I backed it because I thought the courage to attempt a style of game that hasn't been seen outside Flash (non-existent budget, small/one-man team, indie, short, generally poor) gaming scene was worth getting behind.
You mean like Shadowgate, another Point 'n click adventure game on Kickstarter being made by professional developers, that is on track at a fraction of Schafer's budget? How about Hero-U, another p 'n click game that also doesn't require millions to get made?
Shadowgate: didn't hear about it, looking it up now
Hero-U: backed it.
And what we want is to not have 25% of a game. They found a happy medium whereby they put out what they can, garner more sales, and use those sales to fund further production. It's no different than expanded content DLC...that comes free at a later date.
It's not free though. You may not have paid extra but to reach the game that was promised on Kickstarter, someone else has to foot the bill for it, for it to become a reality. And it's not "fund further production." It's "finish the game we promised." This isn't additional funding, it's necessary funding.
"Borrowing money from the future" is what my backing kickstart is. I pay now, get something later. Except there's also 90,000 other people doing the same thing: someone else is paying and I'm getting the product.
"Doing pre-release sales" is the same thing. Someone else pays now, gets something later. Again, 90,000 other people are doing the same thing: they pay, I get stuff.
Kickstarter got the project off the ground and pushed initial funding.
Kickstarter did exactly what it was designed to do.
This is not a failure.
Really? I didn't think the point of Kickstarter was to back so people could have a chance to find find even more funding. I thought the point of Kickstarter was you back to get a product, and you get it, without needing even more 3rd party funding, paid alphas and more hoops.
And how has Doublefine failed that? They got an initial infusion of cash, I get stuff at "some point in the future," where has the design failed? Steam Early Access is
just an extension of the Slacker Backer system.
If a product that succeeded on Kickstarter can't succeed just on Kickstarter, I'd call that a failure. Maybe not of Kickstarter. But definitely of the people that put their project on there.
Then all Kickstarters are failures.
My project had to bring in money from the six of us making the project (I think in terms of us paying ourselves for our time and expenses has come out at net 0, if not negative. We had to hire a lawyer and an accounting firm in order to make sure we weren't going to shoot ourselves in the foot.
The lawyer? $250 flat. Not per hour. Flat. He was working practically pro-bono, based on how much time he actually spent and how much we paid him.
The accountaints?
Free. They actually, legitimately, charged us
nothing.
Kickstarter didn't do that. They did. They decided to be awesome and do work for us out of their own pocket.
But I guess that doesn't really matter to backers as long as the thing they paid for happens, at some point, by some means. Never mind the message this sends to developers, or the culture it's creating on Kickstarter. That it's ok to make a king's ransom and still ask for more money, since there's no one watching the hen house.
Does anyone remember Penny Arcade's Kickstarter? The one where they said up front "we're going to run this Kickstarter every year?" Because the entire "project" was "fund the site for 365 days" so they were going to come back and ask for more repeatedly?
Did we jump all over that in the same way we're jumping on Doublefine?
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Topic: When Kickstarter goes wrong? (Read 680055 times)