Lemme address this line by line, and yes, I understand all these points completely.
Although I understand where you're coming from, when you take into account the Star Command debable
Kz3r0 was talking about and the fact that BIONITE's new campaign seems kinda' scammy ("Give us money for a single player campaign, nevermind we're not out of alpha yet, nevermind that we didn't clearly state in our previous campaign that you suckers were funding the multi-player exclusively.").
I can't speak for Bionite/Platoon Studios, so I can only speak for my crew.
In your case everything is clear, but I think you're making a PR error with coming back with a campaign for mobile, console and multiplayer before having released the initial version of the game and, thus, having created a solid community around it. The problem stems from the fact that, most likey (I can't speak for everyone, but I extrapolate given my motivations and the motivations of a typical Kickstarter donor) the people that donated for FleetCOMM are mostly PC gamers interested in single player. Coming back to them asking for money to invest in mobile/console/multi-player translates to you asking them to invest in you taking your focus off the PC single player game and, essentially, wasting your time and their money developing something that they dislike and some of them actually hate.
Edit: Don't take this as me having something against you, but as me trying to help you fix what I see as a mess that you may, unwittingly, gotten yourself into.
Understandable on all concerns.
From my crews perspective, here's the core reason why we want to expand the game.
Platform distributors like Desura/Steam/Appstore have royalty payout models that can take UP TO SIX MONTHS for my crew to see any profit. I can't wait that long if I wanna continue operations on FleetCOMM. Sure, we are set to deliver this game on December, but after that? Waiting up to six months in limbo for a paystub is a no-go, and I can't simply tell my crew to "wait for the funds, then we port".
We made it very clear on our current Kickstarter run that this is about mobile development, and that we are set to deliver the game on PC.
The only difference between a PC and an iOS/tablet version of FleetCOMM is the user interface and operating system, the core design of the game will not be changed in any way. And, just to get real about game development, porting to a new source base + new OS + new input environment with only 2 people is no easy task. My crew needs at least 6 months of diving into iOS for that task. We will be working in PC + iOS as a dev-cycle (yeah, try juggling 2 OS branches in your head, and NUMEROUS APIs for that matter.....)
I'd like to also point the weak conjecture and speculation about "a game they dislike or hate". That's kind of like gamedevs saying "I dunno if this game is going to be fun!" Not saying that the argument shouldn't be made, but calling us "potentially hateful" is misleading and dishonest. Kind of like those cunts at Destructoid :3.
No focus will be taken away from developing the PC build of FleetCOMM. Hell, the PC build IS the core. I'm not sure how people would say "the tablet version of this game is completely different!"; how one goes from that argument, saying "developing the tablet build of FleetCOMM took away from the PC!" is asinine, and definitely insulting to me and my crew (not saying that you are insulting us, but please, don't put words in our mouth, and don't make arguments that do not exist).
To be honest, I've given up on "building a fan base" before the game is shipped. I'm just Kickstarting a second run to keep FleetCOMM going on the production cycle. I could care less about "building a community"; because most people on the forums are cynical, or tired of the whole Kickstarter thing; and I understand completely. There have been scams, the well is already poisoned. No one from Mercenary Games is trying to scam you. If you wanna see scams, check out ZeroDay DLCs and expansion bloat by the big studios.
But, I am still a studio lead, and I have to look out for my crews best interest. If that means going for another Kickstarter run even before we ship; so be it.
My crew wants to survive. We don't want any downtime waiting on Steam/Desura to give us royalties. And no, we won't "take day jobs and wait" to develop the game; thats just going to rot our skills and slow down the pace of the games development even further. So, I get to wait 6 months, maybe 2 years to build up the capital to port our game?
Fuck that. I'll scope the market for interested gamers.
And if we fail? So be it.
But please, don't dare tell us to stop. We're going to keep dealing business on Kickstarter; honestly and efficiently, and we could care less what critics think.
game.
