T w e n t y S i d e d
My column this week is a bit on the Phoenix Point controversy and why it’s destructive to the crowdfunding scene. I talked about it on the podcast this week, but this column is a text version of that rant for those of you who aren’t into the whole multimedia thing.
The problem is that developers are using crowd money to make demos so they can shop their project around and secure more traditional funding. I don’t have a solution for this. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe this is an inherent flaw in the crowdfunding scene. Backers wind up being investors with no ability to hold the studio accountable, and that makes them vulnerable.
Lots of game projects die / get canceled before they reach release. Most of them vanish without us ever knowing they existed. Unless the project was based on established IP or the team featured a famous industry name, we don’t usually care. If the investors lose their money, nobody really sheds a tear for them because:
- If you’re personally backing a multi-million dollar game, then you’re clearly independently wealthy. Presumably you’re risking money you can afford to lose.
- If you’re an investor, then you’re probably investing with a hope of getting a cut of the profits. You were risking money in the hopes of making more. If there was no risk, then everyone would want to invest in games. The reward and the risk of this exchange are inextricably bound. I’m not one of those people that enjoys a smug feeling of schadenfreude when rich people lose money, but I understand it comes with the territory.
- One would hope that you know what you’re doing. I assume you did your homework? You learned about the team, the proposed design, and the specific market niche the game is aimed at. If you did, then you knew the risks going in. If you didn’t, then you were reckless. Either way, that’s just business.
In crowdfunding, the whole system works sideways. Backers are technically investors, but they bear a similar risk without any of the benefits. Backers can still lose everything they put in, but no matter how successful the game is, none of the money makes it back to the investors. They each get a copy of the game, and that’s it. An investor might risk ten million in the hopes of making twenty million, but a backer risks the price of a game in the hopes of getting… a game. Kind of a crappy deal.
On the other hand, crowdfunding has been a huge boon for those of us who are into niche genres. There are beloved games that exist now that wouldn’t exist at all if not for crowdfunding.
In the comments at the Escapist, someone wondered why I didn’t bring up Star Citizen. Honestly, I didn’t talk about it because I don’t know what to make of it. It’s a complete anomaly among crowdfunded games. It’s massively behind schedule, plagued by rumors of mismanagement, and staggering under the most epic case of scope creep I’ve ever seen. On the other hand, it’s massively over-funded and still pulling in money.
The Star Citizen Kickstarter was seven years ago, and we’re now five years past the original ship date. For the last four years I’ve been expecting the project to either stabilize or collapse, but it hasn’t happened yet. The game is forever hovering on the edge between “troubled but successful project” and “massive boondoggle”. I find the whole thing to be an amusing curiosity, but I suppose I’d feel different if I’d backed the project myself.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
I know that “kickstarter is not a pre-order”, but I think the sticking point for me is that developers pretty much ubiquitously offer copies of the final game as the backer bonus. If they were only providing some promotional tat (“donate $25 for this unique collectible James Pond 3: Kindergarten Cod keyring”) then it would send a clearer message that backers were paying to have “this sort of game that I like and otherwise wouldn’t be available for me to buy” developed.
As it is, it’s paying money in advance in the hope of getting the thing you want, which feels an awful lot like a pre-order. Changing the thing backers actually receive is consequently that much harder to defend.
That’s it in a nutshell really.
Imagine they did promise that for $25 you get a unique collectable James Pond 3: Kindergarten Cod keyring.
But then 3 months after the kickstarter finished, they decided that it was now going to be a James Pond 2: Robocod can opener that they accidentally ended up with a complete oversupply of and giving them away for free is cheaper than the disposal fees to dump them. Clearly the terms of the agreement have changed wildly.
It seems because a game is software, they can get away with making such changes, since it is mostly subjective in how it is appraised.
James Pond! That takes me way back.
OMG, that’s actually a thing that existed?! But then again, it was the 90’s, so I shouldn’t really be surprised…
Three games and a sports-themed spin-off, baby! An era when you could pump out mediocre platformer after platformer based on a single piss-poor pun.
Wait, there actually was a James Pond 3? Way to ruin my joke, history
:D Well, to be fair, it’s made by EA, and like most AAA publishers, they’re notoriously bad at counting, so I wouldn’t put it past them to make to sequels with the number “3” (seriously guys, number 1 goes before number 4).
On the other hand, it would be kind of unreasonable to expect people to hand over money equivalent or higher to the purchase of the game and then ask them to pay for the actual game on top of that.
Who says that the full price of a game is how much they would have to hand over, though? If you’re not giving the game, you can ask for whatever amount you want. The key thing is to meet your funding goal, in whatever combination of amounts. Plus, if you don’t sell people the game as a crowdfunder, then this is extra revenue once these people actually buy your game.
There is/was a huge number of kickstarter games that either don’t offer a copy of the game or at least have backer tiers available at which you do not get said copy. I can’t speak for how many people back at those tiers though.
Suppose they put it up on their website as a “pre-order” while it was still in development and sold preorders and called them that.
Should people who have purchased a preorder have any recourse if the game made reasonable changes from what the initial intention was?
Also, for a traditional investor, all that matters in the end is a return on their investment, i.e. money. As is the nature of money, it’s interchangeable and is only measured by quantity.
But for the backer who is in it for the actual game, it doesn’t merely matter whether they get “a game”. What matters also, if not more, is the quality of the game. For an investor, a buggy mess that is an insult to a beloved IP is still a full success so long as it makes the profit they expected. To a backer, that may be worse than having no game at all.
Amen to that. A buggy mess is worse than having no game at all.
Sadly: Those indy developers who rely on crowdfunding sometimes doesn’t have that choice. As Shamus calculated in his rant about the System Shock Kickstarter, money is tight for the time a game needs to be developed, even if it crowdfunded a million plus.
Resulting in developers getting the game to early access now and hope for income to fix this mess.
And indy studios often do not have the hardware and manpower to test and fix the product.
Fingers crossed: I backed 37 games on Kickstarter till now. 16 of them have a full release till now. 7 are in Early Access. Of the remaining 14, seven are in overdue with (regular) updates (System Shock included). Quality range is from okay to great.
True with the caveat that this was a Fig so some of the backers are in fact investors.
Yes, but those are two entirely different transactions.
I have never given money to any crowd-funded project. I’ve never even been tempted to do so. There are too many finished games for me to buy and play now. Why would I spend money on an unfinished–and possibly never-to-be-finished–game, a game whose qualities are still unknown? I’ve heard some people say that they back certain crowd-funded games because they can’t get games like that any other way. I suppose that may be true in some cases, but it doesn’t seem like a compelling reason to back something like Broken Age. It’s not as though adventure games went away. They just went niche. If you can’t find a good adventure game to play it’s because you aren’t looking. But for me, even in cases where it is true, it’s not enough. I love space sims, a genre which arguably has gone away, but that’s not enough to get me to give money to Chris Roberts when he hasn’t got so much as a demo for me to play. (I know there’s a demo of some sort now, but there wasn’t back at the beginning.)
For me it started with Dreamfall: Chapters. The second “The Longest Journey” ended with the worst kind of cliffhanger and I wanted a third game to be made, but publishers didn’t.
8 years after the release of “Dreamfall: The Longest Journey” this Kickstarter campaign started. And it got my money. I do not regret this.
I was also very bummed out about Dreamfall. I hadn’t known it had a Kickstarter until I bought the game a couple of years ago. As far as I remember, it was split into two episodes. I remember kind of liking the first episode, despite the horrible lip-sync. However, I thought it didn’t really live up to the The Longest Journey. Did they ever release the second episode? And if they did – was it any good (at the very least, did it have better lip-sync)?
Dreamfall Chapters was split into 5 episodes, where the gap between episode 3 and 4 was nearly a full year of development. (And 2 years of localization)
The story is now concluded without another cliffhanger. The game could have used a few more environments (and a lot mor crow :-)) but Arcadia and Stark changed a bit from episode to episode, so you didn’t see the same thing over, and over again.
5 episodes? Hm, I don’t know where I got the idea of 2 episodes. Sounds interesting either way… Might give the rest of the episodes a try someday.
The Developer planned 1 game in the kickstarter.
After the Kickstarter and a few month in development they announced to split the game in two.
A few month later they got to the 5 episodes. “To give backers something to play sooner, than later”
Episode 5 was released short of 2 years after the planned Kickstarter release of the promised 1 game.
And I still don’t regret backing this!
They wanted a Tim Schaefer adventure game. There being “plenty of games to play” is useless if they’re all completely irrelevant to your interests.
What, all of them? Who in the world plays Tim Schafer adventure games and only Tim Schafer adventure games and doesn’t ever play any other video game of any other kind or by any other person? Those are some incredibly specific tastes.
I understand that in the US and Germany, adventure game fandom took in a much more diverse selection of titles, but If you grew up where I did, you could find pretty much any Lucas Arts title in your local game store right up until the mid 2000s. Not so any other adventure. Sure, the latest Gabriel Knight would stay on the shelves for a few weeks, a Discworld or a Broken Sword might come and go, but Schafer’s games were enduring and became synonymous with the idea of the point and clicker.
Fast forward fifteen years and everyone of a sufficiently nerdy persuasion still remembers how to respond to the charge of fighting like a dairy farmer. That’s the kind of nostalgia that can get people on board with your crowdfunding appeal even if they hadn’t been keeping up with the Blackwell trilogy.
I do understand the appeal of crowd-funded games in underserved genres. The success of Pillars of Eternity makes perfect sense to me, even though I’m not much interested in RPGs with real-time combat and have never played (and thus have zero nostalgia for) Baldur’s Gate or Planescape: Torment. I’m afraid I took the comment to which you are replying rather literally, and the idea of a gamer who plays only Schafer or even LucasArts adventure games and nothing else ever, all other games being “irrelevant to [his] interests” was very striking.
Incidentally, I last played Full Throttle less than a year ago. I may not have backed Broken Age, but I am clearly not immune to Tim Schafer nostalgia.
C’mon. Don’t be reductive. The point is that people have favorite genres/styles/whatever, and some people’s favorites basically don’t HAVE new entries.
Imagine that the world has stopped making apple pies. You can still get peach, key lime, pecan, and for some inexplicable reason, banana cream. But not apple. The Market Has Spoken and No One wants apple pies anymore. You LOVE apple pies. Yeah, fine, peach is nice, and pecan is good from time to time, but none of them compare to an actual, honest to goodness apple pie. So then someone says, “I’m running a Kickstarter to set up a bakery and make apple pies! Give me $20 and you’ll get an apple pie!” — in spite of the fact that, technically, the world contains more “pie” than you can ever eat, you are going to be, at the least, Very Tempted to give them $20 in the hopes of getting the first apple pie you’ve had in 20 years.
This doesn’t seem like mysterious behavior to me.
What I said in my original comment is that I don’t think that adventure games are an underserved genre. I stand by that claim. I also allowed for the existence of underserved genres, named one I cared about, and explained that I, personally, was still unwilling to pay for an unfinished product. If people want to give money to specifically to Tim Schafer to go make a Tim Schafer adventure game because of nostalgia for Tim Schafer adventure games then that’s a another matter entirely and not what I was talking about.
An adventure game’s quality is driven more than 95% by the writing. They are movies with little ways to keep the player feeling involved. The Blackwell series was done by a writer, and it shows — in terms of game design and user interface, there are serious issues. But that is fine because it’s more important for the writing to be good.
I don’t think nostalgia for Tim Schafer adventure games is any stranger of a concept than nostalgia for Orson Scott Card books or Tim Burton movies.
I don’t want to harp on this too much, but it is reductive. One of my jams is first person action-roguelites, which is a niche genre even today, and I’d definitely be interested in paying for their development should I get money. Arguably Dark Souls (and the Soulseborne series in part by that success) did so well cause it tapped into a huge market that just wasn’t being served.
I’ve had success backing a comic book and a board game. In both cases the creative work was done and the Kickstarter was for funding a print run. I think that is a fairly low risk approach.
Although for the order of the stick campaign, it’s been seven years now and some of the bonus stretch goals are still undelivered, I still got more than my money’s worth within the first year.
“I love space sims, a genre which arguably has gone away”
‘Space sim’ is a bit un-descriptive, as it is made up of very broad terms. But assuming that you are talking about the Euro Truck Simulator In Space + Dogfights In Space + Financial Empire Building In Space facets that you enjoy, there is still Egosoft and their X series which recently got a new entry (X4): it seems to be loved by fans and regarded as an Early Access title with potential at worst.
It’s the existence of games like the X series that lead me to say “arguably.” I played some X3 a few years back and it wasn’t what I was looking for.
OK, so maybe this is a stupid idea, but I’m wondering anyway…
Is there room (profit wise) for a type of kickstarter insurance? I imagine a corporation that creators can apply to before launching their kickstarter. That corporation has people who evaluate the creators, the proposed kickstarter, and the market. They then offer to place a guarantee to the backers. If the kickstarter is funded, the corporation gets the money, which is held in escrow for the creators. The corporation then invests an equal amount(or more?) into the creators directly. If the project doesn’t complete by the initially projected due date (maybe with some wiggle room), the corporation offers full refunds to any backers who didn’t get their reward.
The backers get guarantees for their pledge. Either a refund, or what they asked for. Also, since the corporation is only going to back projects they think will succeed, the backers can expect (hopefully) that the project is more likely to succeed.
The creators get potentially more backers (less risk means more people willing to pledge), plus the expertise of the corporation for suggestions on a) making a better kickstarter project and b) successfully completing a project.
The corporation gets an actual investment (some form of return), using mostly other people’s money. They’d still have some risk, but a lot less than a traditional investor, since the backers are footing some of the bill.
There’s the overhead eaten by the insurer, which exceed the margins on many projects.
For example, in that scenario Star Citizen would have to refund their Kickstarter pledges, since what they are currently making is now much different from what they first offered.
A typical insurer has a very low or negative overhead cost in the most naive sense, with total payouts exceeding total premiums. They do that because the idea of insurance is that you give them money now and they give you money later — while they’re holding the money, they invest it, and their investing gains are where their profits come from.
But that won’t work in Lee’s model, since the insurance company described there doesn’t hold the money.
I can come up with of lot of scenarios, but I don’t see this as viable. The corporation (it doesn’t actually need to be a corporation at all , though) you’re describing has no reason to go to Kickstarter for funds. They necessarily have money or access to it, under this plan, basically equal to the lent-out funds . You’re asking them to hold the entire budget in cash,which they’re not going to want to do. And evaluating and controlling a developer who may go wildly off the rails and destroy their own project is a job for a very patient publisher.
TL;dr: If they’re in a position to do this, they don’t need Kickstarter money anyway.
It looks like it would essentially boil down to “crowdfund a company who will then fund Kickstarter games”. That would have the same problems as direct Kickstarter funding, and lose the thrill of directly contributing to something you like.
I see three major difficulties here. First, given that video game publishers can’t seem to predict video game sales very well, I’m not confident that an insurance company could do any better. It doesn’t help that Kickstarters are usually for new IPs, making sales even harder to predict. Second, it’s hard to assess the risk that a Kickstarter will fail. Insurers can write profitable insurance contracts on cars, houses, and even people’s health because they have tremendous amounts of data to work with. There just aren’t that many Kickstarters by comparison. Third, Kickstarters are usually for relatively small sums of money. My impression is that most Kickstarters are for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. I know that some Kickstarters raise hundreds of thousands, but how many ask for that much to begin with? The implication is that a company offering Kickstarter insurance would have to do a lot of very difficult work, the result of which is not likely to be substantially more accurate than guessing, for a fairly small number of customers and a fairly small amount of revenue per customer. It just doesn’t seem like it would be profitable.
I haven’t had this happen to me yet, so that’s one good thing I suppose. But I have both gotten bad games out of my kickstarters, and kickstarters that just vanish into the ether. Unsong Story and Mighty No. 9 spring to mind, both being very frustrating. That’s why I haven’t backed anything in years besides 198x and The Good Life. When that and Indivisible releases, aside from the limbo game Unsung Story, my whole kickstarter backlog is gonna be done and I probably won’t back another one until Shigeru Miyamoto asks me for change.
There was also Underworld Ascendant to add to the list of terrible games released. Then there’s the SpaceVenture game created by the people behind Space Quest. Six years behind schedule, and still not even in Beta.
I’ve pretty much dropped backing video games on Kickstarter, and have gotten a lot more selective about board games as well.
I’m not very up-to-date on board game Kickstarters, but I’ve always had the impression that board game projects generally get delivered using crowdfunding – they’re definitely easier to create than a video game. That should mean there should be less duds, shouldn’t it?
My wife and I have backed over a dozen boardgame Kickstarters, and never had an issue. I mean, some of the games weren’t good, but we always got a printed product that matched what was promised on the website.
There’s been several high profile cases of games not delivering at all in the past. But the biggest issue is just unbalanced games that aren’t that good, which are for sale at retail for less then the Kickstarter price. Now I’ll generally just back reprints or deluxe editions of games that I’ve already played and enjoy.
I’ve had the Kickstarter for Katalyka bookmarked for about 8 years just to see if the backers would ever get anything for their money. It was a bizarre story. Around a year after it was funded the creator started complaining about being harassed by the voice of the sun and conspiracies by the US Navy and other insane rantings. Updates became very infrequent, months or years apart. In 2015 she claimed she was still shipping out Katalyka, but then in 2018 she shipped them her new game instead. So some people got *something* anyway, not what they wanted or when they wanted it, but they got it.
Regarding accountability, I would like to divide the backers of a crowdfunded project in two tiers. People who donate before the project is fully funded are risking their money to make the project happen. But people who donate once the project is fully funded have no impact on the success of the campaign — presumably they hope that their donation helps the project succeed.
The fact that the two types of funding are not clearly distinguished causes a few problem with crowdfunding. In particular, with a history of projects being funded many times over, the people who turn to crowdfunding platform are tempted to lowball their budget to make sure they get past the target, and hope they will exceed it by enough to meet their actual needs. (This is in addition to most people being unrealistic as to the real cost of projects, but I digress.)
It would be nice if the above-target funding could be used as a control mechanism. Make it more like an option, almost in the finance sense of the word. As soon as the developer ran out of the money within their original funding goal, the people who had donated above that would have the opportunity to review the progress made, and decide whether they still wanted to pledge their cash.
Obviously, this suggestion has problems: refund mechanisms are tricky, you’d have to provide an incentive for the crowdfunding platform (so, the backer might not get a full refund, for example), developers would hate it (but that’s the point), and this is so unfamiliar that most participants would not really know what to make of it. I suppose it would also come with its own collection of unintended behaviors. But it would force more clarity on what is seed funding and what is additional funding, and where the devs want their additional funding to come from, a traditional investor like a publisher, or the crowd.
That just leads to every reward tier getting “And we’ll send you a postcard!”. Since everyone has had part of their promise fulfilled, it becomes unreasonable to figure out what fraction of their pledge falls into the ‘revocable preorder’ state instead of the ‘project funding’ state.
I’ve always found it baffling how few projects release a breakdown of what they’ll be using the money for (in fact, I’ve personally never seen one). And I don’t just mean the stretch goal poster – I mean an actual business plan, along with a project roadmap and timetable. Even if, legally speaking, backers aren’t investors, they are acting as such, and I think Kickstarter should definitely have such a requirement.
That would definitely increase both the transparency, and the accountability for projects.
It would in theory, but I don’t know that gamers pining for a new “X Quest”/2d platformer/RTS/etc. are likely to review a business prospectus before dropping $30. And if they do, how many can evaluate it effectively? Folks have careers making sense of these kinds of documents, it seems a lot to ask of consumers.
Yes, but I feel it’s a reasonable to ask out of people asking for your money (no matter how small the sum is in the long run).
1. Some people in the audience are bound to have at least some experience dealing with such documents, and could provide some insight for the rest of the backers. But more importantly:
2. Kickstarter’s full of projects running only on enthusiasm. One of the benefits of having a business plan is that it’s useful for the person making it as well – it helps you pin down what you really want, gives you a general what’s involved in achieving it, and an idea if you’re up to the task in the first place
It would also remove some of the wiggle room developers currently have – one of the problems with crowdfunding is the lack of legal protection for backers – but if there was a publicly available record of concrete and specific promises they made to their bakcers, I think it would be a lot easier to take them to court over it…
Unfortunately, taking legal action would probably require some kind of organization whose job is to protect backers from bad actors.
But I still think that more transparency will be beneficial to everyone involved.
I actually have seen multiple projects doing a breakdown of where they expect the money to go. Not to the full business plan level, but x% for printing, y% for shipping, z% for asssembly, etc. However, these aren’t for video games or long development projects, they’re usually for comic collections or board games or the like, where there’s no design phase left. While almost all of my Kickstarters eventually did deliver, the ones that had a design phase almost all ran late. And I think all of the projects I backed that didn’t deliver were video games, where they just didn’t understand how much time and money it would take to actually do what they’d planned.
Kickstarter does now have requirements that proposals discuss the known risks. Unfortunately, the risk of clueless developers is by definition not something the developers have a clue about, so it never gets listed. :-P
Mostly because they’re trying to pretend that they’re doing it all, or even mostly, on the Kickstarter money.
In reality, they’re using the Kickstarter to demonstrate to investors that they have an actual market and people who already believe in them, and praying for investors to cover the rest of the cost. (or, more charitably, have already arranged investors who are making their money contingent on a Kickstarter.
Revealing that $250k is, in fact, not nearly enough money to make a videogame would harm their Kickstarter more than letting everyone second-guess their business decisions would help it.
Kickstarter at least doesn’t charge anyone any money(and doesn’t give anyone any money) until a project meets its primary funding target. So you’re never actually risking any money until the kickstarter has gathered enough support for what the developers claim they’ll need.
>When you back a project, you’re technically an investor, not a consumer.
That represents a complete lack of understanding about what investing is. You’re a /gambler/, certainly. Equity crowdfunding is an entirely different beast- you can own shares in a game without getting a license for it.
As a backer of PP, I’m only slightly miffed that it would take me a year after early access sales begin to get a Steam key. As an investor in it, I’m really pleased that I’m getting paid a fair bit by Epic Games.
It’s not an advance that has to be repayed, or a dilution of the income like other investors might be. Uupfront payments paid by distributors are counted as revenue, and contribute to returns for investors.
Epic is spending significant amounts of money on exclusivity deals. Obviously they have some really deep pockets somewhere who think that getting gamers to use their platform is necessary to make money with it, because they are paying developers enough to be worth it. It’s a LOT of money- Epic is not going to break even on PP sales, and they aren’t even hoping to. What Epic is hoping to do is buy customers. And the price that they are paying for customers is very, very high indeed.
>Backers can still lose everything they put in, but no matter how successful the game is, none of the money makes it back to the investors.
See, that’s the kind of error you make when you confuse ‘backer’ and ‘investor’.
Money does make it back to the investors. It’s the backers who get the game (and swag). And since what is good for the investors is sometimes bad for the backers (as in the case where Epic pays a literally market-breaking sum of money for exclusive rights), if you keep those two groups confused you’re going to be unable to parse events.
He’s not confusing anything, you’re the one making a mountain out of a molehill.
Do molehill climbers really need ropes? Mountains are so small that you can’t hurt yourself falling off of them. And how have so many people summited Molehill Everest without it getting stomped down?
Possible ‘solution’:
The money invested in the kickstarter goes into a special account. The developers receive it in, say, 25% chunks. They get the first chunk right away. The get successive chunks later only if the backers vote to give it to them. The backers can also vote to cancel the project and get the remaining proportion of their investment refunded. The developers have to provide evidence to the backers that they are making progress.
I suspect this would run into the same problem that did in the early-2000s idea of microtransactions – it assumes a near-zero cost to the consumer for evaluating decisions. I don’t know how many people want to do quarterly reviews of the product they spent $30 on and decide if they want to give up and get $15 back.
Plus, this means the developers now *need* to show the backers *demonstrable* progress, which many software programmers will tell you is quite different than *actual* progress. If you’re going to have to spend time arranging presentations for people with no programming background to ensure they’ll still fund you…how is this different than a traditional investor?
It’s different in that they’re willing to invest in your project in the hope of getting a good game out of it, while traditional investors are probably unwilling to invest in your project because they don’t see much money in it.
Even if the code doesn’t do anything yet, progress could be shown in the form of design documents, art, videos of the people working on the game, that kind of thing. Enough to indicate that you’re making a real attempt at creating a game, and you haven’t just taken the money and run.
The consumers who are interested enough to follow the project can vote, and the casual backers can abstain.
If the Kickstarter was the sole source of funding, that might even be fair.
But the other sources of funding can’t trust a funding source that can capriciously become a sudden major cost that sinks all of the other money, even if the project was going to be profitable overall.
With wildly different levels of investment I see that becoming a mess. Either equal votes per backer or weighted votes by dollar amount are going to lead to people being at the mercy of other backers with different expectations.
My friend has backed quite a few campaigns for various gadgets, but says he’ll never back software of any kind. And that’s his industry so I trust he knows better than me what the challenges are. I’ve only backed maybe two games ever, and it was solely based on the people involved.
Kickstarter is a *horrible* platform for funding video games. The time gap between “I have an idea” and “I have a finished product” is going to be years. Companies with accounting departments struggle to accurately project their future costs beyond a year or two; the smaller efforts on Kickstarter are just blue-sky guessing how much they’ll need. Plus, there is little to no financial reward for the developer completing the game vs. running out of money making a good-faith effort to do so: if the game had a significant audience beyond folks dedicated enough to Kickstart it, it could probably secure traditional funding. And once all the expensive work of making the game is done, modern PC gaming’s distribution costs are essentially zero – you don’t need money to get it in people’s hands once a playable game exists.
My wife and I have been getting a lot of board games off Kickstarter, and it’s perfect for them because all these factors are different. Developers can playtest and complete a boardgame before asking for a single dollar of outside money, but they need funds to print and ship actual products to people. And it scales nearly perfectly – unless the game’s print run outright exceeds a publisher’s ability to produce, you just pay more money and get more stuff. (And even then, contracting another publisher is a lot less work than, say, adding a promised subgame stretch goal to a video game.)
Board games passed video games in gross dollars raised on Kickstarter for the first time in 2018. I think that gap is only going to get larger, and I strongly suspect video games will eventually become a small niche on the site.
I think there’s more to it than this. I’d like to hold up the example of Subset Games. They funded their first game, FTL: Faster Than Light through Kickstarter. They requested $10,000 to fund the project and received a little over $200,000 in Kickstarter funds. As far as I can tell they didn’t do any stretch goals during the fundraising; they just completed the scope they had and profited off the rest. However, they did continue to sell more copies of the game afterward and were able to release a free update (Advanced Edition).
They were able to create an iPad version (every copy of which was a sale; NOT a kickstarter pledge reward!). This would be a financial reward for having completed the game instead of just failing afterward.
Further, the studio has released a second game: Into the Breach. They notably did NOT return to Kickstarter to fund that, being able to carry the development costs on their own. This could only happen because game #1 was a success instead of a failure. I’ll certainly look out for any third game by Subset; their brand is now worth something based on their successes. I would call this a solid financial reward for success.
I’d argue it’s a reward for doing *exceptionally* well – note that the primary effect of their success was that they did not have to return to Kickstarter for future efforts.
I’m mostly thinking here of a developer who’s teetering on the edge of failure – having burned through 75% of their money and debating whether to hang it up or try to bring *something* to market. Though I suppose most players don’t really prefer the something to nothing if they end up with a game like Mighty No. 9.
Mighty No. 9 is a good example, I’m glad you brought it up. It billed itself on the name of Keiji Inafune and “an all-start team of veteran Mega Man devs”, reached out to Mega Man fans on that reputation. They had a very successful campaign and made a lot of promises.
That they eventually delivered a game (late) described as “better than nothing” pretty much torpedoes Inafune in the future. The game was either panned or got at best a lukewarm response, they never delivered some promised versions, and there was a lot of criticism for some changes made in the development process.
Inafune billed himself to another project, Red Ash: The Indelible Legend and that failed to reach its funding goal (ended at $519,000 of $800,000). I’d say that Inafune is dead to the crowdfunding scene and he’ll never be able to run another Kickstarter.
If he’d delivered something pretty good for M#9 then I think he’d be able to bank on his success; if not to secure private investment in the future, then to at least hit up Kickstarter a second time and say “hey, it went well last time!”
I’d say it’s the concept of stretch goals that weren’t well thought out that causes a lot of the really overfunded projects to crash and burn. In the heat of the campaign they’ll start throwing out these cool ideas, that they didn’t test for balance, or spec out, or get prices on. Then, they get more attention, and that widget they promised to send everyone who backed them becomes something they can’t manage (or warehouse, or ship, etc.).
I agree. Scope Creep can be the death of any project in any industry; I bet it’s really easy in the crowdfunding space to get swept up in your own hype and to start throwing in tons of extra ideas, or ideas that were initially left on the drawing board for impracticality get pulled back in when the budget becomes 10x what you’d hoped for.
In a different funding model there’s “budget” and “profit” clearly separated by time. In crowdfunding, a huge part of your future profit can suddenly become your upfront budget.
Another advantage for board games is that better materials can act as a lightning rod for stretch goal scope creep.
That’s an exceptional case though, of a breakout hit.
Many people are going to have smaller tailoff sales, particularly niche games, or ones that don’t take off. A lot of these are going to earn their wages entirely off kickstarter pledges. Basically, while they’re making the game, they’re employed, after, they aren’t.
Those people have less incentive to finish the game, because they’ve already been paid, and are rightly drawing a wage for labour, but they likely won’t profit in a large way by finishing it, just by working on it.
They can try and milk that one project as long as possible, but I’d argue that successful delivery of one project can let them return to that same platform for a future project. Maybe they come back for a sequel, maybe they have a new IP they want to try; either way, successes look good and bank well in the future.
Milking out one project and trying to squeeze the pennies out of it forever is destined to fail, I think; even if Roberts & Co have milked a great many pennies out of Star Citizen.
I was about to say that I hadn’t backed any video games on Kickstarter, but it turns out that isn’t true. I did end up backing Sentinels of the Multiverse on there. I can’t say I was dissatisfied with the outcome, although that doesn’t change the arguments against the model.
Still, Handelabra seems to have found a decent way to get digital board/card games into the market, so hopefully they continue to succeed.
I feel like we need a contract version of the GPL, that says “we can’t go sell this to someone else if you fund it.” Something with legal teeth, that can be integrated into Kickstarter, but it’s standardized so whenever a Dev says they’re following it everyone knows what’s going on.
IANAL though, so I don’t know how difficult that would be.
I am also not a lawyer, but I’ve read some lawyer’s interpretations on how Kickstarter works. Apparently all the money you put into Kickstarter is classified as a gift; there’s no obligations whatsoever attached to that money – meaning that if a project gets funded and then manages to fail regardless the recipients aren’t on the hook.
For something with legal teeth, you’d probably need a new platform; given the success of getting money on Kickstarter and the risks of game development, I can’t see many developers accepting the threat of “teeth” when they can just get the money with fewer obligations through Kickstarter or Indiegogo or another platform.
The whole point of this thread is that the money is going to dry up due to the bad actors taking advantage of low accountability. Sure, RIGHT NOW, the people in the business are all too happy to take money with no strings attached, but that’s not stable and my suggestion is a way by which it could be stabilized
My suggestion is that to prove you aren’t a bad actor, put a standardized set of commitments in writing with legal binding that tells people what business you will and won’t do with your money.
To me, this is similar to the GPL–when you make code under the GPL you are specifying how and who you will sell your code to, without hiring an IP lawyer to write you a license agreement. Crowdfunding people can use something similar to restore faith from people (like me) who are never going to give money if there’s no real obligation for the devs to follow through on their promises in good faith.
I’m a big fan of the 1994 Xcom. I don’t hold optimism for Phoenix Point. Julian Gollop (the original dev) has given talks where he explained they didn’t know why the original Xcom was so good. Nor could they repeat the special sauce with the sequels in the 90s. The original success was a happy accident. (I wrote why Xcom was so good here.) Given the talks Gollop has given I don’t believe he ever really figured it out.
And we did have a couple re-creation attempts with Xenonauts for example. That game is not fun at all.
After reading your post: I think you’re very much onto something there. What leads me to believe that is the opposite: Whenever I played the old XCOM, it was a great experience until you had figured out how to get to a specific sub-goal. For example the first couple small UFOs are interesting, but when you’ve done it ten times, they become rote. Then another small UFO just becomes tedious busy-work. It would have been great to include a feature where you could auto-resolve (massively in your favour) things you already did a few times. That would remove the tedium from the late-game. However the originals kinda did that, by making the easy missions extremely trivial towards the end. Remote-controlled nukes and plasma tanks meant you could just speed through these missions within a handful of turns.
The newer XCOMs reduced the amount and complexity of the moving goal posts, and also made them more repetitive, resulting in a worse experience over all.
“Tedious busy-work” is exactly what a small UFO was in the mid and late game. Effectively you could auto-resolve it though. Once you had upgraded your aircraft weapons, there was no longer any chance it would be downed. The extra damage meant it could only be destroyed. So you could safely send out a plane or two in a couple of clicks and the game would resolve the entirety of that encounter for the player in less than 10 seconds. No boring mission necessary.
However a player would have to take in game strategic actions (like researching better weapons, building them, then equipping them) to have that option. Which would be a strategic tradeoff of time and resources the player has made compared to overcoming a different part of the game. Which I think is a far far better way of handling it than a button labelled ‘auto-resolve’.
It sounds like you are agreeing with me. Could you go into more detail what you mean by ‘opposite?’
Well, AFAIK he only really worked on one of the sequels, and Apocalypse was pretty good (even if it wasn’t as big or complex as it was originally supposed to be). It was an attempt to evolve the genre by collapsing the scale but increasing granularity, and it almost worked in that (even if a lot of the systems are only half-baked, opaque or missing). It’s the only one in any of the series that I’ve put about as much time into as the original, and unlike the original it has the sense of something that could actually be improved upon directly (in mechanics, rather than the somewhat clunky interface).
Gollop’s English. That automatically nets you +5 in Self Deprecation and the Can’t Take A Compliment perk.
Sounds a bit like the whole Mighty No. 9 issue, where Keiji Inafune made the Kickstarter promoting himself as Megaman’s creator when in reality he worked more on the business side of things and had very little to do with the design in Megaman games. And, of course, see how that turned out.
Nah. Gollop was the guy designing it. Xcom was made by Gollop and his brother. While he designed it, he didn’t iterate that design. He wasn’t able to put the time and effort into designing/balance/pacing he wanted. Importantly I feel the game benefited from his lack of polish. As of 2013 Gollop still did not understand that the pacing and “unbalanced” weapons were a good thing.
Must have been like a lot of creative endeavors where there is a lackluster sequel. Where the original hits it out of the park and the sequel can’t because the original was never properly analyzed. Given how often it occurs in movies in games it must be pretty easy to misidentify what ‘special sauce’ is driving the quality. Then emphasizing the wrong things and making something mediocre. For example thinking that trappings of a Fallout game (Pipboy, Supermutants etc) are what makes a Fallout game. This is what I feel happened with the Microprose sequels.
Crowdfunding’s a weird space financially; on the big platforms that money is classified as a “gift” and there’s zero legal obligation to actually deliver anything at all. Presumably this is because Kickstarter itself doesn’t want to take responsibility for enforcing delivery of any of the many projects on it.
Some projects can be held accountable by the court of public opinion: the Critical Role one springs to mind, as their valuable brand would be immediately devalued if they just took the money and delivered nothing. But some old-name game developer that hasn’t delivered a success in a decade, looking for millions? These seem insanely risky.
Star Citizen is becoming an incomprehensible quagmire. They’ve sold off so many different elements and aspects of the game ahead of time and milked every dollar from the majority of interested parties that I’m not sure who’s left to sell it to if the game “comes out” properly down the road. Then again, some of its supporters seem perfectly happy to fork over five digits worth of cash on digital spaceships they can’t even see yet… so who’s really in a position to force the development team to do anything?
Lately I find myself treating Kickstarter like a pure gamble. I’ll slap $20 down on an interesting-looking gamble and roll the dice to see if anything valuable comes out the other end. If they screw the pooch and waste the money or do anything dubious with the game I call it a write-off.
To look at this whole situation at a completely different angle, it’s interesting to note how the general attitude towards crowdfunded games has changed since the early days of Broken Age/Wasteland 2. Back then, it was just so amazing to see those types of games coming back from the dead, that it’s hard to imagine anyone getting too angry if it was announced that, say, Wasteland 2 would release attached to a mostly inoffensive launcher. But today a lot of backers consider crowdfunding to be a pre-order, basically. Which, again, doesn’t mean that those angry about the Epic deal are wrong to be angry. It just goes to show that the magic of this whole trend is gone. Now it’s just another business model. Doesn’t help that the market is suddenly oversaturated with XCOM-like games, nostalgic RPGs and pixel art rogue-lites.
Star Citizen is just an exceptionally well-performing con-job. It’s vaporware, and it will never release a product that is even remotely close to what people expect (and should be entitled to, because they spent thousands of dollars on it).
Now cue Star Citizen fans which react with rabid anger when someone points out that they lost their money. Post-purchase rationalization is brutal.
I’ve never followed it very closely (I’ve never been that big a fan of the genre), but I’ve seen the game on Twitch a couple of times – and at a glance, it looks a lot like Elite Dangerous. I’ve read the stories of people forking over 5 figures for tracts of land and spaceships in the game, and I actually find these stories very creepy and appalling (especially the one where they didn’t want to refund a guy who had given them more than $20,000!).
But gameplay-wise, how much is the game actually missing? From what I’ve seen, it looks like a competent enough space sim…
Some of the complaints I’ve heard about the game are: (1) a much smaller-than-promised game world, meaning that there are very few planets, moons, and space-stations to visit and not much to do once you get to one of them, (2) frequent failure to run well, even on the beefiest of rigs, (3) smaller-than-promised player caps, to the point where it can’t really be considered an MMO, and (4) continual failure to live up to the developer’s publicly announced timeline, especially regarding problem (3). Admittedly, I don’t follow the game closely and my usual sources of information are all extremely skeptical about the whole enterprise by this point. It’s possible that some of these complaints have been resolved by now.
Oh, also (5) a total lack of information about the state of Squadron 42, the Wing Commander-like single-player half of the game, other than that the cinematics are probably done. Just not, y’know, the game part. Again, I don’t follow the game closely, so take this with a grain of salt.
The whole “Cinematics” aspect of the single-player side of the game threw up a dozen red flags for me. Hiring expensive big-name actors to record performances seems like a great way to burn a ton of your budget for marginal gains in the finished product.
The cinematics probably being done could actually be an albatross around the team’s neck. They’ve paid these highly-expensive actors for their time, got the scenes in a can… and now they’ve gotta incorporate all of it into the finished product. Want to re-write the opening? Too bad, expensive cutscene had better get in there. Decided that the player should have a different ship? Too bad, expensive cutscene was shot on the other one. Updated the graphics for ship interior? Well, expensive cutscene looks out of date.
They’re spending too much money not to have something to show for it, but I think it’s destined for a disappointing release. Idiots who spent upwards of $10,000 for… something (?) are getting what they deserve. I know it’s rude, but once your investments into a project cross into the tens of thousands, you should be looking for some shares. Not just a “nice gift” to the project team. I swear, there’s a non-trivial chance that money’s being laundered.
I backed Elite and Star Citizen on the same day. Elite, for all it’s faults (and it has many) was published, does what it does well – there’s nothing else that quite captures the feel – and has had ongoing development since launch. I’m not sure whether Star Citizen is closer to launch now than it was then.
I was both amused and unsurprised that the very first comment on Shamus’ Escapist article was about Star Citizen.
One of the most amazing things I’ve seen regarding Good Ol’ SC was back when the Escapist (the old version) ran a story entitled (something like) ‘Is Star Citizen Going To Crash And Burn?’ with accusations of bullying, mismanagement and squandering money. It earned them a threat of legal action from Cloud Imperial Games.
Anyway, regardless of the merits of the article or SC in general, it naturally attracted a hell of a lot of comments, most of which were a circlejerk of people dumping on the game/project. But there were some defenders, including one guy who defended the game, got jeered at, and then…
…went and donated more money to the Star Citizen project in response, then told the Escapist comments section in a ‘that’ll show YOU’ tone.
Just, fascinating.
I backed it at a $50 tier right at the end of the original KS campaign. I succumbed to the hype, but it seemed like a pretty reasonable bet at the time. I’ve gone through various stages of grief since then, settling on a grudging sort of acceptance. It must really suck though for people that pumped hundreds or (for some crazy reason) thousands into it. Although I suppose, much like your investor analogy, they could presumably afford to lose it. But damn that seems like it would still sting a hell of a lot for the guys that have hangars full of digital ships. If it does end up imploding, I sure hope there is some consumer affairs type investigation into it. The whole thing seems pretty damn scammy when you look at what they have shat out and hear about what has gone on behind the scenes over however many years it has been now.
I don’t think you should be using Shamus’s investor analogy as a justification for anything. Just because people spend money on something doesn’t mean they can afford to lose it.
Yes, that means they shouldn’t be spending thousands of dollars on a virtual spaceship whether they eventually get it or not. But assuming that everyone who got drawn into Star Citizen’s obscene pricing structure could afford to do so is a really bad assumption. People can make bad financial decisions for any number of reasons.
I wanted to write a couple weeks back about the flaw of most big game publishers these days. Shamus is 100% right that it isn’t Greed.
It’s Sloth. EA, Activision, and so many others have become shockingly, hilariously lazy about their jobs. They don’t keep up with the market. They’ll blow millions of dollars on crap rather than spend a few thousands on something good. They actively resist diversifying their products and chase microtransaction whales. And they’ll never even think about whether any of its a good idea… because that’s hard work.
It’s just so much easier to spend millions acquiring studios only to close them. Or to mindlessly shove inappropriate fees and cashgrabs into everything. Why bother understanding the market, when you can just burn those FIFA or Warcraft dollars on buying it?
I’ve backed only a few kickstarter projects, and only two(*) of those have lived up to expectations: Obduction by Cyan (the creators of Myst) and Dreamfall Chapters (the sequel to Dreamfall: The Longest Journey). Dreamfall Chapters (already mentioned above) did what it set out to to and finally concluded a tale that began in 1999. It had some flaws, but it was a good game and an awesome achievement considering the scope of what they tried to do and the money they had.
Obduction succeeded brilliantly at being a spritual successor to Myst. It had the gorgeous environments, the atmosphere, the puzzles, everything I wanted. Its only real downfall was the loading times. I recently had the opportunity to replay the whole game in VR and it’s by FAR the best VR experience I’ve had. So many VR puzzle games are just 60-minute (if that) “escape room” style experiences. Obduction, by contrast, feels like an actual game and not a tech demo.
Speaking of Cyan, they just launched a new Kickstarter for a new game, Firmament. The videos and concept art look like classic Cyan-style worldbuilding, and considering how much I loved Obduction I immediately backed this one again with no hesitations, and the expectation that they’ll deliver something great again.
(*) Three, technically, but I’m not counting the Myst 25th Anniversary Collection because it wasn’t a new game, just a rerelease with special packaging. However, it was also successful: on time, and exactly what was promised, and the final product is high quality. Cyan really seems to have this Kickstarter thing down pat.
I’ve backed quite a few things in Kickstarter. Only a few of them didn’t come to fruition. In one of them, the developer confessed he had bit more than he could chew and couldn’t finish the game with the amount he’d gotten. In another one, the guy just stopped communicating, but this was after several enthusiastic updates, so it really looks more like a personal issue than a case of scamming.
I never had anything like this happen to me, though. This would have royally pissed me off. If someone did this kind of thing to me they’d only be making sure I’d never back any of their projects again, or even buy any of their products.
Well, I’m still here waiting for City of Titans to be released. They’re a little late, but I’m confident that I’ll get something eventually….
Have there been any kickstarter MMO success stories? If there have been, I’m going to venture a guess and say that they must have been EVE style ‘make your own gameplay’ deals. MMOs take an unreasonable amount of resources to make and maintain, something that I think indie developers are prone to vastly underestimating. Star Citizen was the only kickstarter that even had a chance, with its two hundred million dollars raised (including funds from post-kickstarter), but it isn’t exactly looking promising.
As far as a CoX successor is concerned, I’m most hopeful for SEGS anyway. None of the CoX knockoffs have lived up to the original, even the ones that were actually released. So if I can just play the original, that’s fine by me.
Elite: Dangerous is probably the closest I can think of. The game launched, it’s sold an expansion, is promising another, and it’s still got pretty healthy numbers and communities today.
The game’s not perfect but I’d call it a success.
CTRL+F hinted that I might be the first to mention this story in this thread: Warhorse studio and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. A success story to contrast the (possible) failures Shamus describes in the Escapist article.
In short, the company made a demo, pitched it to publishers who had no interest, started a crowdfunding campaign which went ridiculously well, which made an investor reconsider and fund the rest of the development. The game was finished and released with nice sales numbers.
In this case, crowdfunding was really not to fund the development, but used as a market research tool using the vote-with-your-money principle.
I have been unable to find a single source describing everything in English, but for example the developer’s diary from 2012 (pre-demo funding) and 2013 (publisher pitches) are quite interesting to read: Warhorse Developer’s Diary. And the articles about the crowdfunding campaign shouldn’t be hard to come by.
It helps that the Kingdom Come developers were up front about the investor funding. If I remember correctly, Koji Igarashi did the same thing with Bloodstained.
I’ve backed quite a few things on Kickstarter, including video games, board games, and a few other items.
I can’t say I’ve ever been burned, but I have paid more than retail for an item that came out later in stores. I was a backer for the original Fidget Cube and paid $35 for 2, but I did get an exclusive color that was never sold at retail, and a couple of extra items (carrying pouch and stickers).
As far as video games, I get excited by the campaign, but by the time they are actually released, I kind of don’t care anymore. I backed Wasteland 2, Carmageddon: Reincarnation and Pillars of Eternity, and I don’t think I’ve ever even played them.
For the board games, I’ve definitely played them, and feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth, but they felt more like pre-orders than anything else, as I only backed a company that I trusted. Also, getting the physical item in the mail is much more fun than getting an email with a key to a game.
I wouldn’t say I was burned on this, but I did pay $100 to back the Ouya. When I got it, I hooked it up, messed with it for 10 minutes, and never used it again. So I actually received exactly what I was promised, but I just didn’t really need it or use it.
Interesting! That’s been my experience as well. Of the games I’ve backed that have delivered objectively good, finished products (Reassembly, RimWorld, Rain World, Parkitect, Star Traders: Frontiers), I’ve only put any serious time into RimWorld, and even that’s only really been trying it out for a few hours every couple of months/years when a new version would come out before getting bored and moving on to something else. I don’t know if it’s that my gaming tastes have moved on in the years since backing and release (my tastes definitely do change on both long and short time scales), or if it’s a case of the finished product, no matter how good, not living up to the hype I had for it, or what.
Though actually…I did participate in the Kickstarter for Defense Grid 2, and have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that game. Though it’s complicated because the Kickstarter was technically for an expansion for the original Defense Grid, and DG 2 was a stretch goal, and they didn’t get enough money for that (they delivered on the expansion as promised), and then some publisher or other stepped in and funded the development of DG 2 so they made it and gave backers keys anyway…I guess the point is, there is at least one game I’ve helped kickstart that I have actually really enjoyed playing.
I’ve been “burned” by a few Kickstarters, but mostly I’ve been very happy with the system. It’s allowed art to exist that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
I agree I would love it if “just to show publishers there is an interest” campaigns were banned unless very clearly and prominently advertised as such. However sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between “whoops, we need extra money to finish this” and “we always knew this would not be enough money”. I would be interested to see people’s suggestions about just how crowdfunding sites could write and enforce that rule. Maybe a clause where Kickstarter is a part owner on behalf of the backers to enforce this rule?
Anyway, I do object to the consumer (customer really) versus investor false choice Shamus presented in the Escapist article. Backers are neither of these. They are supporters or patrons. Regardless of what the people who back projects think they are doing, that’s what they are. Someone might say that the additional geegaws or exclusives are what people are purchasing/investing in by backing, but there are exclusives that come with preorders through normal channels, and those preorderers might be guaranteed to get a game, but they have no guarantee that it will be any good or anything like what they thought it would be. At a certain point you are just giving people your money because you just want to support an idea or a person, and that’s okay.
I’ve backed a bunch of stuff through KS. Most I got, a couple just went dead but the most baffling has been the most recently updated one. Guy kickstarted an rpg. Got his funding started work and then hit a bunch of weird dev losses. He was working on it by himself for a tiny bit and then spent a couple years refusing to work on it at all to make something completely different, advertising it the whole time on the KS page. This new game did not go over well, he complained about it not selling well on Steam and Itch.io and said he was finally going to go back to work on the original game. Then suddenly he said he was not going to update on the KS page anymore because he claimed he couldn’t control the content. It felt really weird like he got more bad feedback then he wanted to deal with and came up with an excuse to stop updating.
I feel like there’s a few problems.
1. The legalities of ACTUALLY investing are weird and I think that’s the reason it’s been hard to make a kickstarter where you get a cut of the profits if a game is more profitable than expected. That also means that if a project does better than expected, it can be hard to absorb the extra money, if you don’t have the option of putting it to the next game instead.
2. Economies of scale are hard to predict. Sometimes a bigger-than-expected response is good because the developers can use the extra money usefully. Often, it means there’s more pressure to make something good, but not a greater chance of success. This is especially obvious with things which involve shipping and stretch goals, but probably affects computer game projects more: the risks are always so much greater for “we’ll develop this thing” than “we’ve already developed this thing but we need to print N000 copies of it”.
3. I only back kickstarter projects where I know the developers have a track record of the sort of thing they’re doing, or I’m happy to gamble and not know if I’ll get anything back. I don’t usually *want* to back projects from people I don’t know, so the problem of figuring if they’re reliable doesn’t come up. But many people do, and the standards for being clear about the chance of failure have never been good, but now there’s so many kickstarters it’s starting to be a problem. Kickstarter have made an effort to make people be upfront, but it’s almost impossible to be fair — anyone can SOUND confident if they know what they’re doing.
4. And sometimes people just lie. I think most “we shop this project round big studios” are like that — it’s a reasonable fallback to have, but it’s basically admitting failure on the original goal of “make a game”, because the studio WILL want to sell it to other people, that’s what a studio does, and that will usually mean compromising on what was originally promised, because kickstarter implies you can create a game that the backers want, with the backers money and not an extra influx.
Personally I’ve stopped backing Video Game Kickstarters. Part of the problem for me is that it’s hard to tell if I’ll actually like whatever the final product ends up being (which isn’t always what was originally promised). Add tot hat the long lead time on them and half the time when the game actually comes out I’ve moved on and never get around to playing it.
I do still like Kickstarter for board games however. Part of the advantage is that the lead time is generally shorter since in most cases the game is complete and the kickstarter is to pay for printing.
A kick starter I’ve back which doesn’t have the problems brought up is this one https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/772594886/sryth-2019/description which is a Massively singleplayer online rpg.
You are sure your getting a game because it already exists. You know the creator can do it because he already has for 15 years. You know whether you’ll like the game because its right there already. You know you can trust him because he’s be delivering for 15 all father dammed years.
I think that expansions should be bigger thing to kickstarter. Post of the risks are gone because the game already exists and the systems are already in place to put more stuff in it. If you like a game just MORE is a easy sell to make.