Kickstarter - The Thread.

[Jherad]

To be fair on the logo thing, it was fairly similar to Mythic Entertainment's logo. As Dave says, they probably had to enforce or risk losing their copyright.

[schild]

Of course, why any company would care about the Mythic logo at this point is beyond me. 

[Goldenmean]

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.

Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

There's a certain gap between what kickstarter advertises itself as being (a way to support projects on a personal level rather than letting some faceless venture capitalist/production house that probably doesn't share your tastes do it), and what many kickstarter users view it as (a way to preorder things). That's been acceptable until now because kickstarter hasn't been in the public eye long enough to have to rectify those two different perspectives often, but people need to start accepting that they may never see *anything* come out of the money they spend backing projects, or crowdfunding is going to fail.

More and more kickstarter projects are going to start crashing and burning because, honestly, that's just what projects sometimes do. Blizzard is one of the biggest names in game development and they've had several large projects fail (Warcraft: Adventures, Starcraft: Ghost, and for the moment, Project Titan), costing what I'm sure is millions of dollars.

In this particular case, yep, Double Fine screwed up. As a software engineer, I have some sympathy because I know I'm horrible at estimating how long a project is going to take me, which on some level translates directly to "I am horrible at estimating how much money my projects cost the company", and I am eternally grateful that it is not my job to give a damn about that. I'm sure most of the people over at Double-Fine feel much the same way, which is probably exactly what landed them in this mess.

Hopefully the take away here is that projects need to be much more transparent about putting up budgets for projects and doing their best to stick to them. As projects take off, people just start throwing incredibly unrealistic stretch goals around like candy with absolutely no real idea of what it's going to mean development time wise, or what it's going to mean for the cost of the project as a whole (See the Ogre boardgame KS which funded itself 4618% and is going to end up costing the company money). Scope creep is practically built into the "stretch goal" concept that the kickstarter community has evolved around, and it's going to continue biting people more and more.

And while I'm blathering anyway, I'll toss in an obligatory "Fuck EA" to the other conversational thread that's going on.

[Ingmar]

Lol. Rights to flames on letters an numbers.

You have got to be kidding.

Well, I'd like to see the actual proof that they think they have that. We're only seeing the guy who received the letter's side of things, and given the Myth logo compared to the Mythic logo I think EA's claim may be a lot more specific/narrow than "omg they think they have the rights to flames on anything."

[Ginaz]

Another game Kickstarter.  Frontiers is an rpg that looks a lot like the Elder Scrolls series.  Unless it brings something new that those games didn't have, I just don't see the appeal for Frontiers.  Anyway, its already met its goal with 10 days to go.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/railboy/frontiers-explore-discover-survive?ref=live

[Paelos]

Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

In the beginning of KS, I would agree. As it develops into it's established phase, and I think it has with over half a billion in funded projects, I think greed and malice does replace incompetence in this arena. Especially when the incentive to fund these projects with no guarntees has netted KS itself almost $30M in it's own right.

[shiznitz]

Kickstarter will be filled with broken promises. How could it not?  Think about it from the business guy;s point of view:

1) start a company with some of your own money
2) raise KS funds but keep all the equity
3) pay yourself from KS funds for a year or so
4) maybe your product works and you get all the upside because you have the equity or it fails and you got paid for a year

There is no downside at all.  KS rewards those who can hype well.  There are a lot more hypesters than those who can actually deliver something.

[Fabricated]

Hey, who wants to trust the security of their worldly possessions to Bluetooth 4.0 enabled doodads made from a kickstarter?

http://www.thetileapp.com/

https://lockitron.com/preorder

These seem like a really bad idea.

[lamaros]

To be fair to KS projects. Most businesses fail, whatever the funding...

[Margalis]

To be fair to most businesses, failing is generally something you want to avoid rather being a way to pocket money.

Running a successful KS campaign then failing to deliver something reasonable (or at all) is itself a "business" of sorts. There's very little incentive to do something with the money you've collected. If anything there's an incentive to do nothing. Everyone can collect a salary for a while then shrug and claim they gave it the old college try.

[lamaros]

True.

[Samwise]

To be fair to most businesses, failing is generally something you want to avoid rather being a way to pocket money.

[Baldrake]

http://www.thetileapp.com/

OMG the Tile is something I would so love to get my wife.

[Fabricated]

The Police Quest guy wants to make a new first-person Police Quest.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/precinctgame/precinct

If you didn't play the original it was a Sierra point-n-clicker where instead of fucking you over by having items you had to pick up at the beginning of the game and keep for hours, it forced you to follow proper police procedure to the letter or (usually) die.

Was kinda cool in the day; like having to be careful where you pulled someone over, had to approach the car right, had to follow legal procedure to get permission to search it, etc. otherwise it came back to bite you on the ass. Like, if you forgot to search a perp after arresting them they could pull a knife/gun and kill you and so on.

$10,000 in the first handful of hours or so. Being as bleeding heart liberal/fuck the cops as I am it sorta feels gross thinking about playing a modern cop but my nostalgia for the games over comes that. Hope it makes it.

[Ingmar]

It did do the fuck you over hours later thing, though - if you didn't calibrate your gun at the range at the beginning you would fail at stuff much, much later on in the game.

[Fabricated]

Well that's more police procedure which the game rather ham-handedly beats you over the head with, rather than "Oh whoops I didn't pick up that innocuous pixel on the third screen and now I'm dead!" stuff.

[Ingmar]

Sort of, although the delay between not calibrating your gun and when you actually have to use it is so long that it might as well be the same.

[schild]

If you haven't seen it, The Origin of Species book is awesome and ends in 48 hours. I'd like, but, nah.

[UnSub]

If you didn't play the original it was a Sierra point-n-clicker where instead of fucking you over by having items you had to pick up at the beginning of the game and keep for hours, it forced you to follow proper police procedure to the letter or (usually) die.

Heh, my friend and I got stuck on a bit in an apartment building until someone told us we couldn't just kick the door down - we had to phone for back-up (I think).

It was a mature series, but like a lot of Sierra output it has been mostly forgotten, or at least supplanted by LucasArts adventures.

[Ingmar]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1517270521/motorgun-return-of-the-auto-duel

Probably appealing to some here. Haven't seen a Car Wars type game in a while.

[Ragnoros]

Ubuntu wants $32 Million to launch a prototype smartphone. Get yours now for just $830 bucks.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge

[Teleku]

Yeah....... good luck with that.

[schild]

I never give money to Indiegogo campaigns. Ever.

[Quinton]

1. Pick a price -- $830 sounds good
2. Render a 3D model
3. Promise to use "the fastest CPU!" (seriously?)
4. Attempt to raise $32M
5. Profit?

I mean, hell, the Ouya people at least had an NVIDIA reference platform to build on and were aiming for a very non-challenging form-factor (little plastic box with power brick).

These guys haven't even picked a chipset yet and they want $32M up front.  Hilarious.

You know it'll be great though, because it'll build on Ubuntu's enormous success in Desktop Linux!

[Sky]

I never give money to Indiegogo campaigns. Ever.

The IGG fixed campaigns are ok, but the flexible funding campaigns are   The fixed funding projects are basically EuroKS, since KS is kind of dicky to non-US companies. By kind of, I mean I think they're secretly funding a wall.

I only backed Starforge on IGG (awesome track record), but there have been a couple I wish I'd backed (like Werner Klocke's project).

edit: 3.5M already on that campaign...what is it about linux nerds?

[JWIV]

Terrible video, but I like the idea of a cheap arduino board a lot.  Enough to get over my usual reluctance of indiegogo

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/9-arduino-compatible-starter-kit-anyone-can-learn-electronics

[Mrbloodworth]

Eterium Definitely Deserves a look. It has a demo too.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1989266212/eterium-a-space-combat-sim-for-windows-pc

[Sky]

For your reading pleasure.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1820893788/katalyka/posts

[schild]

Crazy people that aren't serial killers aren't actually interesting. That girl is basically Tumblr incarnate.

[schild]

I never give money to Indiegogo campaigns. Ever.

The IGG fixed campaigns are ok, but the flexible funding campaigns are  The fixed funding projects are basically EuroKS, since KS is kind of dicky to non-US companies.
edit: 3.5M already on that campaign...what is it about linux nerds?

I don't know, but you could probably get in touch with one via your decentralized Beard2Beard network.

[Fabricated]

Here's pretty much the kind of thing Paelos was talking about.

That is not an invitation to gloat, Paelos. :P

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forkingpath/the-doom-that-came-to-atlantic-city/posts/548030

lol

[Fabricated]

Also, here's another kickstarter that will likely make people mad

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spikelee/the-newest-hottest-spike-lee-joint

seriously

[Paelos]

Here's pretty much the kind of thing Paelos was talking about.

That is not an invitation to gloat, Paelos. :P

I try to avoid gloating about failure. It's not hard to predict. 

In all seriousness I am interested to see how the legal sides of these issues play out and what role KS will be forced to eat.

[schild]

None. Nothing will come of any of these things.

[Paelos]

These incidents specifically, likely nothing. A trend of these over the next few years? How many frauds does it take for a smart lawyer to examine the system for a class-action?