. Now this may be years industry-brainwashing speaking out of me, but I'm not sure there's such a market for "hardcore" RPGs. Still: *fingers crossed*
It is brainwashing. You're still thinking in terms of needing to sell millions of copies to the masses due to the 50 or 100 million dollars spent making a game and marketing it in the AAA way. Vogel is surviving isn't he as is Charles? They sell in the millions? Now, inXile is bigger, has more staff, can churn out more ambitious projects, but if they succeed making W2 on the back of 30,000 odd people then why would they need to cater to more? There will of course easily be tens of thousands more buying the game at retail and that's just pure profit. If they pull this off then it will show that you can survive and PROFIT! from barely 30,000-50,000 people. This is a modest market but it's all that is needed for an Obsidian or inXile to prosper. For smaller indies the need is even less. There will always be a hardcore market of a few hundred thousand fanatics for niche genres, enough to keep level headed companies afloat in perpetuity. They just are ignored by the mainstream as too small a group for their ambitions to bother with.
Not to mention that even in the looks and interface department - the things that can really jarr with newbies who authentically want to play the older games, but just can't get past not having full mouse control, or not being able to make out their characters properly - there are some mighty old engines that still support some popular games, and look easily good enough - especially if you look at what powers the multiplayer shooters.
Source was used for V:tmB and showed promise as a viable crpg engine, and other proofs-of-concept have shown that it could potentially handle turn-based isometric party combat (again: engines are not camera angles). But lots of people would die even for more games in the V:tmB / Deus Ex / System Shock / Thief vein, all of which could be handled with what is now an ancient but highly moddable engine which still supports some rather popular shooters. V:tmB showed what should be obvious - just as engines aren't camera angles, neither are they art styles, and so there's no reason why games with an 2000-ish engine should need to resemble the appearance, angle or game-play of the games they were first made for. I don't think newbies would complain at all if a developer produced a series of good follow-ups to the legacies of Deus Ex and Thief, focussing on the level design and character skill/level/etc systems more than the bigname attempts have, and the game had good art design, but with the underlying graphical (lack of) grunt of TF2. After all, they're still playing TF2 - it's not going to jar when they hop over to a well-designed crpg on the same engine.
One difficulty indies faced for ages was that everything had shifted to 3D, new 3D engines were expensive as fuck, and early 3D engines couldn't handle modern graphics or interface without far too much tinkering to be worthwhile. Now, a lot of those 'new 3D engines' are starting to get pretty ancience - and hence cheaper - whereas we haven't seen any real advances in interface or even graphical design of the scale that developers were faced with following the jump from 2D to 3D.
Not to mention that, as folks have said, enough people put up with shitty graphics but decent interfaces in Vogel's games - I've said many times that the Geneforge series stands for me as possibly my favourite 'stretched series' of games, presenting by the latter ones a style of game that was Vogel's own, and that nobody else had every really attempted, rather than being a cheap clone of another game (whether old or new) - hence my disappointment at his most recent fare. And if enough people buy Vogel's games to make it worth his while to keep updating them for new audiences, while putting out new ones and making his own viable business out of it - despite the godawful graphics prior to his most recent game (which is arguably his weakest game in all other areas), that shows that the market has either hit segmentation point, or at least a very solid niche has developed who want these games, and the publishers just haven't caught on because the industry is woefully under-competitive.
It's laughable to see EA's and Activision's efforts to get their substudios to make ever-more 'accessible' games because of the struggle to compete: if they were facing any true competitive pressure, then just like any other industry they'd be trying to make different products for different people to try and scoop up every potential customer out there with at least ONE of their games per year, rather than willfully abandoning huge chunks of proven and former gaming enthusiasts because they decide that they aren't worth the effort to cater towards.
Even Hollywood knows that you don't just build Michael Bay films - you've got to combine them with the Fincher book adaptions, the foreign language film, the teen musical drama and the experimental film put out by your substudio (so you can promote the director to the big league if he does well, and disown it if it stinks) - because no matter how 'accessible' you make an entertainment product, people have different tastes, and you need to make products for ALL of them. Computer game publisher mentality is the equivalent of a film producer saying: 'the Michael Bay film made the most money the last 3 years - from now on, we're going to make EVERY film a Michael Bay film!!!!' as though the fans of the other genres are just going to hop on board. Sure, a younger generation might grow up without any alternative entertainment and be used to it, but it's still not a strategy you're going to survive with if you're facing true market pressure. For all of the way that folks paint EA and Activision as evil capitalists, in some ways they resemble the way you'd expect computer games to be made in the USSR if communist Russia was still around. One size fits all, and just ignore the obvious inefficiencies that brings.
)
I want to believe. The problem I see with future KS projects is that they will not have many >500$ donations. If Fargo delivers, people will like to use KS (or a competitor) as a pre-order mechanic, but the current craziness can and will not last (past another 1-2 projects). And only when Fargo has to work with amounts of money that realistically reflect the market (that means pre-order-donations + eventual sales) for his games will we see if the concept is sustainable. That means, in the long run, the ~40k backers W2 will probably have by the end will not be enough and he really needs to tap the "millions of fans" even with cutting out the middle-men. Now this may be years industry-brainwashing speaking out of me, but I'm not sure there's such a market for "hardcore" RPGs. Still: *fingers crossed*
