Shadowrun Shadowrun: Hong Kong Pre-Release Discussion [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[buzz]

That relationship is what lead to the most glorious "achievements" of publishers like EA.

Ehh, I'd argue that EA are awful specifically because they're putting their customers in a really bad spot instead of serving them as they should.

Draconian DRM, phone shovelware that no one asked for, DLCs, buggy as fuck releases and so on.

The great games that we know from "back then" happened despite this relationship, not because of it.

The same can be said for today's games just as well. I don't think great games are determined by the funding model used. But I wasn't talking about the quality of the games as much as I was talking about the quality of the treatment of their customers, which are ... dare I say ... emotionally blackmailed into becoming "patrons" and disguised workers.


Spread the word! (marketing)
Report the bugs! (QA)
Design an NPC for us!


I'm a bit conflicted about all of the things happening within the developing scene. On one hand, I'm all about helping devs and supporting games that I love. Helping out in the Gothic 3 Community Patch is one of my memorable internet experiences.
On the other hand, I can't shake the cynical aspect of this situation. At the end of the day, these are companies making products and turning a profit out of them. This isn't a charity case. And while I understand the need to give them a push and help them through the baby steps, I do hope they eventually get their shit together. Self-funded sequels, smaller Early Access/Beta timelines and so on.

What we have now is more a kind of modern day patronage, where an interested party (in this case, random internet people) pays the artist to do what the artist is good at.

Well yeah, that's my point. Patronage implies that the artist does whatever the patron is asking. But taking the money and not giving in to the patron's demands is a bit backwards in my opinion.


Good example is with Elite Dangerous. People are okay with putting the money upfront as long as the devs keep their end of the bargain. When they said the game will have Always ON DRM, they got lots of (well-deserved) backlash. But some people defended them, which I thought was weird. We've ripped a new asshole to Blizzard, EA or Ubisoft when they did that, I don't think Frontier Developments should receive less only because they made the space sim game people have been dreaming about for years.

 

[Transfiguring Roar]

Knowing how the first day of the kickstarter turned out, would it have been a better idea to have a higher goal in the first place?

No. To me it looks like they've almost played it perfectly. They've started with the low goal, stating that this is being co-funded via kickstarter and that they've already started development - it's a very confident front they're portraying to backers. The initial goals are spaced apart appropriately to inspire people to help them reach a much more comfortable budget. I think they're starting point and early strategy was spot on. The question is, what is their comfort-zone budget?

 

[HanoverF]

"Realistic stretch goal" for 50,000 they're adding a new member to the team for a few months, or able to pay more overtime, is that really exciting?
Depends on who they're adding I guess

Spoiler

but hasn't some of the shine come off that goal

 

[Garryydde]

If I donate enough money will they add Wei Shen as a character?

 

[Infinitron]

UPDATE: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/shadowrun-hong-kong/posts/1107311

 

[eXalted]

If I donate enough money will they add Wei Shen as a character?

In Adam Jensen suit, although he never asked for this.

 

[naossano]

It starts to get slower.
I hope the press coverage does its work and we reach 700K before tonight.

 

[Press X for Feels]

The same can be said for today's games just as well. I don't think great games are determined by the funding model used. But I wasn't talking about the quality of the games as much as I was talking about the quality of the treatment of their customers, which are ... dare I say ... emotionally blackmailed into becoming "patrons" and disguised workers.


Spread the word! (marketing)
Report the bugs! (QA)
Design an NPC for us!

The "design an NPC" thing is probably just putting in your likeness with some rough input from you, like the Chris Kluwe orc from SR. They're not asking the patrons to design the character for them or anything. As for bugtesting, it's more in conjunction with their QA team then solely relying on backers. It's definitely better than modern AAA games where the model is "release a half-finished game at full price, use people who purchased it as unknowing beta testers, and then release patches to actually fix it".

 

[buzz]

It's definitely better than modern AAA games where the model is "release a half-finished game at full price, use people who purchased it as unknowing beta testers, and then release patches to actually fix it".

If that doesn't sound like any kickstarter campaign ever released, I don't know what does . Seriously though, it's the same thing except now it's more "official". Early Access games are still full price (or even more expensive like with Wasteland 2) and unlike back in the days, you can't allow to say much in terms of criticism because it's still officially a beta.

Really, bitching about mainstream games doing it in the thread about a franchise where the last title is Dragonfall Director's Cut is just silly. Everyone's doing it (even outside of video games, see this common trend in comic books and movies to tie everything together, turning them into pieces of a bigger entertainment-puzzle so everything can sell better), that's why it needs to stop.

A lot of bad practices are being excused on the premise that other companies do it worse. There are two problems with that:
1. You're not actually addressing the criticism itself. The fact that that someone's shit is more digestible than the other doesn't change the fact that it is still crap you're being fed.
2. And much more importantly, it legitimizes the ones doing it worse by making the negative consumer behavior a common occurrence. This has happened so many times it's not even funny: DLCs, always-online DRM, bad ports, removing content, simplifying mechanics and so on. This is one of those "There was no one left to speak for me" cases, where creators of products and entertainment more and more put the customer into a corner and exploit the shit out of him.


Again, this doesn't necessarily concern Shadowrun Hong Kong and I'm sorry for being slightly off-topic. This campaign has been pretty fair. Though I can see why people would find it annoying that Harebrained Scheme needs half a million dollars only to get their game to the default precedent set by Dragonfall DC.

 

[clemens]

It's nice that they're offering SR5 products as rewards. I bought the core rules book months ago, but haven't had time to do more than skim through it a bit. This little toolbox will help me get things going. I hate eating 550p. of rules in one seating, summarized booklets are a nice thing to get a preview of the major changes from SR4.

 

[naossano]

350K goal funded ! Yeah !
The game will have sound ! It will have sound ! ! !
If the next goal is reached, we might add dialogs into the game. And then, combats... Stay tuned !

(I totally enjoy those games, but a good half of the stretch goals seems like jokes)

 

[clemens]

Sound effects could actually benefit from an upgrade, though.

 

[t]

Looks like 400k is going to be broken by the end of the day, but stagnation is certainly going to hit in the following days. Hope for another 300k during the next month and a final push of 100-200k during the last moments.

 

[Press X for Feels]

If that doesn't sound like any kickstarter campaign ever released, I don't know what does . Seriously though, it's the same thing except now it's more "official". Early Access games are still full price (or even more expensive like with Wasteland 2) and unlike back in the days, you can't allow to say much in terms of criticism because it's still officially a beta.

Really, bitching about mainstream games doing it in the thread about a franchise where the last title is Dragonfall Director's Cut is just silly. Everyone's doing it (even outside of video games, see this common trend in comic books and movies to tie everything together, turning them into pieces of a bigger entertainment-puzzle so everything can sell better), that's why it needs to stop.

A lot of bad practices are being excused on the premise that other companies do it worse. There are two problems with that:
1. You're not actually addressing the criticism itself. The fact that that someone's shit is more digestible than the other doesn't change the fact that it is still crap you're being fed.
2. And much more importantly, it legitimizes the ones doing it worse by making the negative consumer behavior a common occurrence. This has happened so many times it's not even funny: DLCs, always-online DRM, bad ports, removing content, simplifying mechanics and so on. This is one of those "There was no one left to speak for me" cases, where creators of products and entertainment more and more put the customer into a corner and exploit the shit out of him.


Again, this doesn't necessarily concern Shadowrun Hong Kong and I'm sorry for being slightly off-topic. This campaign has been pretty fair. Though I can see why people would find it annoying that Harebrained Scheme needs half a million dollars only to get their game to the default precedent set by Dragonfall DC.

That's true I guess, early access is fucking horrible and I disagree when Kickstarter games do it, especially stuff like Planetary Annihilation where they just use it as another form of funding. I think it depends on the dev really, Kickstarter can be just as abusive as traditional models but devs like HBS and Obsidian have been doing a pretty good job with in in my opinion.

 

[Drowed]

Well, if we use Shadowrun Returns as a guide...

I guess it's a safe bet that it can reach more than 1mil. It was trending to 6,8 milions in the second day, and got 320k in the first one. HK is trending to 6,2 milions now and got 260k in the first day.
By this pattern, I guess it will reach something like 60-80% of the original game, something about 1mil to 1,4 mil.

...I hope.

 

[Starwars]

I think the donations will drop off more noticably than during the kickstarter golden age of SRR and all that other stuff.

Of course, I'm definitely hoping they'll hit as many stretch-goals as possible. The audio goal is pretty nice. While I love that they got the guy back who did work on Dragonfall (mostly the DC) soundtrack, I hope they can upgrade the sound effects also.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

No. HK got about 350 k on the first day. First day ended like an hour or less ago. So it is trending towards the same amount as SR.

 

[Wizfall]

The first campaign made 297k the first 24h.
This one made 356k.

 

[Infinitron]

The first campaign made 297k the first 24h.
This one made 356k.

This campaign had a mailing list of 36,000+ backers of the previous campaign that it could immediately tap for a pledge. Question is what happens after that.

 

[Durante]

This site: http://www.kickspy.com/projects/webeharebrained/shadowrun-hong-kong
generally does a much better job predicting trends than Kicktraq (it also uses a much more complex methodology).

I think it's underrating the campaign somewhat due to the low initial goal, but probably more in the ballpark than Kicktraq's current 6.4 million prediction

 

[Wizfall]

This campaign had a mailing list of 36,000+ backers of the previous campaign that it could immediately tap for a pledge. Question is what happens after that.

Yea i was expecting HBS to make much better.
But i still think they are going to get a bit more than for the first campaign.

 

[t]

This campaign had a mailing list of 36,000+ backers of the previous campaign that it could immediately tap for a pledge. Question is what happens after that.

This. Back when SRR was being kickstarted it was something new and exciting, many people got to know about the project during the campaing. Now everyone knows, most of the people interested got notified really quickly.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I hope our fundraiser is successful. It would be great to have 'RPG Codex' come up as Executive Producer.

I'm expecting a lot more backers to come on board. Sure, there will be some people who backed the original campaign who won't back this, but there will be many more who bought the game on Steam or GOG.com who will want to support, and people who have heard all the positive reviews of Dragonfall who may want to contribute too.

 

[SwiftCrack]

Looks like 400k is going to be broken by the end of the day, but stagnation is certainly going to hit in the following days. Hope for another 300k during the next month and a final push of 100-200k during the last moments.

Remember that the typical Kickstarter funding graph looks like a horseshoe. 30% the first two days, 40% the following 30 days and then 30% the last two days again.

 

[agris]

Thanks for the support in the KS comments Jaesun