Kickstarter-funded releases have been DMP's game as of late. The only non-KS funded releases have been under their Juné yaoi brand. Most of these get pushed back from their initial release date by months, and it's gotten to the point that the only way to get the new releases is to buy it off Akadot. I got so tired of waiting for Amazon to get them in stock (and DMP claims that they sent Amazon an allotment), that I don't even bother to pre-order it anymore. Their recent release of Even So, I Will Love You Tenderly finally shipped from Amazon this week; I purchased the copy off Akadot over 2 months ago.
With Kickstarter, you rarely receive a comparable amount of goods for what you've paid. I've been burned by a lot of campaigns, most of which were being run by AwesomeJapan. I agree that the Madoka figure is overpriced, but then again, that's Kickstarter for you.
Ah, so, I have an update.usamimi wrote:With the Funi missing sketches, I can at least imagine it was one or two jerks who decided they wanted to take em & ruined it for everyone.
After three weeks of being ignored via e-mail and Twitter, I thought, for S&Gs, to tag Make-A-Wish on the most recent tweet. That seemed to light a fire under someone's rump, and I received the yearly thank you call from MAW for my earlier charity auction purchase. After I personally spoke with a representative at MAW, they contacted SakuraCon, who in turn, after e-mailing them a second time, responded. They were very upset that I had exposed the 'disappearance' to Make-A-Wish and went so far as to claim that they didn't receive the artwork until the day after the convention. Considering that Yamada tweeted the picture of the sketches around 2:30p Sunday, while the charity auction was still ongoing, this makes me not give their story much credence. I was given some sappy song-and-dance about how hard it is to run a convention, how they don't check their Twitter feed and how volunteers handle the e-mail, but that still doesn't explain why a cursory "We're forwarding this to the proper department" response was not provided in the three weeks since I initially sent them an e-mail. Although I offered to buy the artwork at a (likely) higher price than it would have fetched at auction to make things right and so that the funds could help children this year, they refused to sell it to me, citing some vague policy of not being able to sell it to a private party. So, I sent them a short response, thanking them for their time and that I would look forward to bidding on them next year.
TBH, it still sounds shady. I received a very angry e-mail, not the e-mail that someone who was genuinely concerned about the disappearance should have received. My guess is that I exposed an often practiced and kept hush-hush practice of conventions taking artwork slated to be sold for charity but instead will end up on the office glory wall. Either way, this has hopefully been resolved, and I'll see them for sale next year.