Getting a Refund for Super Retro Squad (Super Retro Crossover)

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Well unfortunately the day has finally come where Super Action Squad, formerly called Super Retro Squad, has been cancelled. Jay Pavlina wrote a huge article over on explodingrabbit.com which basically makes excuses and then throws his team members under the bus.


More importantly let's talk about refunds. You asked for my help and I will accommodate you. It appears he refunded a few people so they would stop bad mouthing him, basically buying them off. There are a bunch of other people who have asked for refunds and not received them as of today and in looking at the comments on Kickstarter and the explodingrabbit YouTube channel, Jay is not even responding to people. Long story short people want refunds, and as usual Jay has gone MIA an ignoring them.


So here is what you can do.


First of all, you are legally entitled to a refund because he didn't fulfill the rewards. You can read more about that on my post here Timeline for Exploding Rabbit's Super Retro Squad (Super Action Squad)


Right now you basically have 2 options to get the refund.

Option 1 - Ask Jay Pavlina for a refund

You can continue to ask him for a refund though he doesn't seem to be responding to people at all and has pretty much vanished. You could ask on Kickstarter, where the funding took place or attempt to contact him via the "contact form" on explodingrabbit.com. Beware of the contact form though because you have no idea where that goes, will have no record of the email, and he will track you personal IP address. In my opinion this option doesn't seem to be working out.

 

Option 2 - Sue Jay Pavlina

As a backer you legally entered into a contract with Jay Pavlina. You gave him money and in return were to receive rewards. The rewards were not provided and it appears never will be. What you would need to do is sue him. It would be a civil matter and you would sue him in small claims court. Specifically you would sue him for the damages which is the amount you gave him for the rewards as well as court costs. Court costs include court fees and your lawyers fees. Most lawyers will work on contingency which means they won't be paid unless you win the case, and like I said you won't have to pay anything because you would sue Jay Pavlina for the court costs as well. That is basically the overview and if you want to do this, just reach out to a lawyer and find out of they will take the case on contingency. The lawyer will then walk you through the specifics of what you need to do. If a lot of people are interested in this method I can reach out to a lawyer who would do a class action suit on Jay Pavlina on behalf of all the backers. Let me know guys, I am here to help.

Super Action Squad vs Shovel Knight

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So Jay Pavlina's game Super Action Squad and Yacht Club Games's Shovel Knight are both retro games that were funded on Kickstarter and are being produced by "indie" developers. I want to do a comparison of the two so people can see the clear difference between two indie games that were both funded on Kickstarter. Hopefully this will help backers in their decision of what games to back in the future.

Lets start out with Yacht Club Game's thoughts on the risks of developing an indie game;

"Making great video games is hard. Like, really hard! Art, design, and technology have to be blended seamlessly to create a cohesive experience. On top of that, it takes time to iterate and expand on ideas. There is a reason lots of awesome games take forever to come out!
The biggest risk is that Shovel Knight would take longer than anticipated. If production were to go late, cash would be the biggest problem. If catastrophe truly struck, our backup plan would be to pool our remaining funds and partner with venture capitalist or publisher to get the game done. This game is our livelihood, so we will do whatever it takes!
However, perish the thought of failure! Yacht Club Games has an experienced staff that has shipped more than 30 projects on more than 8 platforms. We work as a team, we have made games of this type before, and we know what we are doing!"

I at least think that this sums up the risks pretty nicely. Yacht Club adresses the risk and says what they will do in the case it happens. Jay Pavlina did not even acknowledge or discuss risks at all on the Kickstarter page for Super Retro Squad (now called Super Action Squad).

Missing the deadline is certainly one of the major risks in backing an indie game on Kickstarter. Both Shovel Knight and Super Action Squad missed their deadlines so let's take a good hard comparison of how both indie developers handled the situation.

It's pretty easy to see the situation and I'm actually not even going to say anything about the data, what do you guys think?

Jay Pavlina's Illegal Profits

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"Exploding Rabbit makes $16,000 per year"

How does Exploding Rabbit make Money

This might seem crazy because Jay Pavlina of Exploding Rabbit doesn't sell anything and claims to have created a "non-profit" game called Super Mario Crossover. So how then does Jay Pavlina pull in $16,000 per year you ask? Exploding Rabbit makes this money from the Google advertisements that you see all over his site, explodingrabbit.com . He publically admitted to this in his video "An Inside Look at Super Action Squad" where he said the average Exploding Rabbit employee makes $2,000 per year and because there are 8 Exploding Rabbit employees, that equals $16,000.

What is on explodingrabbit.com to make money from

If you take a look at explodingrabbit.com you will notice that it is absolutely full of Nintendo stuff. The site background, the wiki, the forums, and of course the game Super Mario Crossover. Even the keywords for the site and the description of the site mention "Mario." Thus, he is purposefully using the fact that Nintendo characters are known and people search for them to bring people to his site and then make money off of advertisements.

Does Jay Pavlina own the rights to anything on explodingrabbit.com

Although most of what is on explodingrabbit.com is owned by Nintendo, Jay Pavlina does own the rights to the following only

• Super Mario Crossover source code
• explodingrabbit.com source code
• Exploding Rabbit images
• Super Action Squad

Summing it all up

To sum up, 90% of the content on explodingrabbit.com is owned by Nintendo and Jay Pavlina makes $16,000 a year from this illegal content. The funny part is that Jay Pavlina claims the ads are for "other things." As you can now see, as if you couldn't before, that is just not true.


What do you guys think?