A Year of Kickstarter Watch
If you notice today marks a year since this thread was started, consequently what will follow are my considerations on both the Kickstarter phenomenon and how this thread developed.
Shafer makes gaming, and crowd-funding history
All media an gamers attention was drawn to Kickstarter, and the crowd-funding model in general, after the Double Fine Adventure exploit of getting three millions dollars to create a new game in the vein of old Lucas Arts' adventures.
Since then many old timers and mainstream studios flocked to Kickstarter, both to develop games that would be otherwisw impossible to publish under the current AAA model or just to get money and hype for their current projects.
This has created a chasm between the old crowd-funding ethos, more of the starry eyed type, and the new, more commercial and professional, a very good thing in my opinion, the older projects are a far cry from having any innovative or artistic value, in many cases they seemed to be a way for college kids to get easy money, and rarely delivered.
In fact there has been more innovation now with well established studios than before, where trying to replicate old games, usually of the SNES era, was the rule, or original ideas were half assed concepts without any merit in many cases.
Kickstarter Watch is Born
The codex was swamped in the Kickstarter craze thanks to Brian Fargo decision to launch a campaign for Wasteland 2, fostering the Age of Incline, namely the revival of old school RPGS, then, I got interested in the whole phenomenon and decided to create this thread that earned the approbation of
Codexers who asked for it to be a sticky, thus I think that I learned some things overseeing so many projects, here what they are.
The Cost of Game Development
How much costs to make a proper Indie game? This is a thread that I made at the time, I must say that the more Isaw of the various projects the more I was convinced that I was right.
This lead us to a major issue with many Kickstarter campaigns, how to gauge correctly the money needed, this is a crucial point both for the developers and the backers, many of the minor projects ask obviously for a risible amount of cash, clearly in the hobbyist category, no amount of professional pretenses can change that, in fact makes the whole affair all the more worrisome when someone really think to make a proper game with ten thousand bucks, and backers should be well aware of this, sometimes good faith is not enough.
To Hell With the Publisher, or Not
But what is worse is when developers consciously ask for less than what they need, hoping to get overfunded or attract additional funding from external investors, defying the stated purpose of getting rid of publishers' interference, one of the mantras of Kickstarter pitches video, a well known case around here is Expedition Conquistadores, which developers openly admitted that the sum requested wasn't enough to cover production costs, at the moment the judgment on the final results for that game is suspended.
Developers are Victims of the AAA model, or Accomplices
What Kickstarter has laid bare for everyone to see is that developers are entrenched in the AAA mentality as much as publishers are, case in point is The Banner Saga, which one of the final stretch goals was a Xbox porting, not the only case, other projects started pitching for consoles and ended up promising a PC port to get funded, Republique and Starlight Inception will serve as examples here.
And many other cases of wrestling a promise of DRM free copies of the finished game, or shooting down day 1 DLCs.
The MMOs are the most rife with this kind of mentality, and they are the less successful kind of projects, only FPS do worse, this show how out of the mainstream Kicstarter is.
First the PC, No DRM, No DLCs, No Publisher
This is what the people pledging on Kickstarter or other crowd-funding sites want, get over it.
The Hipster Factor
This will be grating for many but is a fact, the vast majority of people pledge on Kickstarter more out of a peculiar
Forma Mentis than a rational decision as consumers, they believe in crowd funding as a model first and foremost, and this come with other attachments, like social sensibility and gender awareness, or just rooting for the underdog, or stcicking it to the Man, the big bad publisher in our case, this is also why the cool factor is so important and why usually the most dazzling, and vague, ideas get so much attention
How to Discern
When I started this thread the way to filter the various projects seemed obvious, Codex interest in certain projects, this would have acted both as a filter and as a way of scutinize the various projects with the usual unforgiving codexian attitude, this also would have meant less responsibility for me if an subpar project would have got too much attention.
However, it wasn't enough, many interesting projects risked to pass unnoticed, so some leap of faith had to be taken.
Kickstarter Risks
Let's be clear here, crowd-funding is a far cry to be a safe way to make a purchase, but while there is always a certainf margin of uncertainty thsi can be reduced in various ways:
- The developer is well known.
- The asked sum is reasonable.
- There is a demo or an hefty amount of preparatory work.
- Some well known name in the industry is supporting the projects.
- The professional credibility of the people involved.
But that couldn't be enough, here some following example of when the filter didn't work.
The Manse Macabre
This was all my fault, let's call it lack of due diligence, while the project was interesting the real caveat was that relied on only one programmer, and used a not very common language, long story short, the programmer got a better job and left the project, and now, even if they made the source code public trying to solve the mess will be a very long process.
Programming Trumps Artistic Direction
So, for all of the above now I look not only if the sum requested is reasonable but also if there are any programmers in the team or only artists, sorry, unless people will start to really push for some minor artsy project I will disregard them completely from now on.
An Embarrassing Dilemma, the Coles
Seems that the creators of Quest for Glory got themselves exactly in the aforementioned position, no programmer, now, only one person voiced doubts on their project, and it's not without hope yet, but if it will fail it will be more of a collective guilt of the Codex that anything, but the Coles are not the only case of getting a free pass thank to their name.
Shaker
This has been a personal blunder of mine, MCA endorsement blinded me, I admit it, thankfully the Codex worked its magic and was calling bullshit on it from the get got, well, they promised to make two RPGs if they got two millions, not hard to spot it I must admit, obviously large part of the merit goes to Cleve's epic trolling for ridiculing and exposing this obvious vaporware.
Legends of Eisenwald
The highest point of this thread, thanks essentially to the user Knotanalt, now banned, but still among us with another nick.
This project was signaled here, Knotanalt made a dedicated thread and RPGCodex staff picked it up, this is a case of a project that probably got funded principally thanks to the Codex, and at the moment is shaping very well.
Conclusions
At this point I daresay that the thread served its purpose, promoting interesting projects and removing the chaff, obviously is always possible that the vast majority of projects will abysmally fail, but for now things look encouraging.
Feel free to point out what was bad or good for you about this thread and if there is any disagreement with what I wrote.
