If you have a less than perfect meal, is it the end of the world?
It’s not that gamers aren’t entitled to receiving what they’ve purchased, it’s that the attention and anger is not commensurate with the scale of the loss. Losing 20$ is unfortunate but hardly worth the ocd anger.
I never cared much about the game, as I didn’t find his work or vision compelling. Having said that, I think he did put the work in, more than once, as the game that people funded wasn’t going to be good.
I sympathize because I can imagine the amount of effort a single person had to do and I believe he tried, but everyone eventually gets tired and demoralized trying to eke out more out of his creation. Not all game designs can work.
Video game development has two major things working against it: it’s software, and it’s software that has to be fun and engaging on top of being functional.
Planning software projects or milestones itself can be really difficult. Unexpected problems crop up all the time. Good project management is key but oftentimes you just don’t find out where all the potholes are until you get in there. So for an indie developer to say “Yeah, I think I’ll have this done in a year or a year and a half”? I take that with a giant grain of salt.
Aside from the technical stuff, the product can’t just work, it has to be a compelling game on top of it. A 4X game needs to have that one more turn quality and you’re not going to know when that happens until it does. Even the big boys with ridiculous budgets struggle to bring things together. Look at Diablo 3’s eight-year development cycle by industry veterans backed by the mint that was World of Warcraft, building a sequel to an existing franchise (so a large part of the formula was already there for them). Then look at how it launched with a wet thud and wasn’t really salvaged until the first expansion where they pulled out the auction house and revamped large parts of the game.
So did At the Gates not meet with Jon’s or fans’ expectations? It sounds like it didn’t but I’m not going to ascribe that to him not putting in the work. Same with the Limit Theory dev, or Chris Parks over at Arcen Games, or countless other people who work themselves to the point where their mental health starts falling apart. This isn’t assembly line work and given the creative nature of it, sometimes things just don’t work out or don’t come together or the dev runs out of time/money for more iterations and has to try to make lemonade with the lemons on hand.
For me personally, that’s why I don’t get too worked up about most video game Kickstarter projects I’ve backed. I haven’t ever thought of them as a pre-order, I’ve thought of them as a dev coming to me with a pitch for a video game and asking if I’d like to help fund the attempt at making that vision reality. If the vision is appealing enough for me, I’ll part with $20 or $30 to see if it can happen but I’m well aware of the risks. Some Kickstarter projects have irked me a bit with how they were handled or ended up, but this one isn’t very high on that list for me. My main complaint was the long stretch of radio silence while Jon was floundering with the design.
In my experience? Absolutely tons of jobs. In my most cynical I’d say CEOs and politicians, but it’s true across a slew of professional roles.
We did get a playable game. It’s rough aesthetically, but the ideas are there. I had fun with it.
Even if we didn’t, it’s totally valid to fund idea exploration. Anyone too busy to play all the games they like and buy is essentially doing that. I don’t know the Kickstarter terms when AtG was launched but I remember just being glad he had an opportunity to explore some languishing 4X ideas. That’s not to say no one should expect a product, but those of us who are good either way aren’t wrong to not mind how it turned out.
Edit: I have never interacted with Jon Shaffer, either. Besides the game I only know how he thinks from listening to 3MA and the Game Design Roundtable.
Exactly how I feel. I cut Jon slack not because ‘its just games, no big deal’, but because I could visibly witness the effort. The changes. The from scratch redesign of some mechanics to try and find the fun and interesting parts. I can look at his project, from a holistic perspective, and see that he genuinely tried to deliver.
That the game failed to deliver expectations, but let us not forget a game was released, is not indicative of some moral failing or ponzi scheme. It is simply indicative that the game wasn’t as good in execution as the idea could have been.
So I harbor zero ill will or anger over what happened. Would I be more reluctant to give him money in the future for such a venture? Yeah, probably. But given what he went through, and the obvious care and effort he put forth, I genuinely hope Jon is ok more than I care about getting a good game out of At the Gates.
I’ve paid for home repairs that were shoddily done and could not truthfully be called finished. For tickets to professional sports games where the team was ridiculously incompetent. For books that turned out to be terribly written. For restaurant meals that tasted like a mixture of salt and crap. For a doctor to laugh me out of his office for claiming that I could feel something wrong with my kidney (luckily the next doctor found the cancer). For one memorable concert where the group showed up so inebriated that they only made it through four songs, and we were relieved that they quit when they did.
I’d say that At the Gates delivered me vastly more for my money than any of these.
But if you are talking about the Kickstarters that actually delivered nothing, truthfully, most of my other disappointments I have listed were actually worse than a zero. A non-appearance would have been better.
It’s not just games, the commercial world does not always deliver anything remotely commensurate with the price. I am surprised that anyone is surprised.
At least with Kickstarter computer games, most of us know that it is a high risk proposition, kind of like betting on the horses. If you find it fun, great. But if you are counting on taking home something of value, you are just asking to be a victim.
If you scroll up, I didn’t give Jon a lot of slack. I was critical of his lack of communication, and it is still an area for improvement on his part. I’d probably be more critical of Jon if I he wasn’t on the forum.
But the end of the day, he did deliver a decent product, which includes some novel and interesting game mechanics in a period of time which doesn’t have a lot of games. (It is strange I’ve been wanting a game to cover ~1,000 AD period for a long and I got two ATG and Imperator within a year.)
To me the game is as much fun as some from bigger studios, so I don’t regret it
I also agree that Jon mental’s health matters more to me than another year or two of iterating on ATG.
I guess I don’t get the “people in other industries do bad things, so it’s okay to do bad things in games” line of logic, but a lot of the stuff said here really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, so it’s just another item in that long line. A laundry list of bad things that have happened to you isn’t exactly a striking reason that more bad things are okay. Again, unless we’re arguing in favor of Stockholm Syndrome.
But the same things keep getting said. Apparently, it’s okay to take small amounts of money from a lot of people and fail to produce. Again, I really fail to see the logic in that (look at the Up Front! Kickstarter for another example that was much closer to actual fraud, with literally nothing being produced or sent).
I think for some of you, the fact that there are different degrees of culpability gets conflated with there being no culpability. This is far from the worst case I have seen. I actually do have sympathy for what happened. I also highly doubt that this particular project had anything but the best intentions - I don’t think (not like I can know, since I don’t know the guy other than internet postings) that Mr. Shafer knew that he would not be able to produce the game. But I also think there is a danger that too many people are just proposing/launching grand projects that they can’t really complete, and then just trying and saying, “Okay, good enough, this is the best I can do.” And frankly, that they may not be incentivized to really do the due diligence and project management in advance to know whether the project is really feasible for them.
In the past, when people had to produce something prior to being paid, the project would have just remained an idea and never been half-bake launched. Now, with the whole pay in advance to fund someone’s profits culture we’ve launched into, the barrier to such things has been reduced.
There’s been a long running bit of wisdom that there are a ton of people who want to make this game they have a “great idea” for, but they can’t actually really produce anything because they don’t have the skillset to do it all. Now, Kickstarter has allowed some of these idea people to get the money in advance, and only find out after the fact that they can’t really pull it off.
Of course I don’t have to back Kickstarter projects. I generally don’t. But the point is to discuss the topic. I also don’t smoke, but I am more than happy to participate in discussions on whether cigarettes are bad.
Here is the rather large fly in your ointment.
He did deliver a game. It is playable right now.
So in terms of delivering the promised product, he did. Whether it is up to expectations is a separate matter entirely.
But he raised money to produce a game. He delivered a game. A fully playable, if incomplete, game. At that point if you want to get mad over it not meeting promises or expectations, well, I have a long line of people to introduce you to.
Hello Mr Molyneux.
But he did produce. The game was made available for purchase and given to Kickstarter backers for their contribution to the project. It has a “Mixed” or 45% positive rating on Steam which while not good, is hardly unheard of.
Jon Shafer didn’t take your money and spend it on a new house instead of working on a game. He worked on the game and by his statements it sounds like he’s still working on patching it, it just sounds like it didn’t live up to your expectations. Other people seem more positive about the game, like @Strollen.
I’m not quite sure what you’re expecting here. I’ve been disappointed a thousand times by games, movies, TV episodes, meals, relationships, phones, furniture, concerts, lectures, haircuts, sporting events, you name it. That’s not industries “doing bad things”, sometimes things just aren’t to my tastes but others love them. Sometimes a vocalist was battling a cold. Sometimes despite best efforts, things just didn’t quite go exactly as planned. That’s life. Have you never in your life set out to do something that you wished would have gone better? A job interview you wished you performed better in, a comment you made that you wish you had back, a home project that you wish you went with option A instead of option B?
It’s like wondering how people can be not be ripping apart a baseball player because he failed to bat 1.000 or struck out in a game you went to see. That’s not people being mistreated by the baseball player, it’s just… reality.
Hell, he sold his house to keep funding the development.
Yes, so I heard. As I said, his example certainly isn’t the worst case I’ve seen.
Not really something that people paid me thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for, no, I haven’t. I mean, in fairness, I haven’t asked for that kind of money from from people, so I have not really had the opportunity to not deliver on that kind of money. I would not want it for exactly that reason - I would be too nervous about failing/letting them down.
I dont know his programming experience, but I think it is just a case of being too much for one person to handle. I think possibly it would’ve been smoother if someone else was programming and Jon was concentrating on design. To me it seemed he was in over his head. I hope he is doing okay these days.
This is a very good point in At the Gates’ case. There are a lot of crap games on Steam (although you could get a refund in that case). Jon did deliver something playable. There are a lot of Kickstarters that are guilty of not delivering anything, but Jon isn’t one of those cases.
Sure, kickstarter bypasses publishers, who do more due diligence. As a result, you get both people who are capable, but aren’t given a fair chance by publishers for whatever reason, and those who aren’t, but try to convince people that they are based on something (like their track record from the early 90s).
I’m sure Jon initially thought he had enough of a runway to do this – he had a vague vision of the mechanics and such. It’s just that it turned out not to be the case. As mentioned above, games, especially strategy games, especially strategy games that try to innovate heavily – can take a very, very long time to get right. Reminds me of this article about making Firaxcom. That thing took years to get right. In the end, Sid Meier needed to coach Jake Solomon through many of the major design decisions. Innovation can be ridiculously hard, and many devs don’t have the experience to realize it ahead of time.
I reached out to Jon recently through Kickstarter messaging. He indicated he is still working on the game and will have a new, big update in a few weeks focused on AI.
As others here have said, maybe it is time he moves on. But clearly, he’s still going at it.
Sounds like a good reason to cut people slack for their honest efforts that don’t work out. I mean they could change Kickstarter so that everyone agrees to specific milestones and the backers vote them the agreed part of the money as each milestone is met. But that model would just require stupid, defensive milestones where you are paying for X amount of labor and Y and Z features, with no guarantees or extra effort related to whether it’s fun or not. When it clicks it clicks and when it doesn’t you still pay but the dev walks away with the milestones they got.
I’d rather have the model where they take the money and try or deliver on the spirit of what they pitched, even if that ends up not working out in some cases. Because the alternative is only getting the letter of what they pitched even in the cases where it could have been so much better.
Oh! Just in time for the sale!
Very nice!