

The Kickstarter Game Successes: Where Are They Now? - qznc
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/28/the-kickstarter-successes-where-are-they-now/

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greggman
I'm really curious if the people funding these projects have a good idea what
they're going to get.

I know that creative and inspired teams can do great things but ... for
example Wasteland asked for $900k which is barely a budget for a SNES game.
What I assume people expect though is a Fallout 3 level game. I'm guessing
Fallout 3 cost $10-15 million to make.

I don't know what the original Lucas adventure games costs to make in the
early 90s. Double Fine asked for $1mill? I suspect that's close to what those
original games cost. Things have changed. I'd argue it would be challenging to
make those same games but at today's expected quality for the same price.

Of course I hope they all do great and the games all rock and there's
certainly plenty of smaller awesome games to be made. FTL for example. But,
for certain games, sequels, or games that are supposed to be very inspired by
older games there are expectations I think the developers will have a hard
time meeting.

~~~
rrreese
I backed Wasteland, and I'm expecting a game similar to Fallout 2 with modern
graphics and probably little to no voice acting.

They're using unity so they making big savings right away, but are constrained
with what that engine can do. And that's fine. I think most people who backed
it want a game that's true to its roots rather then has the latest graphics
etc.

Finally Kickstarter doesn't preclude additional funding sources. $900k might
have gotten them half way there with the assumption that they can get
additional sources of funding after that point. bear in mind that they will be
getting sales to people other then current backers after they release.

I think the key thing though is that a small focused team, using an engine
like Unity can get a lot done, and the constraints will be excepted by a
community who is far more interested in a classic RPG then the latest
graphics.

~~~
greggman
Engines are great but engines don't make games, people do. Mostly artist and
designers. A typical AAA game is 80% non engineers.

Lots of AAA teams use existing engines like Unreal. It still takes them teams
of 70 to 200 people a couple of years to make all that content.

My point is Unity may br great but it's not really the solving the harder
issue in games, Asset Creation

As for expectations you might be right. Time will tell.

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adrianhon
Zombies, Run! wasn't covered in RPS' roundup, probably because we're
smartphone only and were quite early - but we were the biggest videogame
project of 2011 with $73k from 3500 backers.

Through a pretty herculean effort, we launched on time in February. Since then
we've sold almost 250,000 copies across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and
grossed somewhere in the region of $1.5 million.

So yeah, I'd say it's working for some people. Did backers know what they were
going to get? I don't know, Zombies, Run! is a very original idea so we
couldn't just say "It's like X but with Y." But they seem pretty happy as far
as we can tell.

~~~
Tipzntrix
They state they only covered games with over 100k$

~~~
adrianhon
/me looks again

Yes, and just for 2012. Oh well!

~~~
7rurl
RPS also only covers games that run on Microsoft Windows (and the occasional
board game).

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exterm
More detailed progress updates for planetary annihilation are posted in their
forums: <http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=61> Look especially
for post by project lead Jon Mavor aka neutrino

~~~
funksta
He's also posted some good stuff at <http://www.mavorsrants.com/>. They have
been pretty transparent about the dev process, they just haven't used
Kickstarter updates as the primary medium for that.

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bvttf
Lost interest the third time they said there were only updates for backers.

Yes, they should be providing more updates for the people who might buy it. I
think the backer-only updates were listed as features since that was
presumably one of the big draws of the doublefine kickstarter success.

But RPS: do some journalism and ask someone who did back it? Or email the
project? For a story titled "where are they now", having half the entries be
"they protected updates so dunno, lol" is annoying.

~~~
JonLim
I came to make a similar comment, and am still reading my way through, but RPS
seems to have a bias against updates only for backers.

In my opinion, the games that are still far from being released are doing just
fine by not marketing themselves a little too early. If I'm not mistaken,
games typically ramp up their marketing efforts much closer to actual release
dates than during the development process.

Kickstarter enables a different method of capitalization, sure, but I think
the game development process remains consistent as with other types of funding
available to developers.

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ajaimk
Carmageddon: Reincarnation has already been released on iOS. They just put it
as a free game on day 1 on the iOS store as there isn't a simple way to only
give backers a game due to Apple's rules. Mac version coming soon maybe.

What bothers me reading through this is the rather pessimistic tone vs an
objective one

~~~
mikecsh
That's not true. The version released on iOS was a port of Carmageddon 2 and
has nothing to do with reincarnation..

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shardling
Oh hey, they mention the one game I backed and have beta access to: Word
Realms. (By the Kingdom of Loathing guys.)

It's basically a complete game at this point, just polishing and minor bug
fixing left. (Well, _maybe_ the devs secretly plan to add additional features,
but certainly nothing feels missing.)

~~~
cdmoyer
At least one feature is still locked out in the betas. ;). And it's pretty
cool. Zack is going to give me a heart attack with the design though.

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sami36
in essence, the crowd-funding model is working just fine. Game publishing will
never be the same.

~~~
Devilboy
Only one single game in that list actually got released and half of the rest
are way overdue.

~~~
belorn
But what does it actually mean compared to other game companies? Looking at
valve and blizzard, both has had a long standing style of only releasing a
game once its is "done", no matter the years that has passed since the first
estimated release date.

And maybe this is wrong and the future of game development will shed those
tendencies. Looking historically on game development, rushing a product out of
the door to meet a release date has rarely produced a good game (anyone heard
of E.T?). So the question might be, what alternative do we have between
rushing a product for relase date, and waiting until it is "done", which might
mean fifteen years to find out that the game is rather crappy (duke nukem
forever). We can also look at development processes like Debian, and compare a
static release schedule with a dynamic one.

~~~
intended
Other companies don't pre-sell games or promises before the game is launched,
though.

~~~
hythloday
Not sure what you mean here? Pre-orders are an absolutely critical part of
publishers' revenue, which is the cause of the weird structural problems
around magazine reviews (where 8/10 means "below-average game").

~~~
jivatmanx
Stock market analysts do the same thing as game critics, and never, ever give
sell ratings:
[http://www.cnbc.com/id/42790061/Stock_Analysts_Too_Scared_of...](http://www.cnbc.com/id/42790061/Stock_Analysts_Too_Scared_of_Sell_Ratings_or_Too_Stupid)

I'm guessing in both cases it's because the best raters get the best access
from companies.

Same problem probably exists in other industries too.

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julius
Lets quickly add that all up. Roughly 24 million dollars in total have been
raised for crowdfunded games (just the kickstarter projects mentioned in the
article).

For how long have we been doing that? Is crowdfunding games a 2012 thing?

~~~
sami36
Things changed dramatically after Tim Schaefer managed to raise 3 Mil $ for
double fine adventure in Feb 2012. Since then, many games managed to raise
above 1 Mil $, 9 actually per Kickstarter stats. Star Citizen, a flight sim,
raised the most , 6 Mil $ just as of two weeks ago. Before that Project
eternity was the record holder with 4.2 Mil $. Yeah, it's definitely a 2012
thing & if anything, it's acelerating.

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chucknelson
Maybe someone can make a similar update list, but for kickstarter electronics
(how is that OUYA going?).

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louischatriot
tldr: <http://tldr.io/tldrs/50b76494ada40f0817000160>

It seems to me that most of these problems are communication problems. You
just got a backing of XXX hundreds of thousands of dollars and don't want to
disappoint with some bad news, but that's a poor long term strategy. People
are surprisingly forgiving if they feel like you're telling the truth and
you're doing your best to make good on your promise.

~~~
aw3c2
That tl;dr is not a representation of the actual content. You reduced it to
the last few bullet points.

