What I find most interesting about this Kickstarter trend is that it is proving game publishing companies wrong. Publishers think that it isn't worth the money/time to build games like this. They want the next Angry Birds/Modern Warfare, full of DLC upgrades, in-app purchasing and facebook spam with the core gaming experience being secondary at best.
While the investors/publishers don't think its worth it monetarily, users are demanding higher quality games and putting their money where their mouth is.
Its also a huge shift. Instead of guessing what gamers might want, putting money in, and seeing how the game does- this enables developers to get their idea fully vetted monetarily and demand-wise upfront, then take the time to develop the game.
I don't disagree but I think there's one big problem here:
Kickstarter has no guarantees. As soon as one of these projects falls through / doesn't meet expectations the idea is going to start having problems. All it takes is one company to take $250,000 then not deliver and they undermine the entire idea.
Publishers take risks and publish games that might not be successful and if they're not successful the publisher takes the hit, not the consumer, the consumer is never made to care about failures but if consumers are the ones funding these games failures will start to matter.
Your're right; Though that's why most of the record-breaking Kickstarter projects come from companies that are inherently trustworthy based on some previous track record: Leisure Suit Larry, Shadowrun, that previous Lucas Arts guy. They all proved time and time again that they are capable of creating fantastic games. Even more, the gamers know what to expect.
I reckon it's much much harder to gain Kickstarter records like this when you're virtually unknown and your idea isn't a mere extension / sequel of something well known.
That doesn't mean it's bad, though. It's like a protection shield against the scenario that you outlined.
Bingo. Some of these kickstarted games may make massive profits; others may make the game, and then fail to sell many boxed copies because there's no market. Then they've essentially broken even.
That may be a success in their eyes - they got to make a new game, and the backers got a copy - but breaking even isn't "showing publishers what's what."
I think it's more a question of markets. Kickstarter aims for a far smaller market of educated die-hard fans. These huge Kickstarter records are in big part due to a limited set of fans who are willing to pledge 10.000 or 20.000. At a rate of roughly $30 per game sold (for traditional publishers) that equals to more than 600 sales for one user.
In addition to that, the budget for the game is greatly decreased since there're less marketing costs.
Traditional publishers, in contrast, try to aim for a huge market, and then also need to market to that huge market. The broader the market, the simpler the game has to be. Angry birds is a good example of that.
Disclaimer: I'm currently working with friends on a game too that, much like Angry Birds, is a easy to understand simple game idea that tries to appeal a big and broad market. I'm a huge fan of insanely complex games like dwarf fortress, minecraft, or (hopefully) the upcoming notch game, though.
Complex games are some that (most) publishers would in my mind want to stay away from.
If the guy who makes Dwarf Fortress pitched that to EA, he'd be laughed out of the room. ASCII graphics? A super complex game? They wouldn't get it. Probably the same with Minecraft. EA would be asking for DLC's, achievements posting via some proprietary Facebook app, and micro-transaction purchases to buy more blocks. Plus super heavy DRM. They wouldn't have thought it would sell and wouldn't have touched it as a publisher. Their loss.
If you have a people who are willing to pledge enough for you to make a game that they enjoy and leaves you net positive in the bank, I think that's a worthwhile enough cause. There are plenty of creative people who are just as happy (if not happier) making things for a smaller but more passionate fanbase.
The traditional AAA game industry is build based on the idea that targeting the mass market is the only viable business strategy; Kickstarter's been getting so much buzz lately because it's one of the few examples in modern gaming history that suggests there might be a commercially viable alternative for those who would prefer, for whatever reason, to not operate within the AAA model.
They want the next Angry Birds/Modern Warfare, full of DLC upgrades
I chuckled at this as one of the kickstarter levels on this project gets you enhanced abilities.
Really, though, does everything have to be so binary? Isn't HN above this "stereotype the worst of the worst and cast it as the only alternative" false dichotomy?
There are plenty of incredible games that publishers have supported. And in this case these guys are claiming that they're going to create a PC and a Mac version for $400,000? Really? Most "real" game cost many millions of dollars to bring to fruition.
$400,000 seems like a reasonable amount to make a game.
Maybe not a super polished AAA game, but it seems they are being ruthless about cutting features to keep it in budget.
for $400,000 you could easily retain 4 people to work on it full time for a year.
> And in this case these guys are claiming that they're going to create a PC and a Mac version for $400,000? Really? Most "real" game cost many millions of dollars to bring to fruition.
I got the impression that they were making the game anyway (for PC and tablets), and are going to use the kickstarter money to provide a Mac version, level editor, translations, additional character types, and possibly an additional city. Could be wrong though, it's not 100% clear and I agree that $400,000 can't possibly be enough to make a whole game of this magnitude.
If they were originally planning to develop it for the iPad, then developing a Mac version isn't that much of a stretch. I'm guessing they're going for the iPad since you have a more direct layer to C/C++ & OpenGL and the iPad is a bigger market in the tablet space.
I'm wondering if a good idea for a startup would be to take the Kickstarter model and flip it backwards. Fans propose projects they would like to fund, others fund it, then the respective rights owners see this interest and receive the money for the project.
There is a downside to this, which is the respective author might not be motivated anymore for the project and thus would do a poor job. Or worse, the company owning the rights to the projects, may decide it's not worth selling it back to the original author and therefore create their own version that's not up to par with the author's vision. Perhaps this could be avoided by specifically targeting the original author so that only s/he could receive the funding.
But ultimately, I guess the problem is that if it's proven there's a huge interest in a project, then the current rights owner may be more reluctant to give up the rights or only at a much higher cost.
I am glad that more developers are deciding to do this and putting more control into the hands of their consumers.
The biggest benefit to the developer here is that they have paid for initial development up front AND they get to sell this game on Steam and other market places once it releases.
Even with a moderate PR push from any one of these companies if they sell 100K copies at 10 dollars a piece (or even less) they have come out WAY ahead on this project.
Obviously a big publisher like Activision or EA is going to scoff at something like a 10 Million dollar profit when they need to fund the rest of their operations + split that revenue with the developer. They take risks but only when they know the chances of meeting their return percentage is higher than a certain threshold.
What was the last game you can remember from a big publisher that took a huge risk?
I think it will be a brand new computer game based on an existing pen & paper RPG.
According to the video other games were made based on the same RPG (I never played any of them) but the video hints that these were not so popular with the "true" fans of the original RPG and this game aims to right those wrongs.
In my experience people like the Shadowrun game on Sega Genesis (it's one of my personal favorites actually), but not so much the Super Nintendo one. And the recent Shadowrun first-person shooter borrowed the Shadowrun branding without much of its essence, angering people who were expecting a deeper Shadowrun experience.
I actually really enjoyed the Super Nintendo version and I was too young (at that time) to try the Sega Genesis version. Anyhow, I've decided to pledge $60, for the game, the t-shirt and the docwagon.
It slightly irks me they moved from "Linux support is definitely on the table too!" to "a Linux version [...] beyond the scope of the project." But not quite as much as their move to add more technical content when they reach one million, rather than the expansion into GNU+Linux support.
I do however understand their reasoning. Their cold, realistic and undoubtedly true reasoning.
There doesn't seem to be mention on a Linux version at all, rather just a Mac version.
I have to wonder, if you create a Mac version of a game how difficult would it be to port it to Linux?
I understand that games designed specifically around Windows (and therefor DirectX) are going to be a pain to port over to a platform without DirectX.
Surely though Mac versions of games are all based on OpenGL and most Linux distributions have OpenGL support too (as well as both being Unix type OSes) so surely the port is not that difficult?
It almost seems justified to have some project that aims to make it easy to port Mac games to Linux, if that was the case then you would see a massive increase in the number of Linux games available.
They are using Moai (getmoai.com) which is a cross-platform LUA based open-source game engine. It outputs to Android, iOS and Chrome. From what i gather you can develop+test games on Mac or PC but it doesnt compile to them much more so for Linux. The Chrome part may play in linux but not so sure about that.
Interesting, I had a quick look at the moai docs and the library mostly looks like a wrapper for OpenGL and it already targets android which has a Linux kernel.
Your right I guess, I didn't think about that.
Having said that if I was going to donate that kind of money to something I'd probably just cut them a cheque rather than putting it through a website.
I doubt that's the explanation. But I don't doubt that either it's (a) astroturfing (fake), or (b) there really are a few people out there who are fans and have FU money to spend. (Think: FU money in the hands of successful techie biz owners, they do exist, and they have played computer games.)
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I'm BACKIN THAT SH!
That is all.
While the investors/publishers don't think its worth it monetarily, users are demanding higher quality games and putting their money where their mouth is.
Its also a huge shift. Instead of guessing what gamers might want, putting money in, and seeing how the game does- this enables developers to get their idea fully vetted monetarily and demand-wise upfront, then take the time to develop the game.