EDIT: hours after this article went live, most of the people who pointed out being ghosted on refunds have gotten them! Send another message to SLG support if you still want to cancel from them.

OK, Yeah, I was supposed to be working on a review tonight, but I guess that’s getting pushed back to tuesday now since I have to focus on this nonsense

what nonsense? well, remember my article pointing out the alarming gaps and recent admitting of Strictly Limited not starting production on games in a full year? In response to the sentiment from the reddit thread I linked, Strictly Limited’s Brand Manager finally gave a public response of sorts… And it still barely answers anything at all.

Uh… So this is pretty much something that immediately failed my sensors, since it doesn’t answer the following, glaring issues customers had with them:

1: how do you go from producing something every month or two, to nothing at all for a full calendar year? They later blame “Industry Wide Challenges” yet refuse to elaborate further.

2: How do you not inform the buyers of your product that they hit snags, and they’ll get the latest update on production ASAP?

3: “The good news is that darius and rayz are now in production” NO IT’S NOT! THAT’S HORRIBLE NEWS! WHY? BECAUSE YOU HAD A FULL CALENDAR YEAR TO PRINT THE GAME AND DIDN’T EVEN BEGIN TO PRODUCE ANY! Seriously, my vocal cords cannot emphasize this enough; Rayz launched digitally in July. It would make sense for that one to take a bit extra especially with the R-Gear bonus game. It still does not take eight months to print a standard PS4 disc. Dariusburst came out digitally in October 2022. THEY HAVE HAD A YEAR AND NEARLY A HALF TO START PRODUCING THAT GAME. IF THEY ONLY JUST STARTED NOW (as in, this week, more than likely), THAT IS A VERY, VERY BAD SIGN.

Indeed, it sure seems that whatever happened… They’ve now sent emails to all buyers, finally, informing them on delays. More specifically, their taito related stuff. The bad news? the other game delays make no god damn sense either. Puzzle Bobble is delayed to August. Mind you, both it and the SFC port came out in May 2023 and is already at retail, albeit without the SNES port. Needless to say, I poked at them for further answers on why it took so long to start producing physicals they took money for years ago when the content was already done.

Again with “The slowdown” which they do not elaborate on, and likely doesn’t even exist outside of either “we dont have money and will produce when we have money again” or “shit went down bad and we lost staff due to the gaming industry being terrible”. This also completely ignores that ININ still published retail games like Taito Milestones 2 just fine during this “slowdown” period, so again, it kinda shows that SLG is full of shit here. If “the slowdown” was real, then it would impact a lot of people. And indeed, there are recent slowdowns! Discotek had to put the breaks on printing discs in April due to the bluray lines being blocked up over the hoildays. Some shipments have slowed due to the middle east situation. That happens.

But the difference is any other company would communicate the delay open, and not only when they’re being pressed about their financial status due to being dodgy with questions. Especially when the other half of your own damn company mysteriously does not suffer from “the slowdown”.

So what started all this anyhow, and why did they start replying to a random reddit thread? Believe it or not, it was after someone posted how the SLG Twitter blocked them for posting that spreadsheet I shared in the last article; in fact, that very tweet got them blocked. Thus, the first reddit post ever made by this brand manager… was to basically go “oh shit yeah we unblocked them no worries”.

First off, calling a spreadsheet showing your production gaps “off topic discussion” is laughable when it’s about the status of your own darn company and you refuse to ease the worry or clean the air, and second off, while any company is allowed to block anyone for any reason, it still looks very odd to block someone for sharing your own public production info. Was it because they bumped it to the front instead of leaving it buried like you hoped? Either way, First Press Games shut down all their commenting options and ghosted devs and buyers alike, so at least SLG handles things better than FPG by not closing comments, but still, this was rather eyebrow raising, and I guess was why they decided to start replying to random reddit comments hoping to calm people down.

Except the actual reason I’m almost absolute, absolutely sure, is because around the time that reddit thread blew up, a lot of people were pointing out and prepping to cancel orders due to learning that their stuff they ordered didn’t even start production. (meaning where did all that money go for the past year+ if not toward an actual standard edition?) . And that brings me to why I’m writing this almost near midnight and shoving it out instead of taking notes for a review on a really fun game i’d rather be playing. See, in the days since, mainly later on Tuesday (after publishing my first article, although it didn’t pick up traction until today, so I don’t think it had much impact, personally), people started reporting they stopped hearing from SLG about refunds.

Usually, they’re quick. Very quick. I had a thing canceled a few years ago and they got back to me within hours. I had another problem with support for another issue, and they got back to me in 3 days, Pretty reasonable. Even when they screwed up my Cotton Plates and failed to pay customs on a return, they got back to me very quickly when I poked them about why (and let me keep the one I returned along with their replacement)

But now for a lot of the people who put in requests on Monday, we’re nearing Thursday with still no word on refunds even after some tried poking multiple times. This is to my knowledge the longest gap SLG has taken replying to someone about refunds, and it isn’t just one or two or a few people who slipped through the cracks. Here are several reddit buyers who note the waits, to give a general gist. Someone’s even waited over a week.

And alongside this, I’ve also seen several people in a few forums note they hadn’t heard back in 3 days either, which is a bit unusually long. A reader reached out and also noted that a facebook collector group’s members tried to cancel their orders, and equally got ghosted.

Guys, I just really, really, really hope I’m over thinking this and it’ll all be refunded easily with no issues. But the last time I saw this amount of people wanting to cancel, the publisher went ghost. Some people never got their refunds. First Press Games doesn’t even refund people unless they threaten legal action, since in the EU, you must provide a refund upon request as a business. So at the very least, European protection laws should kick in if they try to pull a dispatch, but still… My vibe is they don’t wanna refund or are trying to hesitate on it, because they don’t want to be out of more money that they need to make the games. The Moviepass situation, in other words, by stalling as long as legally possible.

But honestly, I’m just fed up with these guys. Seriously. They didn’t intend to scam anyone with their releases, but it’s blatant something happened to cause a year freeze on production, whatever that was they will not come clean about and the fall update they provided pretty much ended up being a bust anyway as a lot of that stuff got delayed further to the second half of 2024, with most of the contents being confirmed to have not begun production at all. Meanwhile, Japan got Irem Volume 1 physically this week despite the buggy current state of that collection, so they clearly have the limited means to print something… they’re just dodging their limited print store obligations. And buyers are getting pissed, and transparency versus vagueposting is so, so much needed right now, rather than trying to crawl on a reddit thread and reply to customers insisting you aren’t going bankrupt, because the idea of not spending money to order a disc/cart production run for a full year is totally not an indication of bad financial status.

Full transparency is needed. This can should no longer be kicked any further down the road. For the sake of all collectors and customers, it is vital, even if it is bad news you must deliver.

For customers who have open preorder items, I still strongly encourage canceling them. If they don’t respond in a week or two, chargeback. Very rarely do I make that suggestion, but until they come fully clean, I really, really, really do not want to see a repeat of the dispatch situation and have people come out with no game and no money.

And with that ramble/alert, I’m off to bed again. If the strictly guys read this and are mad somehow, know that your lack of communication is your own damn fault. I’d be more than happy to do a Q&A style interview with the CEOs and with hard questions being asked, if you guys wish to be transparent in that aspect.

Though maybe i dunno, you should just email all your customers the full story instead and work to regain their trust. With your newest game like Spica Adventure only selling 5% in a week, it’s clear nobody wants to buy new stuff from you until you ship out the old.