Stealth edit here at the top: I notice this article and another one gain traction now and then, usually because people google Limited Run in hopes of finding status updates due to their abhorrently shitty lack of ETAs. However, recently the company has been getting flak for firing a transphobic community manager, and while I haven’t seen too much in the stats to indicate such, I’m not gonna allow this article to be used as ammo. Yes, everything I express here critiquing the company is still legitimate as far as I’m concerned and their QC has not improved much even in 2023, and I still have tons of issues that make it so I won’t buy from LRG ever again unless they massively improve their act with quality control, professionalism, and not exploiting FOMO.
But doing the right thing and firing a transphobe leading a community full of LGBT gamers and fans, is not something I consider a valid reason to dislike them. With transphobia on the rise in the US, I’ll instead inject select articles with this prelude asking you to donate to notable charities to help LGBT in need. Thank You, now onto the main article.
Just how low can you go?
Well, considering how I’m back in yet another “oh boy, a thing I keep pledging to never go back to draws me back for another article”, it seems I’m doomed to be in an eternal groundhog day on this subject.
People keep asking me and alerting me to numerous issues, and every time I’m certain I’ve seen the last of something for a while, I get even more shit flung my way in the world of Limited Prints, Limited Run, or whatever have you. Brian Schorr of Dispatch Games scammed people out of their money forever and has gone off into the sunset, Special Reserve is damage controlling after being caught in a PR disaster, and Limited Run Games continues to not give any legitimate care about their customers or products, and LRG is the main subject of today, in a followup to an article I hate to admit has done better than I expected it to.
I always ramble in these and vent, so I can’t promise I’ll make this brief or concise, but I’ll just sum it up early and say outright that as of now? I’m convinced Limited Run Games is unsustainable on this current business model, especially with the current CEOs in charge. Not just the slowing of sales in general, but really due how the Quality Control issues I brought up in the last article, were entirely, utterly ignored and not addressed in the slightest. Not a one. In fact, I argue they’re continuing to get worse, to the point that I feel if Shiren never happened, I’d have likely jumped off the LRG ship by now anyway due to how obscene their recent shipping timelines, quality shenanigans, and narcissist behavior towards critics have ramped up as of late. This whole thing is just getting out of hand with barely any attempts to improve things besides the same tired excuses I’ve heard for years, so let’s sum them all up, yet again…
Website Woes
Limited Run updated their Website to a new design in February of 2022. It did not go well, leading to a sudden, abrupt shift, lots of new things to get used to, and a lot of aspects of the website that were worse than before, namely in terms of how production updates were rolled out, and the addition of Route, a shipping protection service that’s automatically forced into your cart. Needless to say, this was quite a mess! Over time, some stuff would get revamped, and I’d say as of today, the new website is functional and works OK for buying stuff, but compared to the old site’s production updates and layout, it still is a big downgrade.
Route itself is also pretty shitty, hitting many people with sudden, unnoticed charges due to how it stealthily sneaks into your cart on checkout. This is sadly, commonplace on a lot of shopify retailers, as my local RightStuf store does the same thing, but I certainly question why they would even bother with adding it, especially since Limited Run typically is meant to protect your order and ship it out to begin with.
However, the new website has a few aspects that I found really appalling. For starters, all pre-revamp games have been scrubbed of critical info. Lots of missing context as to what editions included what, descriptive info, and whatever else was there prior to the big 2022 revamp is just gone. This is very bad for games that opened last year but shipped recently, since for several of them, they had their descriptions completely removed or stealth edited! Which kicks into a new, awful trend that will show itself very soon. The next, is that the production update section, if you can even find the damn page, is a labyrinthine mess, with no concise way to know what games are shipping out when and what the exact status of a pending order even is. Not that the old one explained much to you either, but at least it was easy to tell what’s shipping out, and what’s pending, but now it’s all a jumbled mess.
The absolute worst part, though? The production update pages barely get updated. Several games had Q1 2022 estimations in June of 2022! That’s the end of Q2, for those unaware. A lot of games just flat out have TBA now, or random Quarterly predictions with little context as to how or why, with no indicator or status update on how close your item is to being done. Hope you like your 14 month wait on a SNES Cart Repro for Ghoul Patrol, kids, because you ain’t getting any more details than that. Yet again, some of the popular items get frequent updates over monthly newsletters and emails, but for the smaller stuff, good luck even getting a peep out of the support team on where the hell your copy of Toki Tori went.
Raining on Vita Island’s Parade
So last year, Limited Run finally released one of their most anticipated releases in the form of Super Meat Boy, which ended up being their final Vita release to date, save for the full set award, Revenge of the Bird King. (further info TBA on how they’ll get you this game, if you were a maniac) Of course, due to limited cartridges in the wild, standard editions were a chaotic mess and sold out in no time at all, leaving a few bundled with a Limited Edition to be snapped up by those hoping to get a copy. This wasn’t really avoidable, since Meat Boy was a catalyst of Sony shutting down US Vita Production long, long ago, but what was avoidable, was the quality of the Limited Edition, or lack thereof.
See, while the standards shipped out in no time since well, they were in-hand, the CEs needed to wait for assets to be made before they would go out… So people waited. And waited. And waited. And eventually, they finally shipped, nine months later. So what did they look like? Well… How about a change from a basic mockup, to a shoddily made cardboard box that was so poorly manufactured, the plastic shield frequently tore, and there was nothing dividing the contents of the CE? (Which contained a recycled Meat Boy toy from Fangamer, a Meat Tray, and a poster, for those curious).
Yeah, and that was one of the ones which didn’t have much damage. Pretty shitty for a CE people waited 10 months for, if you ask me! This didn’t ship out until May, all for a meat tray? And they couldn’t even get it properly made with dividers and everything? This is an absolute joke, and of course, Limited Run’s response was to… direct people to support and ask for a replacement (which led my peers to nothing, since there aren’t replacements, as all of them ended up in this low quality shape). The Switch and PS4 versions aren’t much better in this regard, but as the final CE for the Vita, the system that got Limited Run off the ground? I argue this is an absolute fucking insulting excuse of a Collector’s Edition, and feels more like a low quality, Lootcrate tier grab bag than anything else. So much for loving Vita Island…
Manuals, or lack of
Hey, remember game manuals? Well, they’re kinda silly, and I argue not as good as you remember, but if done really well, even a 5-10 page booklet is a fun sight to peek at. Limited Run were pretty good with them on Switch for the first few years of their service, with even some of the more basic games getting at least 3-5 pages of some kind of content. It was pretty much promised from the get-go how numbered LRG games would try to include a booklet of some sort, even if lengths and page count would vary depending on the publisher. So of course, some people would try and buy these for the manual!
Well, my last article mentioned what happened if they mislabeled a game with a manual that didn’t have one at all, (blamed on “an employee copying and pasting a template”) like with Paper Beast, but what about if they technically followed the terms they set earlier, and just gave you the worst quality manual possible? Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you like inserts, because that sure is what Limited Run has done lately!
Yes, several recent games, mostly from Humble (One Step from Eden, Ikenfell, Narita Boy, etc) and other recent games (QUAKE, DUSK) have had listings for a booklet or even some sort of full color manual labeled on the description to their website for the Switch versions of the game, and you know, while not all of these probably are worthy of bulky books that you’ll spend hours reading, they’d surely have enough material for at least 4-5 pages!
Well, no, because all of those aforementioned games literally came with the worst excuse for a “manual” I have ever seen in my god damn life, a literal flipbook, with two inner pages, and the outer cover. That’s it! Most of the time, said pages don’t even say much of anything at all, usually repeating the blurb from the back of the box or showing a lame control sheet.
Yes, these are technically manuals, in the same way me doodling my own custom health and safety booklet is making a custom manual for a PS4 game. And yes, if they don’t have resources to make a manual with, then they don’t have much to work with… But this is utterly stupid. Nobody who bought these games knew about the “manuals” getting shrunk down to this shitty flip book, because yet again, Limited Run didn’t bother updating anyone with status updates. People found out when opening the game, expecting something, anything akin to even a small booklet of art, only to get the laziest, bare minimum quota filler imaginable. Congrats.
LRG’s response? Well, after One Step from Eden’s developer expressed public shock and confusion as to what happened, Limited Run quickly blamed the developers for not providing enough info for a manual! That’s surely professional… But that falls apart pretty quickly, when you consider the fact that this isn’t just exclusive to Humble published games, and prior Humble published efforts from LRG had better, longer manuals, since Quake gets a low quality flip book.
Quake.
The computer game shooter everyone who was my current age when I was born was obsessed with. One of the most influential First Person shooters of all time, given a loving remaster of top tier quality. Sister game to Doom, which got a great manual on Switch, from the same damn publisher.
Yeah, this is a pretty not-so-good sign of the biggest problem with LRG, and that is cost-cutting across the board, which we’ll get into later. Needless to say, the fact the website updated and just so conveniently scrubbed a lot of these older, longer term games’ descriptions from mentioning the advertised manuals, means that you may swear you’re forgetting things!
Nope, thank god for the wayback machine to show the truth. Even today, as I’m writing this article, Dusk, a game that took nearly a year to ship a standard edition of, came with the same style of shitty “manual” flipbook. Of course, this is long after the CEO of LRG, Josh Fairhurst, noted that all of their mainline numbered games would include manuals of some kind. Guess that ain’t true anymore, and wouldn’t you know it, a renegade employee is to blame for this, too!
Joy.
ETAs and Shipping Delays from Hell
The pandemic screwed everyone. It screwed my mental state, screwed companies, friends, and killed too many people, while also impacting the worldwide supply chain as a whole. Everyone knows that, and thus, delays in general are a bit understandable, especially with stuff like Semiconductors and computer chips. Last time I noted LRG tried speeding up their standard edition pipeline a bit more, which seemed to lead to some QC slips as a result, and while CEs took a while, those also were slipping. So surely, both of those would improve, or at least have better ETAs, right?
No. In fact, this is arguably the worst aspect of the company for a ton of people, especially when you go back to certain standard editions and see just how long people have been waiting on them. There’s too damn many to count, and every week there’s a half-dozen more that’ll go into that same huge queue that makes my own review queue look competent. Let’s just go over a few highlighted items, and detail the journey and communication on them, shall we? MOD means yes, these do take time to make, but even by old LRG standards, these are really stupid…
Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse (PS5)– The stupidly rare game on Switch gets a PS5 version! …Despite the PS4 disc working just fine on a PS5 console. OK. Anyhow, this was put up for sale a year ago, and was estimated to only ship out 3-5 months from the closure of pre-orders! It has now been over a year and this game isn’t even on the Playstation Store for PS5. Some games that went up for order after this one even shipped out in full, including CEs.
What’s the status update on this? …Nothing! Outside of a very reason reply on the Limited Run Discord, indicating Sony approved the build and is getting ready to ship the discs out soon. That’s it! No indication on when they’ll come in, how they’ll ship out, the ETA, etc, just constant delays with no communication, all for the standard edition. Lord knows how long the CE will take.
Double Dragon Neon CE (Switch)- Oh hey, another Wayforward game! This fun throwback to the NES ERA went up for preorder alongside a CE for Double Dragon IV, which has long since shipped along with a vinyl record for the game. A while ago, someone asked about the status of this, and the answer given was that it was almost done and only one component was needed to fully complete it and send it out! (I believe it was the Soda Can prop, but I honestly do not remember)
What’s the Status Update now? Nothing! Just silent delays quarter by quarter, now slated for the end of Q3 2022. Nobody has been emailed on when this is shipping, or what delayed it, or even that the soda can was or was not holding it up, (the aforementioned reply was given via Limited Run’s Facebook in a comment, because of course it was) so while it probably is almost done, 14 months is an absolutely unacceptable period of time to be sitting on a product without a word.
Zombies Ate My Neighbors, on Everything- This game was a huge mess. The standards were slated for late 2021. The digital version on PS4 got held up in some weird, hellish lotcheck process that Dotemu struggled with for a while, before launching in the final quarter of 2021. This probably, very understandably delayed everything regarding the compilation’s physical release on Playstation platforms, leading to both systems getting standards in the middle of the spring of 2022, nearly a whole year later.
As for the CEs? Those took even longer, only just recently finishing production as of the time of this article, 14 months later. However, despite finishing up a month ago, it doesn’t appear any of them have actually shipped out to people yet, relating to yet another problematic trend that’ll be brought up later.
Despite all of that wait and delay on standard and CEs for the compilation set on PS4/Switch, though… Would you be surprised to learn that there are still versions that went up for sale, with not one peep on the status of their production? Indeed, there are, and those are the retro reprints for both included games: The original ZAMN, and the sequel Ghoul Patrol, both for SNES, along with ZAMN’s Genesis version, which isn’t included in the compilation! Ghoul Patrol in particular was a game I almost bought during the window, solely due to the idea of a retro reprint of a rare game like it being a really neat idea. After all, they did an OK job with Return of the Ninja, so surely Ghoul Patrol is a no brainer, right?
Well, who knows, but typically, these repros end up OK at the very least, and cart-wise they’re made by Retro-Bit, who usually do quality work. The problem here is that for these two games, they went into a complete and total void, now taking fourteen months and counting as of the time of this article. It didn’t even get so much of a mention on any front, with not a status update in the long time since orders opened in June of 2022. Just a generic “Q3 2022” ETA, that’ll likely change to it suddenly being in the warehouse, or it being delayed yet again. Whatever the case, you probably won’t get a peep until they show up in your inbox.
So yeah, those are just a few of the really, really long delays. And that isn’t even counting stuff like the Scott Pilgrim Vinyl, caught up in the Vinyl Shortage hell going on right now, the other repros like Worms and the aforementioned Toki Tori I dunked on, or just various standard editions going from 3-5 months, to even longer waits. The Valis collection ended preorders around February, and it’s been six months since then, and the standards are still nowhere in sight despite an original ETA of June. Yet again on that title, no status updates to customers, which is the reoccuring issue: unless it’s a really big item that gets covered in their joke of a monthly newsletter, your money basically goes into a black hole for anywhere between 3-14 months or more with next to no communication, despite repeated promises of improving such. Then again, they promised improved QC, and none of that happened either.
DOOMed Replacements
I mentioned in the last article that one of the more recent QC slipups was that Doom: The Classics Collection had a DRM-filled version on the cart and discs, with no attempt from LRG to notify customers despite being tipped off during the preorder phase, and no response after it was brought to light when people got their copies. Needless to say, they seemed to essentially ghost everyone on the matter.
Well, they eventually revealed a solution! …Kinda. See, they did what they should have done for Shiren and other QC messups, and actually put out a public blog post apologizing and offering a solution. This was in the form of reprinting the game, but forcing you to send in your old copy (or destroy it with evidence to send to them if you’re out of the US). Utterly stupid since you know, other replacements like Game Tengoku (which did ship out and properly happen, finally!) were just automatically sent to anyone who asked for one, but they also noted it’s some dumb mandate from Bethesda, so whatever. That at least is “Fixed”, but the sheer length of time in which they remained silent on it was beyond inexcusable, and this whole routine appears to be little more than a method of discouraging people from sending in their copies and getting the fixed version, especially since it forces you to break open your copy to do so.
Warehouse Mayhem
This is, to be blunt, another key aspect of LRG, that has gone on for ages, and doesn’t seem to be getting better. Last time, I noted that a lot of stuff flooded their warehouse, leading to a lot of games slowly shipping out over the course of a month or two, which thus led to Shiren on PC being in-hand a month before they shipped it out and hoped people wouldn’t noticed they swapped the advertised game with a Steam Key. Oops.
Well, it’s happening more and more, as their production updates pages (Yes, there are two of them) shows a ton of items flooding this warehouse constantly, and it’s been like this for over a year now! Just like last time, everything slows to a crawl, leading to in-hand items taking anywhere from 2-7 weeks to ship, even if you were to place an order through LRG for a T-Shirt this very minute. Yeah, absolutely not a good look if even the in-hand, completed items are stuck in a warehouse with little communication.
Not much has been done to remedy this, outside of continued, repeat promises to yet again “hire more staff”, as if throwing more bodies at a problem is an automatic fix for something logistical, especially when some SKUS like Castlevania have tens of thousands of orders to go through. With so little staff, and so much product, I honestly can’t help but wonder if the Customer Service folk at LRG are even treated humanely, since I do not see much of a way for that whole process to work without insane crunch, especially if, having to deal with support tickets from people who are likely very angry about delays and screwups is thrown in on top of shipping out so many copies, day after day, hour after hour.
Even a living wage I argue, isn’t worth dealing with being yelled at by bosses and customers alike for something that could be remedied from the top to make for a healthier work environment. And to repeat myself, I still do not believe the customer service folk at LRG have any fault in these issues whatsoever: they aren’t the ones who screw up communication or flub ETAs, that’s the higher ups like the CEOs and the key staff who are the face of the company. If anything, I feel really bad for them, especially with how the warehouse crunch is likely to get worse, before it gets better. The sheer fact Scott Pilgrim Vinyls have been at the warehouse for an eternity now, yet are shipping out in super slow batches that take forever to get out the door, with more batches on the way to flood the warehouse over and over again, make me seriously worry that this current model of shipping isn’t viable, which is probably why LRG are dumping a lot of their distro games on Amazon, along with another aspect on that front.
But before we get into that, I might as well talk about the instigator of this entire article, and why I’m dragging my face through gravel to write about something I’d rather not, solely so I can get back to my retrospectives and review queue.
Unprofessional, Narcissistic, and Gaslighting Behaviors
Before I start this segment, let my stance be absolutely firm: I do not accept or support any harassment or direct personal attacks toward anyone. We all have a love of games, and my last article was a plea for something, anything to improve on their quality control for the sake of all their current, remaining buyers and newcomers to be happy. But what has transpired the past several months has pushed me to no choice but to call out behavior I deem unacceptable, along with mentioning stuff referred to, sourced with, and relayed to me from others in similar situations. This whole article so far is a rocky queue of recent screwups that show they haven’t done much to change their ways, and one of the biggest evidences in how they won’t change, is how the CEOs of the company have acted in public.
So remember how I pointed out that Josh tried to get me to erase my critical tweets on the company, back when Shiren went down? And how Doug tried to slide into my DMs back when it happened, blaming the lack of communication on the Shiren code swap on NDAs? Well, I honestly thought that would be the end of it for me, and I pretty much just left it there. Doug and Josh had me both blocked on Twitter, and I muted Doug on Twitter to prevent myself from being notified to anything he did. I truly wanted to unplug and just move on, and really just focus on whatever else I could, save for stuff I got tipped off about like the Monkey Island debacle. But even then, I mostly tried to keep their names out of my mouth in the public sphere, and especially on this website, for the sake of just hoping that nothing as stupid as Shiren would happen again.
Josh, I argue, has done a pretty decent job of this, not really getting into public situations, and just keeping things on the down-lo. Some may think it’s irritating that he isn’t providing 24/7 status updates, but to be blunt, that sort of thing should be handled through PR on the main account, or posted on their website directly, not posted on a CEO’s personal twitter account. That being said, there was a pretty stupid spat that became public, when Signature Edition Games, a limprint brand of Merge Games, made a snarky reply to someone asking about the new TMNT game, in how they bought copies from both LRG and Signature Edition, and are excited to play both.
Signature Edition, jokingly remarked that they’ll have plenty of time to play SEG’s copy, before LRG’s copy ships out in 2023, along with one that mentioned there was no long 8-9 month wait here! This is a pretty silly remark that honestly wouldn’t do much for me but an eyeroll normally, but somehow it set off Josh enough to publicly blast the company in a reply, before quickly deleting it.
In response, Signature Edition posted a public apology for their remarks, which you can see below.
Honestly, totally absurd that this needed a full blown apology to begin with, yet alone set off Josh at all, but it gets crazier, for on the LRG discord Doug would immediately complain about this, insisting it should have stayed private. Keep that bit in mind for later.
Still, outside of that silly spat, Josh stayed mostly out of getting into it with customers or companies, outside of a brief update today noting that they shifted plants for Switch games and that aforementioned tweet l linked earlier about how an employee carelessly copied a template for manuals. (despite how all numbered LRG Switch games were promised to include booklets years ago, but whatever) If it had just been that, I’d have shrugged and gone about my day, just finding it a silly thing that blew up.
Yet Doug has been continuing to do the things I noted in my last article: constant namesearching, subtweeting angry/unhappy customers, and most commonly, getting in spats with customers under the guise of trying to “help” them, only to make things worse by either making them angrier, or going on a block spree. If I listed every instance I’ve been tipped off about or saw for myself, this article would last too god damn long, so I’ll just cut to the chase of my own recent experiences and why it’s absolutely not OK for either of these CEOs to be acting the way they are.
For me, things got really weird when in late June, I got a DM from Doug… Despite him blocking me months prior. Certainly seemed fine at first, an apology for things that went bad in the past, but due to all the QC woes I heard about that I mentioned in this article, I chose to ignore it: my twitter was public and open, and I had tweeted about said QC issues a few times, so I’d be more than happy if he went public and maybe replied to the people unhappy with QC slips, rather than just, trying to take it private.
Except he kept DMing. Anytime I’d made a remark on whatever was going on in the limprint world, such as a weird user who got angry at me over Shiren and poked fun of me, he’d DM about it, despite never following my twitter account and never even attempting to talk in public about anything. One of the more peculiar ones was regarding a guy I nicknamed “Armpit guy” who poked fun of me out of the blue on reddit over the Shiren ordeal, despite that not being brought up at all in the thread itself, and one who obsessively tried to pump LRG products.
In response to this tweet, I got DM’d by doug, asking me who he was buddy buddy with. Yet again, I ignored it, and found it particularly suspicious and weird that he just tried dragging me to a private conversation rather than, you know, replying to the thread he saw. I shook my head, went about my day, and just continued to try and move on.
Then I got my Blaster Master Zero 3 CE. Arguably, my most anticipated of the post-Shiren CEs I had on pending order, it arrived in a total travesty, with the tank having a broken wing in the shrinkwrap.
Yeah, I wasn’t happy. So I took to twitter, and warned people about it, prompting yet another DM reply from Doug! …Despite this, of all times, being the most appropriate to go “Jesus Christ that is not OK, I’ll look into this”
In fact, multiple times, was I DM’d by doug during the making of the very, very long thread that tweet was part of, which I spilled out into the tweet above, long after I publicly noted how they could fix the issues I had (improve quality control), and how I wouldn’t reply to DMs for something that could easily be answered in public view. In fact, I openly baited them by replying to a tweet without a lick of mentioning their name or the company, and sure enough, they came running despite not even following me.
All denying what I had pointed out, noting that things weren’t true, that he didn’t know the Armpit Guy who I was referring to, (with that person being HereticHero, ex-moderator on the Limited Run Discord, evidenced very easily by them sharing the same images in the LRG discord’s sale channel and via the reddit account that dunked on me in game sale subreddits, that is an absolute lie and they do know each other, and the fact a guy who calls your ex-customers “Raging Crybabies” was even considered to be made moderator of your discord server and that you Doug, SENT THEM STUFF IN THE PAST and know them without any attempt to condemn their behavior is absolutely and utterly shameful.) etc
Afterward, Doug finally publicly commented and apologized, but by that point, it wouldn’t cut it for me, nor would it have unless it was immediately after the Shiren incident happened. You don’t handwave away QC issues, promise to fix them later, get mad when called out on not addressing them and for sliding into DMs without getting the hint that maybe you shouldn’t do that to someone you don’t even follow who doesn’t want anything to do with your company, and especially not trying to take things private. He replied with the DMs I posted, cropped to make it look like he was speaking honestly into a void and I rudely ignored him, only for me to retort with the rest of the conversation and showing the gap in dates, indicating that I deliberately ignored him because I want nothing to do with these sham excuses, especially since “Sorry” isn’t a cureall.
In response to this, he finally re-blocked me, but not before retweeting a subtweet he made that pretty much implied that I need to get therapy, which you know, is a normal thing for a CEO to do regarding critics, along with retweeting game listings I had leaked the sales data of (this was done in my behemoth of a twitter thread and the article is already getting far too long, but TLDR: open preorder sales can easily be analyzed and found via inspect element on LRG site listings, by searching “Inventory”, indicating a lot of open pre-order stuff is not doing well at all, hence what I alluded to in my other article about the state of the limprint market.)
That was the end of that for me, but it doesn’t stop there, for in the midst of all of this, he decided to try and do an AMA on the Limited Print Games subreddit, where a lot of my complaints and QC issues for LRG were sourced from, since it’s been a pretty handy chronicle of anything limprints in general have done. It didn’t go so well.
Comments after comments of people pointing out QC slips and how shipping times are too long. Repeated “yes, we’ll improve this”, or “yes, i plan to talk to ____ on how to fix!” or “wow, good idea for a release!” Lots of unanswered questions about QC, a youtube creator openly calling out Doug for not accepting his interview request to clear misconceptions (Doug continued to ignore this content creator, I’m told) and laughable, handwaved excuses, my favorite being how they legitimately forgot about Shiren’s code swap until it was too late (sources indicate to me they actually knew it was changed by April/May of 2021, months before it shipped), plus how Doug and LRG only block people who are trolls and gaslighters, despite blocking a sheer amount of random people who openly dunk on the company without so much as tagging them. (I have since been blocked by the main LRG twitter for pointing out that hiding tweets regarding their game delays wasn’t a good look.) Just look for yourself, it’s an utter chaotic mess of an AMA.
Needless to say, this was a horrible AMA that pretty much served as a PR defense, and considering how today’s article was spurred by, you guessed it, another public LRG QC messup, (a replacement tank being even more broken than the original CE the person got!, along with the aforementioned Dusk manual) it’s clear this was damage control, and not at all a legitimate attempt to hear the community and pledge to fix things.
Conclusion
Considering how the past year’s worth of public reaction to constant quality control slips from Limited Run have been nothing but similar excuses to that in the AMA, I do not believe LRG will ever fix their quality control anytime soon. Change has to come from the top, and everything i’ve seem from Doug and Josh indicate their public behavior is the main cause of a lot of LRG woes. From inconsistent ETAs, awful quality control, terrible treatment of customers, outright gaslighting of people like myself, and being friends with utterly shitty people like HereticHero and banning their own moderators who call them out for enabling such people, the whole culture at LRG just screams of toxicity and incompetence.
A small company, started up to save themselves and preserve their own games, now have a lot of their plate, but have refused to so much as hire proper PR. Now the question remains, will this be what finally, finally leads to full-blown, groundup change, or will LRG’s Quality Control continue to decline, and we get a Shredder’s Revenge figure with broken limbs? It remains to be seen…
Seafoam Gaming 