because they took people's crowdfunding money and never released the thing. they're frauds.
Smach Z handheld gaming PC probably won't ever ship (crowdfunding fail)
liliputing.com
It depends on your definition of fraud. The moment a company enters bankruptcy there's a process of liquidation of its assets to give back the money to its lenders by order of arrival. First off were the initial investors and then would be the backers. Since they spent the crowdfunding money trying to actually launch the thing, there was no money to give back to most backers.
Considering how far they went with the project with a bunch of fully working units out there, were even mentioned by AMD's press releases, etc. it's not reasonable to say they were aiming at defrauding the backers from the start.
The problem is they were way on over their heads with how ambitious the project was. Not only were they trying to make the first PC handheld with decent performance for videogames ever, they were also embedding the Steam Controller instead of a regular gamepad, and they were trying to make it fully modular (which is something we still don't have almost 10 years later).
They partnered with another Spanish startup company called Rhomb.IO that was designing modular PCBs for them to be able to easily switch the SoC. Partnering with another startup with no industrial experience obviously brought the risk way up, and
2 years into the project Rhomb.IO quit the project, forcing SmachZ to design the PCBs from scratch by themselves. And instead of backing down on the modularity promises, they still insisted it would be modular which meant spending a ton of time and money trying to make that work. So much time went by that Zen SoCs were starting to arrive to the market so they pivoted into those instead (they'd be dead in the water with the original SoC with a Bulldozer CPU). And then AMD took their own sweet time before sending them those Zen+ SoCs which delayed the whole thing even further.
At some point their main investor pulled all the funding so they went down.
So did the
Steam
MACHine
Zero creators get rich quick by defrauding their kickstarter backers? LOL no, they got like 250k€ from kickstarter which obviously doesn't even pay the salaries of at least 8 engineers that worked on the project for 5+ years. Had them been releasing only pretty pictures and powerpoints we could believe that, but they had working prototypes being sent to reviewers across the ocean. Any US company would have spent millions on that project alone.
Were they way too ambitious and not competent enough for their own good? Yes, they were. They should've started much simpler like Valve did with the Steam Deck. They clearly focused way too much on making Minimum Viable Products instead of industrialization and assembly, and proof of that was the fact that they
Still, at least they successfully planted the seeds for the Steam Deck to happen, as well as all the GPD and OneX devices that preceded it. And now there's this whole expanding market of handheld PCs to thank them for.
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