there's nothing wrong with if you are just learning and getting your feet wet. The difference is all those maps get released for free, don't try to delude people into thinking they are releasing some insane experience, and don't take peoples money.

[@pilentus]

Users can cancel their pledges at any time for free before the Kickstarter ends. No need for back charging! Also, Kickstarter doesn't take your money until after the campaign ends

[@CallumUpton]

i couldn't remember if it was possible to just cancel the pledges, thanks for the heads up!

[@thinkhouseproductions408]

The campaign has 4 days left and is at 60k+ USD. Until today, the project was tagged as "Projects We Love" by kickstarter.

[@CallumUpton]

@@thinkhouseproductions408 damn, we're making progress! it seems getting all these people to report it had some effect atleast

[@thepretendgineer2288]

1 week is very generous, i would say 1 day, i have seen someone with no coding exp at all make their first game within 1 week of learning, it was graphically horrible but they actually wrote code for it and learned more than these 2 guys seem to know in their 8 months or what ever of doing this game

[@Relocklabs]

man I just found your channel and it's time to binge some dream world

[@DYNANiK]

You have to get 2 friends to pledge... this is a fuggin snowball scam!

[@deanbouvier8529]

I really appreciate people making these scam videos pointing things out because it needs to be called out so people who don't know better are warned and aware. It's really sad and infuriating that such trash is allowed to stand and is getting funded over other legit projects out there. Scams are becoming rampant and a disservice to teams out there working hard to build real games.

[@GtMcGee]

Gold Hunter on steam does the exact same thing. been in development taking donations for over 4 years now and still dont have anything that wasnt downloaded directly from UE store

[@CommandoJenkins]

I propose you continue making videos that expose kickstarters, I think you'll do well.

[@CallumUpton]

thankyou! i definitely will

[@mrspankytank2858]

DWs “dev” is pushing this with a sob story of how he’s so mistreated by life and literally uses it in this “games” promo. That’s a HUGE red flag. I can’t stand BS like this. There’s plenty of these on Steam to. Luckily we have channels like this big and small to help steer people away. Obviously it’s still not enough. This DW guy is banking off it.

[@CallumUpton]

ive reached out to a big youtuber about this and we're in the process of making this BIG. it needs to happen so this can be taken down before people lose their money

[@ShibaInuDogTricks]

Nice little video you've got here! Much better coverage/research compared to other channels. You quickly and cleanly laid out the information without too much bias. Looking forward to more of your work if you carry on

[@CallumUpton]

thanks! i think most peoples scam alarms we're set off by this, they just weren't equipped to say exactly how it was a scam.

[@tangyhyperspace2217]

Callum doing what I've not seen anyone else do and actually name the asset packs

[@supermary-o180]

I had looked up the guy who claims to have left Apple, FB and Google for this, his LinkedIn profile popped up, and he worked at Google & FB ages ago, for less than a year each and all his jobs had nothing to do with game development, just robotics (and nothing impressive either). Same for the main dude, he mostly did some marketing jobs, then nothing worthwhile. No wonder his fiancee left him. Two massive scammers.

[@MTNDEWGANG]

I'm all for using assets to make your game, hell, i even use them in my little mini world projects i like to make. But here's the issue. You not modifying, changing and using them for it's intended puporse as a building tool to help speed up devlopment/make life easier. It's also pretty illegal to just take assets and throw it in a game for profit, even if you bought it. Lot's of creators literally state these are for use of temporary usage or modifying it to your needs.

[@nerdmassa9086]

KS should be notified about this video

[@CallumUpton]

they dont care, they want their 5% cut

[@PSIBoredomOmega]

2:15 amogus character 😳

[@magebit]

It's called Dreamworld because you'd have to be asleep to buy in.

[@batkatbrown4925]

found you from Josh Strife Hayes and been binging your channel. I love your demeanor, your voice and your wit!

[@NaomiYing6969]

Yeah youtube, this is "ARK: Survival Evolved" XD

[@RadeonVector]

Whenever I feel a bit dumb I remember I wasn't one of the backers of this or any other obvious and ridiculous scams and then I feel better again, thanks backers!

[@ZeldaTheSwordsman]

The "million players on a single server" thing is incredibly facepalm-worthy. 1. There is no way that two chuckleheads who are high on themselves to the point of pathological lying at times can actually pull that off 2. Even if they somehow _did_ pull it off, if you take a step back and stop being dazzled by the big number and what a logistical feat that would be... having a million players on one server would kinda suck to play. It would either be packed like a sardine tin, or have a map so big that getting *anywhere* would be a tedious journey. So even if someone _could_ do it... it wouldn't be *worth* doing.

[@livanbard]

I seen a rpg maker mmo made by brazilians that has actual servers and it's on steam. But people with better engines resort to scam. I can't never understand.

[@sashablazquez]

''this is how legends are made kid''

[@idontevenknow9758]

I have never in any game or software based project EVER heard of an demo being locked off unless you get two other people to pay. That is unheard of. The purpose of a demo or a public alpha build is to give people confidence in the project and see if its a game they would be interested in. I have backed all kinds of games on Kickstarter, the majority of them have come through and the demo is either readily available, available upon request with no hesitation, or you back it and get an alpha within 24 hours with tons of in-game footage and information to pour over before hand with questions readily answered. Why would you lock off a demo in a way where you can't even try it after you pledged that makes no sense.

[@FEEAR1000]

They completed funding and not a update or thank you note from the so called "devs" KNEW it was a scam.

[@LiMiT1337oO]

Fun fact: There are people on KZbin (e.g. a young boy called Tobydoo2) creating gameplay content of their so called "Game" :D but if you see it and you think about them saying they made this is 8 months.... you are going to faint. its a Voxel Landscape with the 100 stylized trees as foliage generation with this shitty build system and nothing more... you can gather dirt from terraforming (of course not self written, its the voxel plugin), stone if you use a pickaxe, wood from trees and iron from extremly ugly and buggy ironnodes you often cannot even gather... after this you can build some totally randomly thrown together assets. Thats it... 8 Months? Everyone could do this system in less then 2 days without knowing ue4 before.

[@axymyxa6021]

I guess they got the Joshua Fluke advanced course... Maybe they should start off with a BBS DOOR Game

[@rich9973]

You deserve way more views. Best coverage of this scam that I've seen yet.

[@peter486]

Its so funny to me because i sell assents on the unreal store, and my feeling is that we have to expose these as holes, where ever they pop up , my feeling is that there has to be better know how from people that s going to invest in projects. these people has done so much damage. to future projects from real game devs to be able to finance their games.

[@zurny22]

These two guys "making" this "game" are truly UNREAL...

[@efru1]

Every now and then I go to my spam folder to read the latest Nigerian prince scam emails just for kicks. I get less of a scammy feeling reading those emails than I do in watching that guy talk about how his fiancee left him because of COVID so he's starting a game that will end all other games and the only thing he has to show for his demo is a bunch of recently discounted UE assets strung together in cutscenes. Oh and they've also figured out how to cram a million players into the same open world via client side processing. Ok. There's something obviously off about all this. They have to know someone or be connected in some way to an investor, if it's real. And that's a big if. You cannot walk into an investment pitch with that video and give these outlandish claims and expect anything other than to be laughed out of the room.

[@Limofeus]

All they have done is just bought some assets and recorded gameplay of demo scenes of those assets and now they somehow promise an MMO so good that you will not want to play any other game anymore... And people somehow believe them, in reality this is really sad...

[@AmazinglyScherzo]

13:25 this is literally a pyramid scam LMAO?

[@CallumUpton]

@@GigabearPanda you are required to provide proof that 2 of your friends PURCHASED through the kickstarter. not that they were referred. go and look it up. that is an exchange of money

[@20xdee6]

@@GigabearPanda tricking people into accepting nothing for doing work doesn't make it not a scam, it makes it twice the scam

[@WhiteShack]

I want to know how they are getting by on Kickstarter using stolen video footage, that alone should be grounds for termination on KS.

[@CallumUpton]

kickstarter retracted their "projects we love" badge sadly they still love it enough to keep it up there and take their cut of this scam

[@chrisharris2153]

Again, this is just another chronicles of elyria scam

[@caret_shell]

1:06 A well-researched joke, judging by that browser tab there 🙂

[@destero8853]

Even if they made it all by them selfes, then it wouldn't make any sense to let a robot-Charakter run through a Piratestyle-Level! To be honest, i don't even know what people want to get out of this, because everything shown looks like shit!

[@cutesnitch1156]

The assets that they have used are easily available, for free, from torrenting websites.

[@DeanAshford]

I only found this kickstarter project today, and I immediately recognised everything as asset packs :D lmfao good times. I love asset flips, they're always fun to see.

[@peter486]

they have stolen every single assets.

[@spinn1144]

Star Citizen have earned over $ 2 million in the first two years, and $ 300 million in the last 10 years and have yet to release the game. I think these scammers are trying to do the same thing.

[@crowcoregames1785]

"theres no server" "millons of players online" YEP SCAM

[@SethEric]

Great video! Awesome that you were able to track down the actual assets!

[@CallumUpton]

thanks! i was inspired after seeing your video pop up, i recognized half of the assets as i've used them for grey-boxing some of my projects before

[@Alresu]

This was your first video? Damn, it was already way more professional than many others' after years of KZbining.

[@HaruMochizukiVT]

Ah, the beginning. Where the scams were young and fresh and the content tree was ripe with fruit for bringing the hammer down on the scammer. Oh wait, the tree is still as fruitful as ever XD

[@farmersfigs]

Shared this on a massive argument I'm having on a Dreamworld Facebook ad. Shame they've already scammed so much out of people. Well done on picking this apart so well, hopefully more people see this.

[@CallumUpton]

yeah i keep re-posting it on their Ad's too as they keep deleting any comment with this video. its obvious that they've been busted. just needs a bigger youtuber to pick this up. i wish i could have got all this info to Kira before he posted his video.

[@farmersfigs]

@@CallumUpton I've sent your video and Dreamworlds Kickstarter to a youtuber called BigfryTV, he posts videos about gaming scams and has a decent following, fingers crossed he see's it.

[@vamuse]

Just checked your channel page... did you just make your channel to expose these guys? That's pretty balla.... subscribed.

[@CallumUpton]

i had this channel for a while but never felt the need to make a video until i saw these idiots haha. i'll be posting more though. possibly some game dev/programing

[@vamuse]

@@CallumUpton well looks like you're off to a damn good start. Keep fighting the good fight. Hit me up if you wanna do a cross over some time!

[@Phoenix-gz9xb]

Even if they don't code they would at least have to know enough to visual script the game. Its a disaster waiting to happen. Or..has happened

[@erinbateman1112]

I saw this posted on facebook and pretty much immediately saw it as a scam. Pretty much everything is taken from the asset store. I'm an indie developer myself so I recognise that building games is not easy and sometimes you need to take shortcuts or your game will never be released but this is just ridiculous. The devs are either naive as heck or this is one big scam.

[@CallumUpton]

Kickstarter just removed the "project we love" badge as they discovered it was a scam, they are letting the project run so they claim their 5% however, sign below to try and get this stopped before the 72 hrs is up. make sure to share it around chng.it/Z54kNRRKPD

[@jalooooop7769]

I hope people are using the "report this project to kickstarter" at the bottom of the campaign page. Only 24h left to stop this obvious scam....

[@bluetrianglestudios1741]

what this dude shows use is all true . I join there discord for 15 sec ,when I share the link of it a SCAM... haha they kicked me ,so sad...they could have said to me there props in place not just jump to the kick button.

[@humm3753]

We'll see how this turns out

[@Timeflex1]

Loving the videos so far, keep them coming.

[@Rob2k22]

Just reading there replies in Kickstarter, it's a straight up scam, they have nothing..... I don't know much about Kickstarter but why would they let people scam like this. It looks very bad for them

[@Royaliize]

First saw this on KiraTV yt channel. I digged abit deeper and saw Skiazos had made a interview with the so called devs lol. And guess what garrison have made a moment on the video. He only have a lol video on the channel. Also saw the other dude core aegis lololol what is this.

[@TheSmashingDoc1]

someone gave them 2000, omg, people kill each other for much less and he throws it away.

[@Necrotog82]

This sounds like a Pyramid scheme.

[@Lonit-be]

so obviously you're right and this is 100% a scam. though when people see bought assets in a game they are fast to claim its bad or a scam but is that not what they are there for?

[@CallumUpton]

its not them using assets that's the issue. its the fact that their "game" is 100% assets, nothing custom at all

[@Lonit-be]

@@CallumUpton yeah true, obviously these 2 goobers are a total joke haha

[@vladroot546]

the last game I'll ever play. yes. because it's so bad I would sell my PC afterwards