f13.net forums - Kickstarter

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June 20, 2025, 10:44:58 AM

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Guess who is jumping on the kickstarter bandwagon now? American McGee!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spicyhorse/ozombie

Literally a zombie game set in the land of Oz. Oy.

Quote from: Fabricated on June 25, 2013, 03:43:53 AM

Guess who is jumping on the kickstarter bandwagon now? American McGee!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spicyhorse/ozombie

Literally a zombie game set in the land of Oz. Oy.

It's not the first time. He ran a kickstarter for Akaneiro as well, which turned out to be an amazingly bland action RPG (which is a shame, there's lots you can do with Japanese mythology)

My eyes almost popped out of their sockets from rolling so hard when I saw this last night. I am so incredibly over both zombies and steampunk (At least steampunk as it's represented in pop media. I still like the literary movement that was around for several decades before it became a fashion movement and everyone started gluing cogs to things)

Quote from: Sky on June 24, 2013, 01:35:46 PM

I think this sums up the situation:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/295600

Youtube link for anyone not in the USA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBVuAGFcGKY

Just got my KS'd Art of Brom.

Phenomenal.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Brom/dp/1933865490

I can buy it for $31. What was your KS payment?

57. I'm ok with that. Got some art prints and a sketchbook, as well as a limited cover. I'd give Brom a c-note for it if it cut out the retailer.

Anyway, the KS allowed for more pages and an upgraded binding. The binding upgrade is a big deal, since this book will be a reference book for a real long time in my house.

edit - it was $47 for the version that I linked on amazon, I have a publisher/artist only version.

Quote from: Goldenmean on June 25, 2013, 01:39:39 PM

Quote from: Fabricated on June 25, 2013, 03:43:53 AM

Guess who is jumping on the kickstarter bandwagon now? American McGee!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spicyhorse/ozombie

Literally a zombie game set in the land of Oz. Oy.

Also, Akaneiro officially launched before the Kickstarter had completed. McGee called the process a "Kicklauncher" where the game was 100% finished for launch, but they wanted to give their F2P title a revenue boost (effectively). If you look at the reward levels for that particular project, they were full of Alice promo materials and signed copies of other Spicy Horse titles.

Even then it only just got up.

Do you feel that you never have enough useless, niche peripherals for your mobile? Well now there's the BowBlade; pledge at least $49 and you get a cheap ass t-shirt, a sticker, some badges, and a keychain!

(seriously, what is the point of these low-level pledge rewards)

That actually looks pretty awesome.

But... it works via a hammer that physically taps the screen when you pull the bow's trigger. (a) Limited in what it can do; (b) No way I want something physically hammering on my phone.

Satellite Reign by 5 Lives Studios ("A real-time, class-based strategy game, set in an open world cyberpunk city, from the creator of Syndicate Wars.")
Might be good or a total disaster.

I haven't looked around but is something up with the Doublefine kickstarter? I guess Doublefine spread itself too thin and has blown through the KS money, and the game is now going to be a 2-installment deal where the first half is what Kickstarters get?

Shocking news: company that turned to donations to stay afloat after a series of development debacles mired in another development debacle.

The majority of established video game companies on Kickstarter are there because publishers no longer want to work with them after a series of botched projects. Expect this kind of thing to happen a lot.

Quote from: Fabricated on July 02, 2013, 03:33:53 PM

From what I understand they're just splitting in half. I haven't seen anything that the Kickstarters only get the first half.

Quote

"Backers still get the whole game this way — nobody has to pay again for the second half."

via: http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/2/4487692/double-fine-planning-to-launch-first-half-of-broken-age-in-january

Ah, that's better than I heard. Still, lol.

Here's a thing from the Banner Saga guys in response to the issues that Shadowrun Returns and mostly DoubleFine are having:

Quote

A CONVERSATION ABOUT KICKSTARTER
Lots of stuff has been going on in the Kickstarter community lately. I'm sure many of you have noticed Double Fine's announcement about splitting up their game into two parts. They've gotten some serious heat for this. Backers of Shadowrun have heard similar things about the content in that game, with the DLC being released much later.

First of all, I want to be clear that we do not intend to do something like this for The Banner Saga. When it releases it will be a complete product. We don't have plans for DLC at this time, and we will continue to support the multiplayer component. We also intend to continue on the sequels (chapter 2 and 3) just as planned.

I would also like to talk about my personal opinion on this, and I'd love to be open and talk like a normal person instead of a PR person in damage control mode. Can we do this? Without freaking out? You can disagree with me of course, just be nice about it.

This is hard. Like, way WAY hard. When we pitched the game we were hoping for enough money to get extra animations, maybe increase the length of the game. We thought we'd get, like, 2000 backers, not 20,000. A fine problem to have, right? Haha! Except that it's actually a huge problem. The hardest problem I've ever dealt with in my life. Now I know.

We thought now we could do everything we ever wanted for the game, and got too ambitious. We thought we could make the game in six months, and I'm still not sure what we were thinking. That was stupid. I wish I could take that back, all we needed to do was put a different date there and nobody would be complaining. Whoops. We ARE still doing everything we want, and it's taking a long time. I don't feel bad about that. That was the POINT, right? To dream as big as we could?

It's interesting to think of it from someone else's point of view. For many people, letting a dev shoot for the moon is NOT the point. For a lot of people the point is I BOUGHT A GAME, WHERE IS IT? They want the biggest, best game ever made, on time, for their $10 contribution. I can see that, too. I don't really agree... but I suppose it's a matter of perspective.

If nothing else, I think the gaming community is finally getting a good picture about real game development. What would really shock people is that there is nothing unusual about any of this, except that you are finally seeing it. This is every game development story that has ever existed, except instead of the publisher dealing with it, YOU are.

Budgets of 1 to 4 million are small-to-medium sized. Our budget of $650k (in actual funding) is relatively small, half a year of production for a small team. Budgets of kickstarter projects asking for $20k... that's not enough to make a game, that's just some content. Surprise! Games you've come to expect as "standard" like Call of Duty: maybe 150 million to make, rough guess. You know how much Old Republic cost? I'm not legally allowed to tell you, actually. It's that much. Now you know.

Games take 1 year to make... if it's a casual iOS game, or an annual sequel. Medium sized games take 2-3 years. Large games take 4-5 years. Believe it or not, lots of games fall in a nebulous space between AAA and "indie", whatever that means. The Old Republic took over 6 years. Yeah, you started hearing about it 1 year before it released. It started production five years before that. For five years hundreds of people toiled on it 12 hours a day and you had no idea! Now you know! Isn't knowing about production right from the start wonderful? No, it's not. It's annoying. It takes FOREVER. That's why you usually don't hear anything until it's almost ready to ship.

Delays, content cuts, pushed back dates, plans to make revenue sooner- this is how games are developed. Bioshock Infinite, the biggest game of 2013, got delayed for half a year, AFTER pre-orders were sold. Journey took 3 years to make a 3 hour game and had to go back for more funding from Sony TWICE. That's how game development goes. They didn't know they'd need to do it. Humans are not good at estimating creative endeavors, no matter how "professional" they are.

We released a truly free demo hoping to make some extra cash for development, and got brutalized for it. But without that income and development time our single-player game wouldn't be as good. Some people will never understand this.

I've worked in games for about a decade. Some companies I worked for had their stuff together better than others. Some were a huge, hundred-million dollar, extremely delayed nightmares. Every company had delays and went over-budget. You know what a release date is? A guess. We're just guessing.

Essentially, I hope people don't freak out too much about what's happening with Kickstarter right now. It's not deceitful or underhanded. It's not a conspiracy. It's normal stuff, whether you like it or not. If Broken Age wasn't a Kickstarter game the first time you would have heard about it would be a couple months from ship, and that it was a two-part adventure game. And you would have been fine with that.

Our game is coming along better than I could have imagined, even if delayed. BECAUSE it's delayed. I'm super happy with it. Other companies have way bigger problems, but that's game development. NOW YOU KNOW. I sincerely hope everything works out the best for them, and you should too. At the end of the day, they're nice guys trying to make good entertainment for you. I, personally, will cut them all the slack in the world.

So there you have it. The games industry! The aristocrats! Maybe it'll get better someday? For now, let's enjoy our time together! (I love you).

-Alex

Old Republic cost well over 300M. Maybe one day ill be precise.

It did NOT need to cost that much.

Lots of the problems in the industry are the net result of the inmates running the asylum. This applies to a good many indie studios also.

Anybody that gave money to doublefine (and really any of these guys) to get a specific product out on schedule and on budget is a fucking moron. But specifically, I gave money to doublefine, and for a specific reason. Not so they would stay under budget, so they would hit whatever targets, etc. I'm happy they overshot, overthought, and blew their budget. That's what people that make creative things do. You can't put anything that is actually interesting in a financial or temporal box. Anything that is interesting artistically/creatively is inherently unpredictable and grows on its own terms.

Throwing your hands up in the air and saying "it's game development" is such a cop out.

A game that is supposed to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and is supposed to come out in 6 months being delayed for 2 years, granted millions of extra dollars then still running can not be dismissed as simply "game development."

I am currently funding a game out of pocket. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to go "oops, this is going to cost ten times as much as I thought!" I imagine it's a lot easier to do that when you are spending other people's money.

But there was no game. When you say 'A game that is supposed to cost...', you're talking about nothing in this case. If DF squeaked by with 400k on their kickstarter they would have made an incredibly simple retro point and click in flash with some witty dialogue. But there was no game. There was no design document. There was nothing that was supposed to cost anything. DF specifically had an insanely vague pitch. Old school adventure game...that's it.

Once 3 million was invested, the stakes were raised, and they had to make something fucking good. Grim Fandango good. That is a fundamentally different thing than a cheap short flash game. I'm sure, if DF wanted, they could give you that cheap short flash game with their 3 million dollars. Would you be happy with that? Of course, going far past the kickstarter funded budget is a different story, but at the same time, I have to reiterate that anyone who gave schafer money to get a game out on schedule and on budget is a moron.

Lol at "that's how games work" excuse for poorly managed production. It is a massive cop out from the fact that these people are not professional and have the wrong people in charge.

Yes, even in well run companies it can occur from time to time. But if as an industry you're failing as a matter of course then you are doing something wrong.

If you don't know what the fuck you're doing the professional thing to do is say "holy shit, you all have given us more money than we thought. Fucked if I know what we will do with it yet. We might add to our original plans but I'll have to get back to you on that."

FTL and Star Command delivered a product (much smaller in scale, but still) relatively on time and within spec with the money they were given and that's with particularly Star Command getting less than they needed to actually finish the game due to failed payments costing them a significant percentage of the KS cash.

Quote from: Margalis on July 04, 2013, 11:52:15 PM

I imagine it's a lot easier to do that when you are spending other people's money.

This is where game development REALLY fucks it up. So many of the stories I hear about game development is people spending other people's money badly. Gearbox outsourcing Aliens: Colonial Marines. The Deus Ex: HR guys outsourcing the boss fights. Probably the entirety of the dot.com crash was about these companies spending OTHER people's money badly because fuck it, it's not their money. The fact that anyone gave Romero money after Daikatana is insane. That anyone would spend north of $300 million on The Old Republic is ludicrous.

Kickstarter takes the other people's money problem and makes it lots of other people's money instead of a few investors. At least it gives a modicum of transparency during the process so the gamer won't get to the end and go "Why does this suck so hard?"

Quote from: Fabricated on July 05, 2013, 04:00:22 AM

I wouldn't call Star Command within time and spec given we're still waiting on Kickstarter rewards.

I wouldn't lump FTL in there either, since it was already mostly done by the time the kickstarter was going on.

Quote

I hope people don't freak out too much

AHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahahhaa.....

Yeah, good luck with that. We live in the Drama Age.

Quote from: trias_e on July 05, 2013, 12:03:22 AM

What the hell?

The fact they got a shit ton of money should have never changed their goals of what they wanted to achieve. The fact that they went "hey we got 3 million instead of $400k, lets up the ante but 500 times" is no excuse.

The stakes were only raised because they themselves raised it, not the kickstarters. They only asked for a certain amount of money, the fact that people were excited and paid them more does not excuse them for trying to go way beyond their original intentions. It has nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with bad business management (and no, creativity is no excuse because you still need to manage a business to make your creative vision a reality).

They got way more money than they expected. Great for them. They still should have budgeted accordingly. It's not like money they expected didn't show up or someone backed out. They just can't manage for shit.

This whole thing isn't making a good case for removing the publisher from the equation.

Quote from: trias_e on July 04, 2013, 11:47:56 PM

And even if you thought differently - that maybe you wanted them to release their game vaguely close to schedule, or stay on budget - it doesn't matter, because they already have your money.

I find Kickstarter for video games to be an interesting way of demonstrating why publishers end up being EEEE-villlll after funding games for any length of time. The "I'm an artist, you can't put a time or budget on art, where's my next million dollars?" contributes a lot that process, I'm guessing.

Speaking of videogame companies being douchey...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1700755582/myth-0/posts/527334

It's normal with trademarks to make the claims as wide as possible, and you have to enforce them or you lose them. Still a douche move, they could have licensed for a nominal fee and still protected the trademarks.

--Dave

Lol. Rights to flames on letters an numbers.

You have got to be kidding.

Don't forget, Apple trademarked rounded corners.

I sure some of you donaters might have some kinda semi-plausible reason, but I don't know how anyone in here can say what Doublefine did during this whole KS thing was even remotely ethical. They essentially raped and pillaged an independent startup funding system with little more than a few kiddie graphics and the hope of making a game (with no idea wtf the game will even be); to essentially just make their balance sheet work for another year. Fuck those guys; seriously, as well as every other big(ger) studio that runs the same business model.

And before you harp on the fact "they created a lot of KS hype;" there were a lot of great, truly usable, projects back then that were already doing that. All Doublefine did was prove how retarded gamedevs could be when given the keys to KS.