We'd like to share our concerns about Kickstarter as well, from our own studios problems and our situation for the past 2 years.
We've been developing our engine and our game assets, mostly on the side, and only going fulltime with it during the past 6 months.
We were making good progress, however, our teams personal finances were starting to suffer. We've got crew mates who still go to school, or they can't find decent work, nor decent contracts to fill in the time. We've been making the game primarily online through Skype, Dropbox and Git.
Kickstarter was not an easy choice for us. By opening the project to public scrutiny, and by opening up to the community, we have to expend DOUBLE the effort, since we now have to deal with an audience and try to find interested gamers.
By no means did we want to do Kickstarter, it was a last resort to save our project, or freeze it again.
We also started thinking about how our concept should be tested. Will we receive the kind of reception we needed to deliver the game to the market?
So, Kickstarter it was. We needed fuel, and we needed to deliver this concept out of the engine room.
We don't feel like pointing fingers at other projects, though we are going to be blunt about the filthy attitudes of a minority of pitches on KS. Basically it rolls down to "I haz a game idea, plz give me moniez so I can haz artists, hackerz and sound doodz to do everything for our powerpoint deck, and feed my dream."
There's also some numbskull scheduling and costing of a project. We're not talking about the big titles though, the veterans know what they are doing, and have already proven themselves on project delivery. However, some projects asking 300k+ for an iOS game? Please. 1M+ for an untested, no crew, no design philosophy game pitch? Unspeakable.
Sorry for the rant. It's just hard to swallow the kind of bullshit numbers being thrown up there. We believe Kickstarter is about saving and preserving a project, as a last resort, and not some Zynga style cash cow. The veterans deserve the kind of fuel they are getting, they already have the reputation to back it up.
We are still unknown, and we recognize the need to prove our scheduling, costing and design honestly. We've got a crew thats worked on game engines from the PS3, iOS and in Windows environments. We even have artwork already laid out.
Hopefully the Patrons will sort this out, and think for themselves. We believe Kickstarter to be a rational community effort, and not some audience to be gamed.
