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The Dangers of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal

Posted by Unknown on from the feature-creep dept.

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."

10 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Ah... by dyingtolive · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Surely you mean "The Dangers of Overextending the Scope of Your Project Beyond What Resource Allocations Allows".

    I guess that's not scary enough though.

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    1. Re:Ah... by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think it was Nicholas Meyer (of Star Trek II fame) who said "art thrives on limitations" and time and again we have seen that, you get a big budget and you go overboard and end up with a mess. Maybe in the future others will learn and set some sort of upper limit on their kickstarter?

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    2. Re:Ah... by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Another possible lesson by Hentes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Only buy a finished product unless you have money to burn.

    1. Re:Another possible lesson by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  3. Bad Planning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    'It's a bad plan that can't be changed' – Publilius Syrus c.100 BC

    Release the core game as it was intended on time and add the extras (in game, ports to other platforms, whatever...) later.

    This needs to be planned for Kickstarters from, well, before the start. Because you might get more money than anticipated, but not more time.

  4. This is called feature creep; mission creep by cheesybagel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Which is why you should stick to well defined objectives. Do the planned release. If you got more money than you expected then you release an expansion pack later for free.

  5. Re:Hmmm by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The original project maybe not. The stretch goals probably.

    With stretch goals you either need more time or more staff than you had originally planned on. If your stretch goal is 10% more than your base game and involves some trivial art feature that's easy to just hire an artist or overtime and existing one for.

    When you get 8x as much money as you were planning on, you stick in goals that you don't think you'll meet, or don't have serious cost estimations for. And that's where you get into trouble. People aren't serious about getting down to work when they know there is way more money than you expected available to pay them, hiring on significantly more staff than you were expecting, with the required office space and infrastructure and training that goes with that takes time, a lot of it, and then with the way kickstarter funding is counted by tax agencies you may be screwed on any money you didn't spend that calendar year and be looking at a huge tax bill. Etc.

    Oh, and as with all creative enterprises, just because I made a great movie/game/story last time doesn't mean I will do so next time, or maybe my great idea will turn out to be... not so great on implementation and now I have to do something else. Changing gears costs money too.

  6. Pebble watch is another example by oneblokeinoz · · Score: 5, Informative

    For another example look at the Pebble watch.

    Originally wanted $100,000 in funding, wound up getting over $10 million. That changed the size of their problem from making 1000 watches, to making 100,000 watches. So now they had to scale their manufacturing by a factor of 100, which is a totally different set of problems to solve.

    There has been a lot of angst (some anger) at the delivery delays, most of the "investors" have been reasonably patient, some have been downright ignorant. One of the most popular forum topics is something like "I funded it on [date], why haven't I got my watch", where [date] was only a small number of days after the kickstarter campaign began, but in reality was when they were at over $5 million going up.

    Disclaimer: I'm still waiting (patiently) on my two watches. I should have just ordered black, or changed to black when they made the option available. sigh!

  7. Misunderstanding on the part of backers by Minupla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The issue comes from backers believing they're preordering a product.

    This is not what is going on here. What is going on is more akin to the Medieval practice of being a patron to an artist.

    We hand our collective money to an artist who says "I want to make something like this... And the more you provide me in funding the bigger and more grand a statue I can make."

    We as a group come together and pool our money and hand it to the artist saying "We like your vision. Here is a bucket of gold coins, go forth and create awesomeness".

    This makes more sense when you consider that the high end rewards are usually something like "A copy of the widget, plus lunch with the widget visionary"

    Noone pays 1000$ for a game. People pay 1000$ for artistic vision and being a part of seeing the vision realized.

    Min

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