There are two big fears I have when it comes to Kickstarter. Given that they’re more or less obvious, I’m probably not the first to air them, but I’m writing them down here because I want to be able to refer to them in a later piece (this particular blog entry used to be a very long one, and I cut it up in several pieces)
The first is that there’s going to be a couple of high-profile failures leading to players potentially abandoning the idea of engaging in this type of very advanced pre-ordering of a game & its associated goodies
For instance, when I heard Wastelands 2 was only asking for 1MUS$ (900K+100K from the fpounder), my first reaction was that that was too low to make a RPG. I’m guessing they’d get something like 150 months of work out of that, perhaps 200, which is the equivalent of around 12 to 16 people for one year. Maybe they’d get a bit more if the team would be really cheap (which I doubt) and they’d get a lot of interns, but it’d still be a low number for a RPG.
My fear was that when it was going to come out, players were going to be disappointed. Or alternatively, I reasoned they’d need a second round of funding, and perhaps fail at that. But since they went way beyond that and got to the level of funding with which you can make a decent modern RPG, that risk is now lower, so they’ll only have themselves to blame if the game turns out bad.
Inevitably however, one of these very hyped Kickstarter games is going to be a flop, and I’m not sure what the reactions are going to be when that happens. Nor am I sure what the reactions are going to be when these projects run very late or go over budget.
We’ve often seen that the higher the hype is, the deeper the fall afterwards if the game doesn’t deliver (except for Diablo 3 I guess, man am I disappointed by that one).
My second fear is that the platform will become oversaturated.
