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The Dangers of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal
jfruh writes "In March of 2012 legendary game designers Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert ran a Kickstarter to design a new adventure game, asked for $400,000, and came away with more than $3.3 million. Their promised delivery date was October 2012. Now it's July 2013, and the project still needs cash, which they plan to raise by selling an 'early release' version on Steam in January 2014. One possible lesson: radically overshooting your crowdfunding goal can cause you to wildly expand your ambitions, leading to a project that can't be tamed."
Kinda.
Kickstarter is a lesson to investors and publishers etc. that there is money available for things they didn't think there was a market for. If no one funded star citizen or project eternity or the like then we would go another 10 years without good space combat games and isometric RPG's. As it is we'll probably see a lot, some of which will suck (and some of which will be the kickstarted projects unfortunately), but the 'product' you're buying on kickstarter is really paying to create a genre or a product family or the like. Sure, you might get star citizen or some adventure game that *might* be good. But expectations are high on those. I'll be happy if funding star citizen means one of the big guys picks up on 'space sims can make money again? Hurray!' XWing vs Tie Fighter 2015' or whatever.
I always enjoyed games that had a good core and then released expansion packs later that actually expanded on the game. It was almost like getting two great games. Total Annihilation was good, Core Contingency made it better. Diablo II was good. Lord of Destruction made it better (although in this case, the expansion was essential to actually finishing the storyline). StarCraft was good, Brood War made it better. It seems expansions that really expanded the game died out around ten years ago. Since then, expansions are more like content packs - they tend to just add more of the same.