City of Titans - spiritual successor to CoH - Kickstarter

[pants]

Welp, they've hit their target.  $350K right now, with 27 days still to go...

[tazelbain]

Doesn't matter because they would have to pull in more than top 5 kickstaters together to get out of fantasyland.

[Malakili]

Doesn't matter because they would have to pull in more than top 5 kickstaters together to get out of fantasyland.

Matters because they get paid now.

[tazelbain]

Of course that's the point, they just couldn't put $1 because that's be too obvious. But they always going to make their 380k or whatever. This is the geek equivalent of playing the lottery.

[Rendakor]

Given what they've said on the KS page, I don't think there's any amount of money that will make this more than vapourware; I'll happily give them money if I'm wrong and they release a decent game.

[UnSub]

Also looking at the way the budget is structured, assuming that they are paying up things like the Unreal Engine for 2 years, the money will run out just as beta is meant to launch. So we can look forward to either more Star Citizen-like pre-game virtual item sales or another Kickstarter in order to get the title over whatever line it reaches by the end of 2015.

I appear to be wrong about this - CoT looks to be going with the $99 user license option, which sees Unreal take 25% of their revenue past the first $50K. Which means as the Kickstarter earns more money, a quarter of it will go straight to Unreal. A rough calculation last night saw the project pay Unreal $82.5K (and this figure will go up as the Kickstarter goes up).

Which may seem a great idea now, but when every future bit of revenue also sees Unreal take 25% off the top it will make any kind of additional revenue raising more difficult.

[Ingmar]

Wait... that applies to revenue that isn't directly from the game?

[MediumHigh]

Yeah I'm pretty sure it only applies to "game" revenue, you know release, steam sells etc etc. Otherwise fuck unreal and glad I avoided it like the plague when I was in school.

[Nevermore]

I would be really surprised if Kickstarter investment money counted as 'revenue'.

[Ragnoros]

Wait... that applies to revenue that isn't directly from the game?

Yeah I'm pretty sure it only applies to "game" revenue, you know release, steam sells etc etc. Otherwise fuck unreal and glad I avoided it like the plague when I was in school.

I would be really surprised if Kickstarter investment money counted as 'revenue'.

And yet...

Since we are developing the game using the Unreal Engine, and the Kickstarter counts as revenue, we owe Epic Games, the company which makes the Unreal Engine royalties. That comes to about $70,000, as well.

[Ingmar]

Jesus, what a scam.

[Paelos]

 

Can't wait to see how it turns out.

[Venkman]

If this project didn't have CoH attached to it so prominently, it would have been lucky to make $3200, let alone $320K.

What do you mean "attached"? Aside from SEO value I mean?

[Threash]

What was so bad about champions online anyways?

[UnSub]

I would be really surprised if Kickstarter investment money counted as 'revenue'.

From the UDK FAQ page:

Q: Can Kickstarter or other crowd funding be used to fund games made with UDK? Is a license required?

A: Yes, crowd funding is perfectly acceptable with UDK games; however, a $99 commercial UDK license is required and all revenue earned through the crowd funding is subject to the standard UDK royalty.

I believe that the Phoenix Project team has registered themselves as a company somewhere, so they should be looking at paying for Unreal seats outright (although this has its own issues).

If this project didn't have CoH attached to it so prominently, it would have been lucky to make $3200, let alone $320K.

What do you mean "attached"? Aside from SEO value I mean?

I mean that the very first sentence of the Kickstarter mentions being a "spiritual successor" to City of Heroes, a significant part of the pitch references the loss of CoH and the attempt to reverse that, it's called 'City of Titans' and every article about the project mentions CoH.

It's tapping into the player base who feels that CoH was unfairly shutdown and can live again through this project. If City of Titans had referenced DCUO and ChampO as well as inspirations, or just talked about building a superhero MMO, people wouldn't have been as motivated to back the project.

What was so bad about champions online anyways?

Haven't played it in a long time, but it just lacked a reason to keep logging in. I found my power combo was exactly the same in every battle and either I was powerful enough to destroy my targets, or I wasn't.

[ezrast]

What was so bad about champions online anyways?

It was formulaic quest grindy bullshit with nonsensical itemization and lolpvp. It was a theme park with only one ride, and the ride was really fucking poorly written.

[Typhon]

What was so bad about champions online anyways?

If you were looking for a month-ish amount of play time with a superhero beat-em-up it was fun.  If you were looking for a home to virtually live for a year it wasn't.  Part of that was simply because if you were playing this game, you had likely played CoX.  But part of it wasn't.  CoX's powersets had a richer interaction system, and line-of-sight mechanics in CoX allowed you to do clever positioning things during combat (neither hero's nor NPC could shoot around corners or through hills in CoX, this wasn't always true in CO).

Combat and controls were, as is to be expected, superior to CoX.  Lore, world and story were inferior to CoX (especially from a villains perspective).  Character customization was similar to CoX, but as a short-term player I'd say CoX was superior.  If you could stomach the monotony necessary to build up all the costume unlocks, probably CO was superior (still arguable though).

I liked it, got my money's worth.

[Malakili]

I got a good amount of fun out of Champions Online, but the amount of content on launch was really not sufficient.  It was, ostensibly, a quest centered game but you couldn't really quest all the way to max level.  On top of that, the quests were pretty damn repetitive and often had just AWFUL drop rates on the quest items.  There was usually one interesting line per area that ended in a pretty fun soloable dungeon.

I've played it on and off for a while since it went free to play and I think the "Alerts" they added are pretty fun.  They've added some neat stuff over the years like a variety of housing and some new areas, but the content never has been sufficient.  Millennium City, which should really be the focal point of the whole game also turned out to be a mediocre zone with a variety of mid-level quests.

[Signe]

Ah.  I only played in the beta just before the release and didn't like it at all, except the character creator which I loved.  I wasn't around when they started adding stuff.  By then, it was simply off my radar.

[KallDrexx]

I would be really surprised if Kickstarter investment money counted as 'revenue'.

Of course KS money counts towards UDK royalties.  With almost all game kickstarters when you "invest" you are essentially pre-paying for the game at a certain level.  Since the game comes with your investment it would be associated with the game if they didn't then Unreal would lose out on revenue from selling to those people who get the game due to their original money.

Also, KS isn't really investing as much as it is pre-paying.

[Venkman]

If this project didn't have CoH attached to it so prominently, it would have been lucky to make $3200, let alone $320K.

What do you mean "attached"? Aside from SEO value I mean?

I mean that the very first sentence of the Kickstarter mentions being a "spiritual successor" to City of Heroes, a significant part of the pitch references the loss of CoH and the attempt to reverse that, it's called 'City of Titans' and every article about the project mentions CoH.

It's tapping into the player base who feels that CoH was unfairly shutdown and can live again through this project. If City of Titans had referenced DCUO and ChampO as well as inspirations, or just talked about building a superhero MMO, people wouldn't have been as motivated to back the project.

Ah. Yes, that is all correct. I read "attached" as if they were claiming to have actual assets or Cryptic personnel. To me, what they have isn't attachment though, just association.

[UnSub]

I've seen people - not necessarily those involved in the Volunteer team, mainly because I'm not cross referencing 100+ names - take the fact that former CoH Lead Dev Matt Miller is backing the project as a sign that it has some kind of special blessing.

[Lantyssa]

Jesus, what a scam.

Nope, just morons running the show else they wouldn't have taken that option.

[UnSub]

This CoT push has thrown up some figures that at shutdown CoH/V had 40K VIP subscribers, 20K premium accounts (former subscribers who got some special account bonuses or paying F2P player) and 40K F2P players. This is based on comments made by Mercedes Lackey who has headed up the push to save CoH/V by appealing directly to Disney and Google and apparently was given some inside info to help that cause.

It's clearer to me why NCsoft pulled the plug; 40K active F2P players is awful. And going F2P appears to have split the active number of paying customers.

[Kageru]

F2P doesn't change the fact that the game was badly aged and took a lot of work to get into, plus there's lots of F2P competition. But after a long period of neglect the developers had been making some decent moves so it is the trends that would be most interesting.

Still probably not economical, but it's sort of cool seeing people being foolish fans of something.

[Numtini]

I don't know what whether they changed it, but when it went F2P it had a poison pill that kicked in at fairly low levels and required a sub.

[Ingmar]

Their F2P model was really awful iirc.

[Father mike]

The poison pill was that you couldn't use crafted enhancements or the auction house without buying a one-month liscense for each or having a sub.  Former subs could use the AH, I think.

[Lantyssa]

Yeah.  It was a terrible f2p system and I was a two or three year vet that made it mostly tolerable.  These are just the ones that got me, and I'm pretty easy going:

Had to buy access to slot crafted enhancements.

Had to buy access to the AH if not grandfathered.

Needed a subscriber to activate your Super Group base on a monthly basis.

[Numtini]

Had to buy access to slot crafted enhancements.

My memory is that at first you needed to have some kind of mini-subscription that cost like $5 a month to use them? It was something recurring though which to me personally is the poison pill on any sort of F2P. I'll throw a lot of money at cash shops, but not for time sensitive items.

[ezrast]

Free players got put into a time machine and forced to relive Issue 7.

[Lantyssa]

Maybe $2.50.  Whatever it was, it was stupid.

[Ingmar]

Oh right, it was the stupid enhancements that you couldn't use! That was a huge problem. (Was unlocking them per-characters as well?)

[UnSub]

All over, having raised $678k.

[Cadaverine]

Welp, I think I've found my new career path.