Banned from BGG and Kickstarter: How Golden Bell broke its reputation with the board game community

No publisher’s name is untarnished, but few draw the ire of the board game community like Golden Bell Studios. A brief scan of forum threads on BoardGameGeek.com (BGG) or r/boardgames will quickly unveil the depths of this anger; Community members don’t just criticize the way the company operates, many feel personally victimized by it.

Partially, this is due to delays in Golden Bell’s Kickstarter campaigns. The company is a startup, founded in 2016, and has frequently struggled with funding for shipping fulfillment, creating long, repeated delays. The most infamous of these delays was probably the Unbroken saga, which we’ll discuss in more detail below. It is not hard to find war stories about the Unbroken Kickstarter on BGG and r/boardgames.

But the antipathy for Golden Bell runs deeper than that. Several of its content creators have spoken out about feeling manipulated by the company or taken advantage of. This has happened enough times to create a small community of people who feel wronged by Golden Bell.

The company has sometimes been confronted online with these accusations and has displayed a tendency to respond defensively, attack critics and threaten lawsuits. When asked about such comments, the company executives, Chairman and CEO Marc Goldner, President and Chief Creative Officer Rachel Korsen, and Co-Founder and Chief Content Officer Robert Gross, tend to point to the online abuse they receive, which does reach the point of cyberbullying. They argued that if their abusers were going to send such attacks out into the world, then they should be prepared to receive them as well.

“The few hurtful comments directed at [our employee] escalated to the hundreds and it became too much for her. The comments escalated to harmful private messages on social media platforms, and it even gained Golden Bell a ban from BGG to never comment again since it seems many people can dish out comments, but can’t take anything else in return when it’s thrown back out at them.” 

Unbroken Kickstarter, Update #27, Emphasis added.

Many of these comments were reported by users who felt that a company’s social media account should hold itself to a higher standard. BGG and Kickstarter both agreed, and the game studio has now been cut off from those industry mainstays; It cannot form new Kickstarter campaigns or post on either forum.

So what comes next? Golden Bell says it is committed to finishing fulfillment for all its outstanding Kickstarter projects, even if that takes months or years. The executives are all quite young, between 27-30 years old, and have much more patience for this than their backers or content creators do. To their credit, many of the delayed international shipments are indeed getting delivered, if several years after the fact.

“Our priority is getting all that backlogged stuff done because we can’t be focusing on growth anymore. We can’t maintain it. We can’t maintain that growth while we have these projects and we’re in school, it’s just not feasible. Cause we don’t want to let people down either,” Goldner said. “It is shitty to make people wait so long for a product, but I do think—and I definitely do mean this—I think people are really going to enjoy, at the end of the day, the finished products of everything, because the whole team—and some of the designers we’ve worked with—have done a great, great job and made incredible products”

Marc Goldner, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO

After that, well, Golden Bell got what it primarily came for, which is a hefty library of intellectual property. It plans to market these IP in several different media types; It hopes to continue selling games to local and online retailers without using Kickstarter, the executives said, but ultimately they don’t feel tied to the board game market.

“We’re not a board game publisher. This is what people don’t get. We have a board game publishing business, but we are an intellectual property company. Rob said it earlier, a ‘multimedia transmedia company.’ We are not a board game publisher. It’s so crazy to me that people don’t get that,” Goldner said.

A startup’s growing pains

Golden Bell Studios was founded in 2016 by three college friends: Marc Goldner, his girlfriend Rachel Korsen, and their good friend Robert Gross. For the first few years of their operation, they were in their mid-20s, pursuing higher degrees, all the while co-managing Golden Bell from a single house, along with some other friends/staff members.

Korsen is getting a Master in Arts Management degree. Goldner is currently working toward a JD, an MBA, a Master of Public Administration degree, and a Master of Education degree at the same time.

“I think people look at us, look at Golden Bell, as a company. We’re not really a company. We don’t make money. I mean, Rachel and I live off student loans,” Goldner said with a laugh. “I think that’s definitely part of it. People think we’re like a real entity—like we’re a real company. And we’re just a startup, and I think people may not know the difference.”

Gross said it may be a few more years before Golden Bell might consider itself, as Goldner put it, “like a real entity.”

“We’re trying very very hard, but this is something that is not something that is uncommon in this industry. In games, in media, in film, it can take a long time to be—I don’t want to use the word viable, I don’t think Golden Bell is a nonviable company—but I think in order to be steady and really making ends meet for everyone, I mean it’s going to take a while.”

Robert Gross, Co-Founder and Chief Content Officer

Golden Bell’s early years were characterized by identifying projects it found promising and sending out proposals to buy the licensing. Like many startups, the group had more ideas than resources. The trio aspired to be the next Disney: a multimedia giant with an extensive portfolio of intellectual property.

During this time, Golden Bell purchased licenses to both well-known titles, like the tv series “Lost,” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” along with some brand-new franchises.

Golden Bell became involved in nearly 50 Kickstarter projects between 2016 and 2018, according to its executives. In order to support the number of offers the company was making, it developed standardized form contracts and letters of interest, something for which it would later be criticized.

“Do people have boilerplate contracts? Of course we do. It’s a starting point. And if people don’t want to negotiate or they don’t want to sign, no one’s holding a gun to their head and saying ‘sign or else.’ We say goodbye. And there’s been so many deals where we couldn’t come to an agreement, and that’s totally okay. Not every deal is the same,” said Goldner.

Many of these Kickstarter campaigns were small, with a few hundred or thousand backers, so fulfillment was a fairly straightforward logistics problem. But some of its bigger projects ran into funding problems. And since it was involved in so many projects at the same time, it didn’t necessarily have enough capital on hand to support those shortfalls.

“I’ve read before, people are like, ‘Golden Bell shelves stuff.’ And I’m like, ‘we don’t shelve anything. We just—we wound up growing too quick,’” Goldner said. “And this is a big problem with some startups. Is that we grew too quick and we didn’t have the capital or the infrastructure to maintain the growth, and to also have a salesforce.”

The Unbroken saga

One of the most infamous delayed campaigns was Unbroken, “a solo game of survival and revenge” designed by Artem Safarov. The Kickstarter campaign was funded in April 2018 and backers in Asia and Australia—and some parts of Europe—are just now receiving their games. Meanwhile, the game has been available on retail shelves since May 2019.

By late 2019/early 2020, some backers thought their game would never arrive (admittedly not an unheard-of case for Kickstarters). Others felt annoyed to see the game on retail shelves before they received their backer copy.

“I’m in the US, and backed it on Kickstarter before [Golden Bell] got involved in things. I did receive my copy, but it was frankly frustrating to see it on the shelf at my LGS for the same price I’d paid, without the shipping cost, a month before I got my copy. After that came loads of emails from [Golden Bell] begging backers to cover their shipping costs.”

Reddit user u/Harrumphenstein

LGS stands for “local game store.”

To be fair, Golden Bell did not create the initial shipping shortfalls, it inherited them. Golden Bell became involved with the production and fulfillment of Unbroken after the Kickstarter campaign had already ended, around 2018. The campaign had initially estimated about $4 for shipping to the U.S. It isn’t clear whether this was ever a viable rate, but certainly by the time Unbroken finished its development and production finished, standard shipping costs were much higher.

“We didn’t know the exact pricing until after because we were so focused on development and getting like the editorial and production ready, that to be honest, shipping was like an afterthought that didn’t even cross our minds until after the campaign,” Goldner said. “Pretty much what ended up happening was, while that was all happening, shipping prices were increasing over the span of about a year where our focus just wasn’t shipping. I don’t know, maybe some companies do plan shipping that early on, it’s just we weren’t even in the mindset of saying ‘we’re delivering tomorrow.’ We were like, ‘we needed to get this ready to print.’ And we were so far away.”

Marc Goldner

When they realized the issue, Golden Bell and Safarov appealed to Unbroken backers to help rescue the project. Explaining the problem in an April 2019 update to backers, Safarov took responsibility for the shortfall and requested help to cover the difference in shipping costs. These donations would be optional, Safarov stressed, and backers would receive their game regardless of whether they paid extra or not.

“Ultimately our goal is to return the project back into the break-even territory to make Unbroken financially feasible and ensure we can continue further development of the game’s content. I understand that there are people who will be uncomfortable with this request—I want to stress that this will be entirely optional, and no action is expected on your end if that is your preference,” Safarov wrote.

Naturally, some backers expressed annoyance in the comments section (it is a comments section, after all) but many others showed support and understanding of the issue.

“Artem / Golden Bell – your openness and transparency are the be applauded [sic]. Shipping is a dangerous beast on these projects, sorry that you’ve ended up on the wrong end of it. You’ll have my extra when the time comes.” wrote Tom Mattson in the comments of Unbroken Update #24.

“You’ll have extra money for shipping from me. Supporting talented game designers is a great cause. I’m looking forward to the release,” wrote Jason Padgett on the same update.

But backers were not asked to pay extra at that point. Instead, they were instructed to wait for an email that would arrive around the same time as their game.

“We will only ask for this optional payment after your game is shipped, when your reward should be in hand,” Safarov stressed in the update. After what came next, this may be seen a tactical blunder.

Media Mail fiasco

Among other things, the plan meant that Golden Bell couldn’t expect to know how much extra shipping money it was going to receive until after it had paid all of the project’s shipping costs. Still looking for a way to cut shipping costs, it made the fateful decision to use Media Mail for U.S. fulfillment, a service the U.S. postal service offers to ship books, films, audio recordings, and other media.

Most importantly for Golden Bell, Media Mail shipping costs about half what USPS normally charges for packages. But it is not intended for games, or mass commercial distribution.

“Media Mail is generally used to send books,” explained Kimberly Frum, a senior public relations representative for the United States Postal service, in an email to The Tabletop Tribune. “Board games do not qualify as Media Mail. The Postal Service can’t comment on companies or their business practices. However, on occasion, customers misuse Media Mail. When other classes of mail are sent at Media Mail prices, this results in revenue deficiencies—for instance a two pound Priority Mail piece (local $8.25- Zone 9 $22.30) mailed at Media Mail prices – $3.33.”

Kimberly Frum, Senior Public Relations Representative for the United States Postal Service

This was not Golden Bell’s understanding, however. It had received some incorrect information, allegedly from a local postmaster, that the Unbroken shipment could qualify for media mail. Unbroken was going to be shipped with some other materials that would be considered eligible for Media Mail—A short comic and a musical score for the game’s theme song—which the company understood as making the package eligible.

“Otherwise we wouldn’t do it!” said Korsen. “I mean, we try to be very thorough with everything we do—even if people don’t think that we are. So, before we really go ahead we try to check every corner to make sure everything’s good to go before we do something like that.”

“Mail fraud is fraud. And, I mean, you say looked at my LinkedIn so you know I’m in law school. I wouldn’t be able to sit the bar; I’m not spending $200,000 to go to law school, and committing fraud for saving $15,000 in shipping,” Goldner added.

Ultimately, their inclusion of written materials did not matter for USPS policy.

“If you combined the package with an ineligible item, it would have to be mailed at the higher price for the item not qualified for Media Mail,” Frum wrote.

Some Post Offices realized the issue when they received Golden Bell’s shipment. As a result, these packages were held and marked as having insufficient postage. Much of that difference was charged to Golden Bell, but some unlucky backers had to pay it themselves.

“They were actually confiscating packages and charging backers more. That’s what was crazy, they weren’t even sending it back to us; they were charging backers like 2 or 3 dollars,” explained Goldner. But, “there were only, honestly, like 50 to 100 people that got charged, and any person that got charged that emails me—which we told them in an update—we refunded people that 2, 3 bucks. Because we were very clear from the start that any payments for shipping were optional.”

Marc Goldner

Despite the pledge to refund, the damage was already done. The word was out that Golden Bell was trying to pull one over on the postal system and finagle extra payment from its customers, even on top of its previous pleas for financial assistance. And that precipitated Golden Bell’s fall from grace.

“I was truly appalled by the use of media mail. I’m sure they think printing a … piece of music on the back of the insert meets the requirements, but it does not. I’ve reported them, and I’m sure many others have as well. Some backers reported receiving packages with postage due, when post offices realized that the packages were ineligible for media mail,” wrote Michael Steffens on BGG.

Furthermore, 200 backers received double copies of the game, to whom Goldner sent a mass email asking them to return the extra one. It was claimed online that Goldner had threatened a backer with a lawsuit if he didn’t return the game, which Goldner denied.

“We never threatened a consumer, that’s outrageous. Actually, that’s not true. Someone called me a kike, I told him I’m gonna, I’m gonna find who he is, and sue him. So that’s the only time I threatened to sue a customer. But other than that, like, we never threatened to sue a customer for getting a double thing, we sent a boilerplate-like mass email, saying, ‘Listen, we made a mistake, if you don’t want to return it, you can donate it to your friendly local game store.’ And a lot of people did.”

Marc Goldner

By the summer of 2019, Golden Bell had fulfilled about half of its U.S. backer pledges and almost none of its EU or international pledges. Safarov and Golden Bell continued requesting help for shipping costs as fulfillment continued, but the community wasn’t as eager to contribute at this point. Some people were frustrated and simply wondered where their games were (the campaign originally estimated fulfillment by April 2019). Others took issue with the extended delays for international backers. Others believed Golden Bell was being greedy either by asking for additional funds or by taking advantage of Post Office policy.

It didn’t help that Golden Bell was asking backers to send extra shipping donations to the PayPal account “marc@goldenbellstudios.com.” This is the company’s PayPal account, and Goldner put his own name because he is the Chief Financial Officer. But some backers thought that Golden Bell was asking them to send funds to Goldner’s personal account. Goldner was surprised that backers objected to it and said he didn’t realize it was a point of concern.

Still other backers were put off by the tone Golden Bell sometimes used in updates and comments.

“I see angry backers comment on even the best of Kickstarter campaigns, so I never think much of them and they don’t really impact my view on the people running the Kickstarter project. What DOES impact my view would be what the company does. I want my game, and I wouldn’t want to sabotage anything, but I can definitely see why those people who would normally just be angry are going the extra mile. The flames are being stoked like crazy … Leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth.”

Brent Raudenbush, Comment on Unbroken campaign update #27

Feeding the trolls

Raudenbush was referring to a string of controversial comments in which the company social media accounts struck back at its critics, sometimes aggressively. The following were posted on Kickstarter:

Consumers are not accustomed to seeing company accounts speak this way, to say the least, so this was jarring for many backers. Several accounts questioned why Golden Bell was tarnishing its brand by lashing out like this.

“All the responses and feeding into it by Golden Bell looks bad from a customer point of view. I get you guys are frustrated by the trolls. But let it go man, the more ya’ll feed that sort of behavior the worse it gets. And you guys are a big ol thanksgiving dinner with these responses. You would be better off doing your thing, sending them out, posting an update, and staying away from everything else.”

Lewtz, Comment on Unbroken campaign update #27

The answer comes down to their lack of experience. As noted earlier, the startup didn’t really consider itself a full-fledged company at the time. It didn’t have many staff members, and most of the staff members it did have were cooped up in one house. One relevant role they did not have was a social media manager.

“Realistically, none of us are really PR people. None of us went to school to be social media managers or study communications or anything like that,” explained Goldner.

As bouncers who did a bit of everything, various employees and executives would intermittently log on to post on the company account, so the tones displayed were wildly inconsistent. It was assumed that Goldner was doing most of the posting because some comments bore his name. According to Goldner, only those signed comments were from him, the rest were from other staffers. He was just the only one who signed his name when he left a comment.

Another frequent poster was Nikki Storme, one of Golden Bell’s partners that was sharing the same living space. Storme mostly works on game art and graphic design, but during this Unbroken era she was frequently piloting the social media accounts. At the time, Storme was about 22 years old and had been given no content direction.

“Nikki, she’s a different person, we can’t control someone what to say. I know she said some stuff like she’s been called a cunt before, and I’m not—I can’t tell you how to respond to that. Like, I don’t think I can. And there are no employees, we’re all partners here, so I can’t really tell someone how to say something,” Goldner, the CEO, said.

Realistically, the group had reasonable cause to be upset—some of the attacks against them did reach the point of abuse.

“I mean, I get weekly calls from random people calling me a kike. And look, I’m no angel in the matter, like if someone calls me a kike I’m not going to be like, ‘thank you very much sir, I appreciate it.’ And look, Artem and I always talk about, like, PR-type stuff and how to handle those situations. But, I’m a person, we don’t have like this huge faceless company, and if someone’s calling, emailing me, and saying ‘you’re a kike,’ I’m going to stop them and say ‘eff off.’ Because that’s crazy, I view it as a hate crime,” said Goldner.

Storme said the online harassment was creeping into the analog world. She was receiving angry calls on her personal phone number and even confronted while hosting a convention booth. Storme, a frequent Twitter user, took to the company social media account to defend herself.

“I could say that I kind of contributed to it,” said Storme. “I could understand people’s impatience towards not receiving the game, but when I go to a convention and people are verbally harassing myself or my coworkers, or you know, calling me words, or telling me to go die, ruining my merchandise, causing a scene, giving me phone calls, sending me emails. There came like a breaking point where I was like, ‘I don’t understand why I should be allowed to take this. If they’re allowed to do this, then I should be able to like, make a joke or say something or insult someone.’ And I think that was met with even more anger. I will admit, it drove me a little off the deep end.”

Nikki Storme, “Golden Artist,” Graphic Designer, Editor, Game Designer

Around when things came to a head, Korsen was also having a medical emergency. Her doctor had found a tumor in her hand and they didn’t yet know if it was malignant or not. Korsen said this made it particularly triggering when she saw comments like “I hope you guys go die of cancer.”

“It’s a little bit hard to even like, sit there and try to function, especially at that time when I don’t even have test results, people saying go die of cancer,” she said.

They tried to explain the situation—and some of the accompanying delays—in an update, but it wasn’t received well.

“It’s not like we put it up there for people to like, feel bad, it’s just so people can understand why we may have slowed down a little bit, or what’s going on in the background just so people had an understanding. But I think people might have taken it the wrong way and they just use it as like a weapon to attack us, and it’s just—I don’t get it, it’s a little bizarre to me,” said Korsen.

“I understand people are frustrated but I don’t know if that’s the best way to go about being frustrated,” she added.

One might say the same thing about the company’s use of social media. But, to be fair, it does become difficult to maintain composure when life comes at you from multiple directions. Over time, the group learned to avoid comment sections and were able to stop their habit of feeding the trolls (although this was aided by the fact that they were no longer allowed to post on BGG or Kickstarter).

~~

So if that’s all there was to this story—a group of very young people starting up a company and making mistakes in shipping and social media—the situation may have healed over time. Backers might still rightfully be upset about the delays, but the situation would be eminently understandable.

However, once the internet had Golden Bell in its crosshairs, it unearthed a community of content creators who also felt wronged by the company, but for completely different reasons. And this is harder for the community to overlook, especially as we are predisposed to empathy for game designers.

Content creators’ accusations

You’ll find a lot of loaded terms being thrown at Golden Bell online—predatory contracts, scammers, Ponzi schemers, even psychopaths—which can make it hard to pin down the exact problem. But after speaking with several disgruntled content creators, a common story started to take shape. It goes something like this:

A game designer (or other content creator) is contacted by Golden Bell with a letter of interest in their project. Designer thinks, “Great! I can’t do production and sales of this all by myself. These folks come on a little strong but that probably means they are good salespeople.”

Golden Bell presents designer with a boilerplate contract it uses as a starting point with all its creators. The contract gives creators an initial fee and a percentage of profits from their products. Designer finds it unusual that the contract gives them a percent of net profits rather than a percent of sales or royalties, but Goldner assures them this is standard.

“Our contract is not exploitable … We have NY Times Best Sellers that we work with that we’ve come to an agreement with on this contract. We are not here to exploit anyone. The people creators should be afraid of are companies like Random House that are known to actually screw people. We are here to make something work and just want to ensure our long-term interest in the property.”

Marc Goldner in an email obtained by The Tabletop Tribune

After some degree of negotiations, the designer signs and is momentarily content.

Time passes, designer continues to work on the product. Project deadlines stated in their contract start to creep up and pass. Golden Bell tells designer not to worry, the project has been postponed not canceled.

“The contract doesn’t have a deadline its just per say an example date don’t stress about it!”

Marc Goldner to a designer, in an email obtained by The Tabletop Tribune

Designer becomes increasingly suspicious as more deadlines pass. Sometimes this is coupled with anxiety that they will miss fulfillment dates they promised Kickstarter backers. Sometimes it is coupled with anxiety over aging. Golden Bell seems mostly unconcerned.

At some point, designer finds out that Golden Bell executives are much younger and inexperienced than they thought—The CEO has gray hair and assumptions were made.

“I was unaware of how old they were until a year after the contract when I asked, hey, how old are you guys? Mark told me he was in school. However, it was grad school, and you can be any age in grad school, especially law school. So I’m thinking, you know, late 20s, early 30s. It turns out mid maybe/probably getting it into our late 20s now, and I was like, ‘Oh, well, um okay.’ But you know, they appeared to have their … feet on the ground, and they appear to have a solid work ethic, and they also had products, I mean, they had a plethora of products. And they were producing them and they were selling.”

“MG,” a designer associated with Golden Bell who requested pseudonymity to protect themself from lawsuits.

Designer realizes Golden Bell is in absolutely no rush to get their project off the ground. Designer, under various time pressures and eager to see their project come to life, wonders if their product will ever see the light of day.

Beginning to panic, designer starts investigating other options. At some point, designer broaches the idea with executives of parting ways. Golden Bell pulls out their signed contract and informs designer that they cannot take another approach with this project, Golden Bell owns the IP. If content creator points to clauses in the contract that Golden Bell failed to meet as evidence it is “void,” CEO threatens litigation. Designer feels their project is being taken away from them, seeks legal advice.

This has happened enough times that a small support group has formed for affected creators. Listening to designers’ stories, we can find five distinct accusations:

1. Golden Bell’s contracts took complete ownership of creators’ intellectual property.
2. Golden Bell would frequently threaten litigation against content creators.
3. Content creators’ projects progressed too slowly.
4. Some content creators were not receiving much (or any) income for their continued work.
5. Golden Bell wasted the creator’s time.

I intend to focus on each of these points in turn.

Golden Bell’s leadership addressed the first point directly. They said they were clear about all IP acquisition in their discussions and no one should have been surprised by that fact.

“I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with acquiring intellectual properties. I don’t think it’s immoral, I don’t think it’s illegal; I think a lot of people don’t like it,” Goldner said. “Rachel and I had invested a lot of money—and I’m talking a lot of money—paying people advances. So I look at that as acquiring, like as a buy-up fee.”

Goldner said that it was common for content creators to get “seller’s remorse” down the road, after they had already obtained that initial investment.

“They realize that they’ve sold something, whether it’s their baby or something that they thought had more value or thought that they could have done better than us, which is subjective, and they wanted to either get out of the contract or were not happy about it,” he said. “We’ve paid people over $10,000, and then they come to us and say, ‘Contract’s not valid, it’s void! It’s an unenforceable contract.’ And then we’re like, ‘okay, refund us the $10,000, we paid you on PayPal.’ And they say, ‘No. come after us, we’re in a different country.’ Well, pardon my French, but eff you! What do you mean? So you stole $10,000 from us and then you’re saying we don’t own the intellectual property but you keep the money that we paid you? No. And if people think I’m a jerk, then they think I’m a jerk. But that’s not an unreasonable businessperson.”

Marc Goldner

Legal battles

It’s also clear that Goldner will frequently threaten lawsuits if he thinks there is a case—regardless of whether he intends to bring one or not. Goldner’s four favorite words are “I’m in law school,” and he seems to derive some fulfillment from exercising his curriculum.

“Just because I would [sue someone] philosophically, the mentality is that I would. It doesn’t mean from a business perspective, I have anything to gain from it. What am I going to do, go after someone, just because they made a mistake? No! And that’s what I think a lot of people don’t understand about me, there is a difference when I speak about the difference between the mentality and philosophy of saying that person should be sued—absolutely—versus a business owner saying, ‘We’re not going to sue that person, because, like you said, they made a mistake, people make mistakes.'” said Goldner. “You have to say, from a business standpoint, there’s no reason to litigate. It doesn’t help anyone, the lawyers win in litigation.”

Marc Goldner

As a matter of fact, Golden Bell has never brought a lawsuit against a content creator. It has filed counter-suits, and it is suing the People’s Court, but it has never technically instigated a legal battle with any of its designers.

The company doesn’t seem to mind if Goldner’s empty threats give it a black eye though. The threats are often successful because many designers have limited income and cannot afford a protracted legal battle.

“Every single time a game developer comes to me with a crazy story about a certain publisher who took advantage of them, I can guess who it is without them telling me the name. This certain publisher is also extremely aggressive with NDAs and threatening litigation, which scares the shit out of the developers,” wrote Reddit user SMcArthur, who identified themself as an attorney in the board game industry in a thread about Golden Bell.

Some designers do raise the funds to sue, however. Perhaps the most well-known is when the designer of the Recipe Game, Kelsey Devois, went on “The People’s Court” and Judge Marilyn Milian said Golden Bell owed her money and the rights to her game because it had broken their contract. What isn’t as well-known is that decision was immediately overturned upon appeal and the courtroom retracted the ruling granting Devois her trademark back. Goldner sent the following message to Devois after that appeal.

Goldner then filed suit against The People’s Court because its episode had broadcast an improper guilty verdict against Goldner.

Less-publicized but still well-known is the ongoing case of Peter Chiykowski v. Marc Goldner. Chiykowski, the creator of Rock, Paper, Cynic, agreed to work with Golden Bell to print some of his books because Goldner claimed he could bring the per-unit price below $2. Golden Bell was not able to deliver those prices, eventually quoting a figure more than $4 per-unit, and was also not able to deliver the books on the Kickstarter-promised timeframe Chiykowski had promised his backers. Goldner took the blame but refused to let Chiykowski do a print run at his own expense. He did not appear concerned about the Kickstarter-promised delivery date of August 2017.

In fact, “On January 9, 2018, Plaintiff requested Defendants to allow him to post an update to his Kickstarter backers. A couple of weeks later, Defendant Goldner denied Plaintiff’s effort to salvage his reputation with his Kickstarter backers,” according to his filed lawsuit. It’s worth reading the full lawsuit if you have the time and inclination, the timeline it describes is damning. I’ve attempted to simplify and lay it out in this interactive:

There’s much more in the suit, this timeline only focuses on the printing promises Golden Bell made. Chiykowski initially sought damages exceeding $200,000 but the parties have indicated they intend to settle in the coming weeks. Golden Bell declined to comment on the suit prior to the settlement but provided this comment about the printing and shipping markets:

“There are … a combination of factors that lead to factory prices changing on a daily basis. Prices go up, then they go down, and right back up depending on the market. For example, one month paper costs could double but then if you’re willing to wait the prices likely go back down in a few months after the market stabilizes due to basic supply and demand of those resources. Say if a factory gives you a quote on January 1, it is often only valid for 7 days (sometimes less), and if you aren’t ready to produce or publish a product for say six months or even a year, those prices will surely change. Sometimes printing delays can happen due to publisher or legal editorial, other times it is to give creators the freedom to express themselves and explore their vision. We have always been willing to take a hit financially and allow our partners to perfect their products so the consumers get pristine products even if that means things get delayed and we take a PR hit. We will never blame anyone for such a delay, we have always tried to be transparent that our goal as a company is to never pump a sub-par product out, and that mission sometimes has created a divisive division between us and either some of our customers or partners. We are now working on revised methods of operations to having projects completely approved and sampled prior to us launching any products that may incur a delay. We are eating these development costs and not passing them down to the consumer in order to minimize lag times between ordering and delivery, as well as ensuring premium product deliverables that everyone can be proud of.”

Golden Bell

Wasted time, wasted effort

For several content creators, the most important thing Golden Bell took was time. Every content creator I spoke to bemoaned the amount of work they had done free-of-charge for Golden Bell to get their projects off the ground, which they didn’t feel Golden Bell appreciated or even recognized as significant labor.

Sometimes this took the form of requests to add content.

“Before being a game designer, I was a graphic designer. So, you know, part of designing is getting feedback and understanding changes and stuff like that. So, you know, I’m not, I’m not averse to getting changes, but they really started adding a lot of components to the game just for, for their own sake,” said RK, another game designer associated with Golden Bell who requested pseudonymity to speak with The Tabletop Tribune.

Other times it meant working Golden Bell’s convention booths.

“We would basically be going to conventions to sell our own game, and selling their other products while we were there. So we ended up being sort of free labor. For me, this relationship sort of soured very quickly,” RK added.

Then there were the production delays, of course, which matter more to a designer the older they are.

“Considering everything, I came away basically unscathed, it’s just I lost so much time. And that really makes me upset. Yeah, but um, hey, I’m still young, I think,” said MG.

Another designer tried to express this to Goldner in an email. “Come on man, you win, game over. Can I have my time back please? No? OK, I guess not. We only have one time,” they wrote.

Golden Bell was nowhere near as concerned by the delays, frequently comparing them to production timeframes in other industries.

“We executive produced a 3D-animated film, got it into four or five international film festivals, but people don’t talk about that. That work? That took five years to make one animation. And it’s short, it’s only five minutes, but it’s great. Like, do we have a great relationship with those creators? Yes! We talk to them all the time,” Goldner said.

Pledging to deliver

Golden Bell is currently working to deliver the remaining delayed projects. Its executives expressed frustration that this didn’t seem to be well-understood, let alone change anyone’s mind.

“Someone sent this comment over and I think this is such an example of what we’re talking about,” Goldner texted me.

“The narrative became we’re some ‘scammers’ even AFTER people get their games and are not charged anything. The shipping was optional and everyone is still getting their games but still we are just wrecked in comments and online. It’s actually a really crappy situation,” he wrote.

The executives claimed to understand people’s frustration with delays but hoped they would be understanding and forgiving about genuine human mistakes. I asked whether that same forgiveness extended to the content creators Goldner is always threatening to sue. Goldner’s answer was illuminating.

“If a creator that we had a disagreement with or—even one that ended in a lawsuit if they came back to us—we’d still work with them tomorrow. Because it’s water under the bridge. And I think I developed that mentality when Rob told me about how; Rob, you told me like the Weinstein brothers sued each other a long, long time ago. And like, I forgot what the whole story was. But then they decided, like, right after the thing was done, they wound up saying ‘what project is next?’ And that’s kind of how I am from a business perspective. Because look, that agreement didn’t go well. But you know what, people make mistakes. Let’s try to do another project. Now, that doesn’t mean other people are going to want to but that’s just, that’s my perspective. So, and that should give you a little bit of an insight of what—really how we don’t hold grudges.”

Marc Goldner

Some content creators I spoke to would definitely contest whether Goldner holds grudges. But this quote struck me because the attitude it displayed was so dramatically different than what the content creators were experiencing.

To Goldner, discussing the idea of a lawsuit isn’t a big deal. He does it all the time, and he sees it as legal commentary rather than a threat.

To game designers, being threatened with a lawsuit turned their world upside down. They are terrified that a legal battle could ruin them financially and distraught that a project they worked on as a labor of love is turning into a high-temperature battle. Designers described fighting depression, sleepless nights, and personal turmoil as a result of these disputes. I can’t imagine them turning around and trying to work with Golden Bell again, because they are traumatized by their past experiences with the company.

The question now is: Does Golden Bell realize that? And does it care?

Editor’s Note: The headline of this article was updated from its original version