KickStarter Kickstarter Watch.

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

Cryengine and Metroidvania references get brofist. I'm still waiting on Alice in Otherlands, and Shadow of the Eternals, which never got funded.

 

[Zombra]

Wow, Shadow of the Eternals, that brings back memories.

 

[Infinitron]

Troll Ruins Kickstarter Campaign After Withdrawing €7000 Pledge

Here they go again: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2awesomestudio/dimension-drive-jack-is-back

 

[Abelian]

Good decision the devs' part to relaunch after the free media exposure and while the $7K incident is fresh in people's minds.

 

[Infinitron]

at Polygon: http://www.polygon.com/2015/5/19/8624665/big-indie-kickstarters-are-killing-actual-indies

'Big indie' Kickstarters are killing actual indies

We all know the Kickstarter bubble is bursting.

And when it inevitably pops, Kickstarters like Bloodstained will be the ones holding the thumbtack.

Right now, passionate, optimistic backers who want to see their favorite old franchises return to life are being misled right and left about the "real" costs behind a game, concerns often hand-waved away by celebrity headliners and funding goals that appear to be appropriately large — on the surface.

Most game devs can tell you at a glance that campaigns like Yooka-Laylee, Mighty No. 9,Bloodstained and others are heavily deflating the costs of their development cycle, sometimes not-so-secretly planning to search for the bulk of their actual funding elsewhere or hoping to be massively overfunded. The amount asked for initially has nothing to do with the real cost of making the game.

In fact, Koji Igarashi has stated that Bloodstained's $500,000 Kickstarter goal was only 10 percent of the money needed to create the game. Fans are being shown a budget that doesn't line up with the reality of game development, and it's skewing the public perception of what a game actually costs.

The notion that "consumers don't actually understand the real cost of game development" isn't a new one, but the true price tag is actually kind of scary, and the illusions put up by large Kickstarters are having a measurable negative effect on Kickstarter as a whole.

THE COST OF DEVELOPMENT
OK. Let's do some math.

The current word-of-mouth figure used by most developers and publishers to estimate the cost of an average-sized game development team is $10,000 per person per month. Now, this is a rough figure; if your studio operates in a major city or you're building the next Assassin's Creed, the cost will be higher. If you're working out of someone's apartment, doing 100-hour weeks or living without health care, it'll be lower. But let's stick with this basic figure for now.

"But wait," you cry. "Isn't the average game developer's salary around $60,000 or so? By that number, you'd be paying $120,000 per person per year!"

That's because the figure above factors in the 'unseen extras' that go into game development: the cost of rent, equipment, electricity, food and water, taxes, art tablets, software licenses, healthcare, dev kits, outsourcing, interviewing employees, paying actor and agent fees for voice-over work, and myriad other expenses incurred over a game's life cycle. There are an awful lot of them.

If you've ever wondered why game studios seem to constantly be closing their doors and laying off staff, now you know. Game development is expensive, and each person adds an extensive number of costs.

At a glance, Wikipedia tells us that Inti Creates, the company employing Igarashi, is around 80 employees. Let's estimate, optimistically, that only 15 employees are needed to produce Bloodstained. A very, very skinny team for a game of this size, but, hey — at least it'll be cheap, right?

No release date has been announced for Bloodstained yet, and all sources point to it being in a pre-production / concepting stage. Let's give it a highly aggressive but theoretically possible dev cycle of two years.

$10,000 x 15 people x 24 months = $3.6 million. Okay, that's not so bad. I mean, it's over seven times Bloodstained's original goal, but the Kickstarter itself is at $2.3 million after only a few days. Maybe they'll raise the money —

Wait a second. Who the hell are all these people?

Five other companies are listed on Bloodstained's Kickstarter page. If I only count the cute faces and names, we have a total of 20 extra staff to handle marketing, merchandise and PR. Marketing can easily match a game's budget on its own, but let's assume — again, with big sparkly anime eyes and youthful hearts — that we'll only be doubling the budget by bringing on another 20 people across five companies.

We now have a budget of $7.2 million.

This is napkin math, but you begin to understand how quickly costs can escalate.

Even knowing that Igarashi's publishing partner is covering 90 percent of their pre-Kickstarter budget, that's only $5 million on the table. Where is that extra $2.2 million coming from? If Igarashi had asked for the full $7.2 million on Kickstarter up front, it's almost a guarantee the team would never have made its goal. But is this recent pattern of compromising on the "public budget" vs. the "true budget" really any better?

"In order to finish Yooka-Laylee we will need to expand our team to an 'N64 size' roster of around 15, which we'll look to do immediately upon reaching our funding goal," that game's Kickstarter stated. "Therefore the vast majority of our budget will be allocated to wages and office space, plus the cost of outsourcing sound, testing and version creation."

That's a realistic statement, but the idea of paying 15 people, along with office space and the other costs associated with the development of a project this size, with a $270,000 budget — the campaign's minimal funding goal — is absurd.

If we say $10,000 per person per month for a year of development, which is a very rough approximation, you get a $1.8 million budget. The campaign has already raised over $2.5 million, which is a very workable budget, but it's hard to imagine how the game would have survived under the campaign's original goal.

More importantly, how did a platform intended to support grassroots efforts and independent creators turn into a publisher-backed PR service where consumers actually pay large game companies to promote the game to them?

RACING TO THE BOTTOM
I didn't fully understand the impact this effect would have on smaller, indie projects until I was part of one.

Elsinore, our narrative tragedy simulator, is halfway through its campaign now. When the team first got together to talk about our budget, we had blue-sky conversations about trying to fund the amount we'd need to dedicate more than part-time to the project, or at least to allow the freelancing members of our team to work on the game full-time while the rest of us continued with our day jobs. But even by our most frugal estimates, the odds of raising that amount seemed impossible.

Using the above formula, cheaping out on things like health care and rent, with a team of seven and a release of April 2016 (optimistically moving the deadline up a couple of months to account for some full-time staff), we'd have needed to raise $8,000 x 7 x 12 = $672,000.

In other words, 2.5 times what Yooka-Laylee asked for. Not happening. After all, if games like Yooka-Laylee claim to be able to deliver their game on just $270,000, how can we possibly ask for the amount we actually need?

In the end, we decided to ask for $12,000. Considering Kickstarter and Stripe take 10 percent of a project's total and taxes take at least another 5 percent, that would have left us with around $10,000 — a modest sum.

Immediately, people were skeptical. We got messages asking why our licenses were so expensive, why we needed more than $200 to pay a composer, and more. Posters complained that our $45,000 stretch goal seemed like "a lot" to port a game to mobile.

Our budget was turned inside out, scoured over. Worse yet, the information people seemed to have about what things ought to cost for us was completely wrong. Luckily, we've met and exceeded our goal, but others are not as lucky — forced to re-launch their campaigns for an even smaller amount and try to scrape by via other means.

This is the effect large Kickstarters have on indies. This is where Kickstarter is headed. Because when a $7.2 million game masquerades as a $500,000 game (or even a $5 million game), it drags the line of what appears to be "a reasonable amount of funding" just a little bit lower for all the thousands of "little guy" projects out there.

WHEN YOU ASK FOR HALF A MILLION DOLLARS WHEN YOU REALLY NEED $5 MILLION, IT BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE FOR GAMES WITH REALISTIC BUDGETS TO SURVIVE

Bloodstained isn't a story of the little guy triumphing over big publishers; it's the story of a campaign that had millions of dollars of funding before the Kickstarter began and the help of multiple companies handling the logistics of the campaign. They asked for $500,000 to prove a point, not fund a game. The issue is that campaigns like that cause members of the community to believe that $500,000 is all you need to create large-scale experiences.

When you ask for half a million dollars when you really need $5 million, it becomes impossible for games with realistic budgets to survive. It’s not that people don’t understand what a game costs, it’s more that Kickstarter is actively distorting people’s understanding of a sane budget. The ecosystem is being poisoned for projects that need to raise their actual, workable budget for a game.

Transparency is critical. If consumers don't know how much things actually cost, projects that haven't raised nearly enough will continue to be funded wildly right and left and, inevitably, will have to scramble for extra funding from commercial sources — the exact problem Kickstarter was intended to solve in the first place.

If we want to maintain the longevity of a service which benefits everyone, we need to hold each other accountable and maintain the ecosystem's balance. And if they care about Kickstarter, big projects are going to need to spearhead this effort so everyone can use the platform for years to come.

Katie Chironis is a game and narrative designer who has previously worked at several game studios. By night, she serves as team lead on the upcoming indie PC game Elsinore.

 

[Ninjerk]

narrative tragedy simulator

 

[tuluse]

Nice to see someone actually doing math and looking at things skeptically, but big KS actually grow the whole thing and increase pledges to smaller projects while they're running.

 

[Redlands]

Nice to see someone actually doing math and looking at things skeptically, but big KS actually grow the whole thing and increase pledges to smaller projects while they're running.

I was glad, too... until I realised that no, this isn't an article written by a journalist, but by a game developer with their own Kickstarter that's still active at the moment. I guess

narrative tragedy simulator

isn't a genre that can get outside funding, and that's why they're butthurt. Besides, as I understand it (I haven't run my own Kickstarter so I can't say for certain) but don't most companies/groups use their own funds to support their project? And, if so, wouldn't that be considered as distorting the value required to fund games?

 

[Ninjerk]

I wasn't aware it was a genre at all.

 

[Apexeon]

Aloran (aka Project Silkworm), an isometric, turn-based RPG project by fellow codexer Apexeon. Inspired by Infinity Engine games and Master of Magic.

Master of Magic? I think Might and Magic?

The whole KS video is just a bunch of slideshow (but very nice looking) screens...

Late next year I should have a demo to go with the nice screens .

 

[Abu Antar]

Kickstarter isn't dying and the bubble isn't bursting. We had more big projects in earlier years. Kickstarter is also not only for video games. A card game made over $8 million.

There have been lots of interesting Kickstarter campaigns that didn't ask for huge sums of money.

We're getting Bard's Tale IV and a new Obsidian game this year. They will do decently. Yoka-Leylee is doing fine and so is Bloodstained.

Less money spent on Kickstarter video games doesn't mean much if there aren't many big campaigns going on.

 

[Kz3r0]

Nice to see someone actually doing math and looking at things skeptically, but big KS actually grow the whole thing and increase pledges to smaller projects while they're running.

When I did a thread about it almost everyone told me that breadcrumbs are enough.
However the guy in that article is purposefully overinflating the costs because he seems upset about that particular project.

 

[tuluse]

I think I supported you in that thread, if not I definitely agreed with your analysis. I'm just saying it is nice to see more mainstream thinking about it.

 

[Aeschylus]

'Big indie' Kickstarters are killing actual indies

Good?

 

[Apexeon]

These rockstar indies are not indies but were part of the "game industry" now looking for work.
They have now infected kickstarter and are milking it with the help from there media mates.

There fame was funded by the industry and then they step out and cry poor when work dries up.
They use the media (the propaganda arm of the industry) to make sure they get there time out
in the main stream so they can get pre-orders.

A real indie team is one that makes the impossible - possible (what fuels my drive).

Here comes a real indie team. They only made $28,000 on there kickstarter.
Amazing what they have achieved and they should be in the running for "the real indie development team award of the year".

My game of the year and a inspiration for real indies.

http://serpentinthestaglands.com/

This team is what kickstarter should be all about.
The rockstar teams are nothing more then bloated relics of the bloated industry of Decline cashing in on past glories of the 90's.

Kickstarter in now becoming a circus for these clowns as they come back for pre-orders.

 

[Kz3r0]

Kickstarter in now becoming a circus for these clowns as they come back for pre-orders.

Without those clown your beloved indie team would have never got more than twenty thousand dollars.
Stop with the hippy bullshit, Kickstarter doesn't magically multiply indie audience and sales, it gives then more exposure so that casual players attracted by the big names give money to little projects too.
If Kickstarter was only for the little guy it will the same as it was prior to Schafer, a place where ten thousand dollars are unherad of and the vast majrity of projects doesn't deliver.

 

[Grauken]

I think the biggest surprise is always when veteran developers need 10x times as much money to make a platformer than newcomers or at least complete unknowns, and the game by the unknowns actually delivers while the veterans produce less than desired results (see Shovel Knight vs Mighty Nr. 9). Not that its possible to really generalize, as a lot of the smaller projects by unknowns are still shit, but usually you only pledge 10 $ compared to what some people put into bug name projects

 

[Infinitron]

More amusing Kickstarter hysteria: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Andr...r_Every_Publishers_New_Greenlight_Process.php

Kickstarter, or, Every Publisher's New Greenlight Process
by Andrew Pellerano on 05/20/15 02:13:00 pm

There's a hot new Kickstarter game making its way around games media. Bloodstained is the spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a beloved game from the first PlayStation era. On the surface this looks like an increasingly familiar Kickstarter success story. You take a popular game from nearly 20 years ago, have its designer get on camera and tell you they could finally make the sequel of your dreams if they could just, like, get rid of The Man, man, and show some artist's renditions of a video game (dripping in concept art disclaimers.)

What an exciting recipe! It's empowering. It's how we want games to be made. It's a triumph of games as art made by artists. It's an underdog story. Or is it?

While I write this, Bloodstained is in its first two days of Kickstarter and the response has been meteoric. Here, you can look at the data for yourself on KickTraq.

(Day 3 is partial data)

That's over 3x the goal already, which sounds impressive until you look at the goal. $500,000 USD to build a video game for both major consoles, and Steam too. Here's a screenshot, ahem, artist's rendition of what the game will look like.

It's being developed by Inti Creates, a high profile Japanese development studio. There's voice actors listed for two languages. This is not a small production. $500,000 will not deliver the promised game and if you believe you could assemble a team to make this game for that much money you might have a lucrative future in video game development.

Don't believe me? Let's do some math. The expected delivery date listed on the Kickstarter page itself is March 2017. That's just under 2 years of development. $250k/yr will get you 2-3 professional full-time programmers, and that's it. You've got no money left for the rest of your team. If Inti Creates is making this game for $250k/yr it can either not hit the quality bar everyone expects, or they are taking an equity share of the game. This is a risk that is not disclosed. Taking an equity share would mean Inti Creates needs to keep their doors open for 2 years on their own dime before this game finishes and they can get some money from it.

So what's going on here? Bloodstained is willing to form a legally binding agreement to deliver this game in 2 years for only $500k. This is impossible. Maybe there's more money we aren't being told about? The first hint is dropped in the video.

The next hint came in an interview Igarashi gave to Gamasutra the opening day of the Kickstarter. Here's Igarashi:

"All I can say right now is that after over a year of talking with just about every publisher out there, I was able to secure funding for about 90 percent of the game with the condition that I prove the market still wants an Igavania game."

Hey, wait a minute! They don't need Kickstarter money to make this game, they need Kickstarter to prove there's an audience so they can get their real funding! Again, none of this is disclosed in the risks portion of the Kickstarter. External partners are funding the game's development, not the Kickstarter backers. Those partners are free to change their terms, and thus the viability of the game, without backers having any awareness or say in the matter.

Igarashi is a respected and amazingly talented individual and that acts as a calming force in the face of this risk, but investors and checkbooks do not respect great game designers like game enthusiasts do. It's just business. That worries me. The precedent being set here worries me even more.

You see, this Kickstarter is a clear vision for a new era of game funding. First let's count the benefits of Bloodstained's approach and see why it's so attractive.

1. Market test your game idea at the concept stage and force commitment. This is literally worth millions of dollars. Previously your financier would subject you to constant checkpoints throughout development, each one potentially ending your game.
2. Find the maximum price point for every early adopter. Publishers have been attempting this in past years by offering collector's tins at launch but these are risky to produce and shelve so they are conservatively built and inefficiently distributed. Kickstarter blows the doors of this.
   • You can offer a buffet of trinkets and rewards and let backers customize their collector's edition down to the handcrafted jewelry. No joke, for $7,500 Igarashi will make you a silver ring to add to your pile of Bloodstained soundtracks, hardcover books, and t-shirts.
   • None of this stuff has been manufactured yet; wait, none of this stuff has been designed yet! You're selling collector's edition concept pitches. When you're done you'll make exactly as much as you needed, to known specifications.
   • Sell shit you couldn't even dream of selling with collector's tins. We're at the concept stage, remember? Sell inconsequential pieces of your game content. For $8,500 you can play designer for a day and hide a secret room in Bloodstained. For only $5,000 you can design an enemy.
3. Get some customers now, even though you've got nothing to sell yet. Customers are always good. You can put them on a mailing list and talk to them. You can ask them to settle design conundrums for you. Or you could just plain sell them more shit. Star Citizen, another high profile Kickstarted game, isn't even out yet and has sold millions of dollars in virtual ships to its backers.
4. If things don't work out, as in your Kickstarter fails, you found out really early and didn't spend much money. In Silicon Valley lingo they call this failing fast. It's the difference between the bruised egos of the Eternal Darkness developers and the Rhode Island-disappointing, FBI-investigating, dream-killing bankruptcy of Kingdoms of Amalur.

You might be reading this and thinking that it sounds great! But you're only looking at this from the bottom up. That is, you're looking at what this model can do for a fledgling developer trying to get their wings. Unforunately, all the things that make this Kickstarter strategy great for small developers also make it a great strategy for gigantic publishers. To be clear, I'm talking about publishers using Kickstarter for every AAA game in the foreseeable future.

Previously if you were someone responsible for making executive decisions publishers tend to make -- such as which games to fund -- your job was to spend a lot of money and be wrong as little as possible. Also you needed to see 2 years into the future. Anyone in that role would want to mitigate risk in every conceivable way. And they do, which is why we see so many of the same dominant genre trends and sequels.

Imagine if you're one of these execs and I told you you could offload all the risk of your position? "Tell me more," you reply, stroking your white cat in your executive swivel chair. "Well, we can spend next to nothing Kickstarting an idea and only fund a team if the Kickstarter is a success!" In other words, Kickstarter backers become a lot like external consultants. They add weight to a corporate decision and become the spectral fall guy if anything goes wrong. Actually it's worse than that. Corporations pay consultants. In this case, we pay the corporation.

Oh and if anything goes wrong on that Kickstarter funded game? Like, I dunno, the concept you pitched, once you get it playable, ends up not being fun? Which happens all the time in game development? You're only legally on the hook to deliver something to the backers. You can lay off most of the development team and take the quickest route to a shippable title that legally meets the bare minimum of Kickstarter's contract. This is the corporate level version of failing fast. Well, we only spent $10M instead of $250M.

Is this really going to happen? Am I crazy? No. No I am not crazy. IT'S ALREADY HAPPENING. The Black Glove, a failed Kickstarter for a game by some of BioShock's former developers, recently cancelled their project entirely. Their reason? No publisher would fund the game after its Kickstarter failed.

No Kickstarter? No publisher. Kickstarter isn't an alternative to publisher funding. It is the greenlight process that gets you publisher funding.

I know it sounds great having Joe Gamer and his friends acting as the greenlight process for what publishers do, but Joe and most other backers don't know jack about greenlighting games. What do you think Joe does with the following concept art for a new genre:

Dear readers, Joe just cancelled Super Mario Bros and ended Shigeru Miyamoto's career.

Now that we know all this, what can we do to make it better? Beats me. It really appears like the industry is fully incentivized to evolve in this direction. Maybe there will be push-back. If you're feeling particularly entrepreneurial, start a business that runs kickstarters-as-a-service. Fangamer, bless their Earthbound loving hearts, is starting to do this. They're an online retailer for gaming merchandise. They've been hired by other game Kickstarters to handle reward fulfillment on physical goods like t-shirts, books, and CDs, because that's already what their business does.

For Bloodstained, Fangamer has stepped up and is actually running the whole shebang. Check out theKickstarter page again and look at the stretch goals and achievements system. It's a light layer of gamification that encourages sharing on social networks. You know, the exact stuff backers hate about FarmVille but totally eat up if 7,500 Facebook likes means everyone gets a 1" Igarashi button added to their rewards. You can't make this shit up. Over time these techniques will become more sophisticated and extract even more revenue and backers, similar to the evolution of these mechanics in F2P games.

As the link between Kickstarter and publisher funding becomes more explicit, the embodiment of systemic degradation, Goodhart's Law, will take hold and allow for quality to decline while funding remains stable. Let's say publishers care about the # of backers as a leading metric in Kickstarter successes. We'll see game developers withhold core features from their pitch and move them into their Kickstarter's stretch goals and achievement systems. They know the game won't work without those features, but if they can't use some gamified nonsense to double the number of backers, they won't get funded. So it doesn't matter anyway. Questioning my prediction? It's already happened with DLC.

In the dystopian Kickstarter future we have people unqualified to greenlight games greenlighting them and quality declining as a trend. Doesn't sound much different from where we are now. The only difference is that all the publisher's risk has been offloaded to the fans. Lucky us.

By the time this is all commonplace we'll probably have stopped using Kickstarter in favor of other crowdfunding platforms with better support for gamification. Kickstarter will be too slow to react; it needs to remain generalized enough to support consumer gadgets, movies, etc. The most nimble and therefore most likely candidate will be Steam Greenlight, leading the charge on their Steam Boxen, which will demonstrate the advantageous feedback loop between crowdfunding platform, digital storefront, and game console. Sony and Microsoft will follow suit. Feature parity is how they've competed with each other for three generations, after all.

Someday we'll be logging onto our PS5's and Xbox Twos, taking a few minutes to vote with our wallets on the next 2 years of video games. And then we'll load up our crowdfunded copies of Assassin's Creed 12. The main character has a hidden blade in his shoe tip, because we reached the stretch goal.

 

[Apexeon]

Apparently The Witcher 3 only cost $15M to develop (and another $25M spent on marketing). I'm surprised it's so low, I would have guessed $30M at least based on the hyped scale. GTA V is an outlier but it cost $137M to develop (plus ~$100M for marketing).

I spent this on marketing the Aloran kickstarter $0.

So for all those indies who don't do there homework. Marketing makes up 50% of your budget (money or time) for a kickstarter.
A big kickstarter is all about "are you famous", marketing and presentation (smoke and mirrors).

Also making a funky video with a nostalgia angle is marketing as well (for the little break out pixel art indies).
Make some wird new idea and people have a hard time "emotionally connecting" with the potential product.
When you can't emote your logical brain kicks in and starts to well "think things through".
Question time = your screwed!

 

[Grauken]

I think if you'r a no-name, the best thing you can do is make a demo or playable prototype, has helped me a lot in the past to decide whether something is worth throwing money at or not, as video can be too deceiving

 

[Kz3r0]

It's being developed by Inti Creates, a high profile Japanese development studio. There's voice actors listed for two languages. This is not a small production. $500,000 will not deliver the promised game

True of almost any Kickstarte, PoE needed an additional million, Expeditions:Conquistador needed BitComposer, Tex Murphy had external investors pledging to the Kickstarter based on the number of backers, Legend of Eisenwald sought two additional investors in addition to Kickstarter and Early Access, etc., etc.

So what's going on here? Bloodstained is willing to form a legally binding agreement to deliver this game in 2 years for only $500k.

Lol, Wut?
Kickstarter has never been tested in a court of law, is legally binding as chewing gum.

Here's Igarashi:

"All I can say right now is that after over a year of talking with just about every publisher out there, I was able to secure funding for about 90 percent of the game with the condition that I prove the market still wants an Igavania game."

Hey, wait a minute! They don't need Kickstarter money to make this game, they need Kickstarter to prove there's an audience so they can get their real funding!

The same as Republique, only that needed at least half of the budgeted sum and wasn't even enough.

Again, none of this is disclosed in the risks portion of the Kickstarter.

Actually that's not a risk but a guarantee.

External partners are funding the game's development, not the Kickstarter backers. Those partners are free to change their terms, and thus the viability of the game, without backers having any awareness or say in the matter.

Still better than Harebrained Schemes running a Kickstarter for Shadowrun without even having permission from Microsoft to use the IP, the editor, a stretch goal strongly wanted by the backers, suffered because of that, who knows what else was influenced.

It's just business. That worries me. The precedent being set here worries me even more.

It's not a precedent, I wonder if this schill is so clueless or just lying.

You see, this Kickstarter is a clear vision for a new era of game funding. First let's count the benefits of Bloodstained's approach and see why it's so attractive.

1. Market test your game idea at the concept stage and force commitment. This is literally worth millions of dollars. Previously your financier would subject you to constant checkpoints throughout development, each one potentially ending your game.

1. (This is true for every Kickstarter, except that many projects sold poorly after release, doesn't seem very reliable.)

   [*]Find the maximum price point for every early adopter. Publishers have been attempting this in past years by offering collector's tins at launch but these are risky to produce and shelve so they are conservatively built and inefficiently distributed. Kickstarter blows the doors of this.
   

   • You can offer a buffet of trinkets and rewards and let backers customize their collector's edition down to the handcrafted jewelry. No joke, for $7,500 Igarashi will make you a silver ring to add to your pile of Bloodstained soundtracks, hardcover books, and t-shirts.
   • None of this stuff has been manufactured yet; wait, none of this stuff has been designed yet! You're selling collector's edition concept pitches. When you're done you'll make exactly as much as you needed, to known specifications.
   • Sell shit you couldn't even dream of selling with collector's tins. We're at the concept stage, remember? Sell inconsequential pieces of your game content. For $8,500 you can play designer for a day and hide a secret room in Bloodstained. For only $5,000 you can design an enemy.

   • (True for every Kickstarter ever.)

   [*]Get some customers now, even though you've got nothing to sell yet. Customers are always good. You can put them on a mailing list and talk to them. You can ask them to settle design conundrums for you. Or you could just plain sell them more shit. Star Citizen, another high profile Kickstarted game, isn't even out yet and has sold millions of dollars in virtual ships to its backers.

   (As any other Kickstarter.)

   [*]If things don't work out, as in your Kickstarter fails, you found out really early and didn't spend much money. In Silicon Valley lingo they call this failing fast. It's the difference between the bruised egos of the Eternal Darkness developers and the Rhode Island-disappointing, FBI-investigating, dream-killing bankruptcy of Kingdoms of Amalur.

   (As any other Kickstarter.)

Unforunately, all the things that make this Kickstarter strategy great for small developers also make it a great strategy for gigantic publishers. To be clear, I'm talking about publishers using Kickstarter for every AAA game in the foreseeable future.

Inpractical to say the leaast, funny tho how indies seem entitled to basically scam you based on what he wrote.

Anyone in that role would want to mitigate risk in every conceivable way. And they do, which is why we see so many of the same dominant genre trends and sequels.

My, my, weren't all those AAA+ games so innovative and revolutionary?

In other words, Kickstarter backers become a lot like external consultants. They add weight to a corporate decision and become the spectral fall guy if anything goes wrong. Actually it's worse than that. Corporations pay consultants. In this case, we pay the corporation.

Kickstarter in a nutshell.

Oh and if anything goes wrong on that Kickstarter funded game? Like, I dunno, the concept you pitched, once you get it playable, ends up not being fun? Which happens all the time in game development? You're only legally on the hook to deliver something to the backers. You can lay off most of the development team and take the quickest route to a shippable title that legally meets the bare minimum of Kickstarter's contract. This is the corporate level version of failing fast. Well, we only spent $10M instead of $250M.

Done by indies is okay instead.

No Kickstarter? No publisher. Kickstarter isn't an alternative to publisher funding. It is the greenlight process that gets you publisher funding.

True of almost all projects on Kickstarter, for the simple reason that until now raising all the needed funds for non amateirish projects isimpossible.

What do you think Joe does with the following concept art for a new genre:

Dear readers, Joe just cancelled Super Mario Bros and ended Shigeru Miyamoto's career.

True of Kickstarter as a whole.

For Bloodstained, Fangamer has stepped up and is actually running the whole shebang. Check out theKickstarter page again and look at the stretch goals and achievements system. It's a light layer of gamification that encourages sharing on social networks. You know, the exact stuff backers hate about FarmVille but totally eat up if 7,500 Facebook likes means everyone gets a 1" Igarashi button added to their rewards. You can't make this shit up. Over time these techniques will become more sophisticated and extract even more revenue and backers, similar to the evolution of these mechanics in F2P games.

By what I read there's some kind of business linked to Facebook likes, and many other studios did that, Obsidian for one.

As the link between Kickstarter and publisher funding becomes more explicit, the embodiment of systemic degradation, Goodhart's Law, will take hold and allow for quality to decline while funding remains stable.

Citation of quality Kickstarters needed.
And LOL at implying that the gaming industry produce quality.

Let's say publishers care about the # of backers as a leading metric in Kickstarter successes. We'll see game developers withhold core features from their pitch and move them into their Kickstarter's stretch goals and achievement systems.

They already did.

They know the game won't work without those features, but if they can't use some gamified nonsense to double the number of backers, they won't get funded. So it doesn't matter anyway. Questioning my prediction? It's already happened with DLC.

In the dystopian Kickstarter future we have people unqualified to greenlight games greenlighting them and quality declining as a trend. Doesn't sound much different from where we are now. The only difference is that all the publisher's risk has been offloaded to the fans. Lucky us.

Shutdown Kickstarter then.

 

[Kz3r0]

I think if you'r a no-name, the best thing you can do is make a demo or playable prototype,

No, it doesn't work, on Kickstarter you sell illusions, ahem, ideas, it works better if you are famous in some way.

 

[Grauken]

Sure, but not everybody is, and then its better you can show something substantial than just nice screens

 

[Kz3r0]

Sure, but not everybody is, and then its better you can show something substantial than just nice screens

As I hace already wrote, itìs not how Kicstarter works.

 

[Grauken]

don't crush my illusions