Warned Collectors Lied To Customers That Their Games Were In Production

Warned Collectors, a French company that promised Nintendo Switch and PS4 physical games in limited quantities, has received lots of backlash from customers in the last few weeks.

The company had gone silent for a long time until a NintendoSoup article triggered an onslaught of customer complains and PayPal disputes as the games they promised to deliver continue to be delayed with no end in sight.

In a desperate attempt to assure customers that they were still hard at work in delivering their first Nintendo Switch release Pankapu, Warned Collectors posted screenshots from the Nintendo Developer Portal, which is under NDA (non-disclosure agreement), on Twitter:

Super Rare Games, another company that deals with limited print Nintendo Switch games, soon discovered that there wasn’t any game code assigned to Warned Collectors’ physical release of Pankapu, which means the games have not gone into production yet:

NintendoSoup has confirmed with other members of the industry that without a valid game code from Nintendo, it is impossible for Warned Collectors to put in an order for Game Cards. Without a game code, the game wouldn’t have even gone into lotcheck.

With that information, Warned Collectors’ claims that the “games are in production” in April 2019 and May 2019 are completely dishonest:

Besides ignoring customers, our friends at Gaming Boulevard spoke to developers that have worked with Warned Collectors. Shockingly, the same developers that have signed releases with Warned Collectors have been kept in the dark:

“Nothing, blank, nada… We have no information at all from them since few weeks, and indeed we are asking ourself the same questions as you have. Have we been fooled too? Monday we’ll try to directly call them”

The developers behind Zombie Night Terror still had “no news” after directly calling them, aside from public information on the Warned Collectors website.

Besides Pankapu, there’s another game that is supposed to be released at the same time – Bolting Bolt for PS4. As of June 19, 2019, Warned Collectors has not registered Boiling Bolt with PEGI, the European agency for video game age ratings, indicating that the game is unlikely to be released with Pankapu at the same time, if at all.

Members of the Nintendo Switch collectors’ community and French video game press have expressed their worries and concerns to NintendoSoup over the situation at Warned Collectors, with one declaring it a “sinking ship”. A video game publisher told NintendoSoup that they believed Warned Collectors is suffering from serious cash flow problems, and it would be hard to turn things round without external help.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Yoyu and various members of the industry and community for contributing to this report.