90% of the time? It’s the publisher.
Also, her project was so vaguely defined. I skimmed the page and thought, what is this funding? A year of a studio?
She’s already improved it somewhat added more specific information about the games they plan to make.
For the majority of backers, I don’t think kickstarting a game is all that different from pre-ordering a console game, which people do all the time. You can’t get your money back like you can with a pre-order, but I’m guessing most people who put their money down for a game probably stick with it. And compared to the amount of money made spent on pre-order sales for major games, I don’t think $2 or $3 million is really that huge or suprising. At least here it’s hopefully going to some useful end, funding games that might not otherwise get made
The people who spend $1000+ on a dud might be a different story. I’d have to guess most of those people are family members or something, but there’s too many on the big projects to say they all are
Another potential negative to the really big Kickstarter game projects is the question of who is going to do the QA on them. That’s one thing publishers have access to that most small devs don’t. Sure, you can do beta tests with volunteers, but that’s a bit different from having a lab with experienced techs running through common hardware combinations. And if there is a third party that can do that work, thats where some of the money has to go.
I would think that developers especially those with a history of good games would want to make the best game they can with the funds given.
The ability to sell directly to the fans without a publisher has to be a great incentive and one that they would be crazy to lose.
Being able to support a turn based game or space sim for 10 - 15 dollars and receive a digital copy is wonderful. As I get older I was starting to realize that my type of games were fading but now they seem to have found some new life.
I wonder how much the developers owe Steam (and other companies) that pushed digital distribution into the mainstream. I believe the acceptance of digital copies has helped all of the PC Kickstarter projects being able to raise so much money.
New kickstarter!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2dawngames/ravaged
Ravaged, the game already covered a pair of time by RPS. It looks kinda like Rage, but focused on multiplayer. edit: yep, the idea is a Battlefield game mixed with Rage setting and vehicles.
The game is called Ravaged, a post-apocalyptic vehicular first-person shooter. Think Mad Max meets Battlefield where a group of resistance soldiers fight for humanity while scavengers look to control it all.
The game features over 30 vehicles and weapons, amazing post-apocalyptic maps and 10 classes to choose from.
Lucasarts games was always more popular than Sierra games.
And Tim Schafer street cred and name recognition has maintained over the years with Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, unlike Jane Jensen.
This looks a lot like the final scenes in the original planet of tha apes… one of the truly iconic images that has stuck in my mind from being a kid. :)
I guess this will be the new norm. The days of making your first game while eating Ramen and working 18 hours a day in your parents unheated basement are over. Now, after the initial idea is hatched, it’s off to Kickstarter!
That sounds like a good thing to me. Although anyone without a track record will need to have an impressive prototype to attract attention. Like the Minecraft development model.
Just imagine how many people would have thrown their money at a Kickstarter based on that Hawken footage that was released early last year?
It could be good, we’ll have to see. What we might end up with is a bad spiral of people getting funding, not finishing the game, then the next guys getting less funding, and so on.
Indie teams can get awfully over zealous at times and there might be a lot of noise as far as Kickstarter projects go.
I wonder if we’ll then see people asking for funding in stages - get us as far as an alpha, then we’ll kickstart again for the next round and you contribute if you’re satisfied with progress. That’s how venture capital tends to work.
Yeah. We’re in a honeymoon period right now. Things will go poorly once some of these projects fail to be completed, or come out and aren’t very good. Hell, with the rate at which projects are launching, the market is going to be burnt out on spending money for games they can’t play for 2 years.
I don’t really know if this kind of open-ended game funding is actually appropriate for kickstarter, given the vagaries of the game development process. In my mind, kickstarter projects should probably be along the lines of “I have product / prototype X, help me do a full production run of it” rather than “Help me make this concept into a prototype”.
That’s probably more about my level of risk-aversion than the kickstarter model per se though.
Well that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it CLWheeljack. You can chose not take the risk, and pay $40 for the final game rather than $15-20 now.
Me? Tim Schaefer, Brian Fargo, Jordan Weissman - those are names I’ll put cash down for in advance. I’m not going to kickstart projects without a major name, though. Others will splash on all kinds of project.
I guess what I’m feeling is this … Indies made games on their own up until Kickstarter happened. I don’t think anyone would say the indie scene was a void where nobody made anything happen. Far from it. But now these teams are going to get into the mindset that they need money up front before they can work on their games. I find that … upsetting, I guess? Sad, maybe. I don’t know. It might kill some of that indie spirit.
Sort of like it used to “make the game, get paid - hopefully” - and now it might shift to “get paid, make the game - hopefully”.
I know what you mean. Like music fans who have a romantic image of the “garage band” and so don’t like seeing potential young musicians snapped up by the industry too early.
Theres bound to be some messy failures, but I still think its a good thing.
Unless you’re suggesting that eating ramen noodles and living in your parent’s basement leads to revolutionary creative breakthroughs in game making, I’m not sure what you’re complaining about here.
So some game developers will be able to make a decent living by shifting some of the risk onto willing consumers during development. Sounds good to me.
If anything, it theoretically should result in MORE independent development since there are inevitably some people out there who would be making games but can’t take the risk.
All I mean is that being hungry (mentally, not literally) and having that drive is a big part of what makes a lot of start ups work. It takes a LOT of work to get your first game/product done and if you are living on savings or sponging off your parents or whatever, I think that’s a motivator. If you raise $250K beforehand and can work at a leisurely pace … will that hurt the end product? It might. Not in all cases … but I think removing that drive and hunger from the process might not always work out for the best.
Also, instituting a system where people get money by pandering to the Kickstart fund mob is going to have it’s own design problems. They’ll be different from the problems associated with traditional publishers, but there are still going to be issues. It’s the old “the best thing is the thing you didn’t know you wanted” issue. If people get indoctrinated that crowd-sourcing is the only way to start a project, you’ll probably start losing some creativity (Of course, this is all entirely hypothetical at the moment.)