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Kickstarter's Problem: You Have To Make the Game Before You Ask For Money
An anonymous reader writes with this piece about Digital Knights, the studio behind the Kickstarter campaign project Sienna Storm, which was cancelled this week after the team raised only 10% of their $180,000 target, despite a compelling concept (a card based espionage game) and a reputable team including the writer of the original Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti.
The team is now seeking alternative funding before reaching out to publishers, but in an interview given this week, Knights CEO Sergei Filipov highlights what he sees as a recent and growing problem with crowdfunding games: an expectation to see a working prototype. "It seems at least 50 or 60 percent of the game needs to be completed before one launches a campaign on Kickstarter," he says. It's a chicken and egg cycle some indie developers will struggle to break out of, and shows just how far we've come since Tim Schafer's Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter burst the doors open two years ago.
You get nothing, and are owed nothing, from the people you give money to.
That seems like a bummer. I guess to many people feel they are getting ripped off to much to be willing to take a chance.
This requires would-be developers to have significant skin already in the game (pardon the pun) in terms of time and resources invested. Better than "I have an idea, now give me money and I'll eventually build it for ya." Or all those similar-talking losers on Shark Tank and Dragons Den who think and idea with nothing else is worth big bucks.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You *should* have a working prototype before you expect to get money.
Yes, it's difficult to build a prototype when you don't have funds. Welcome to the Real World, asshole. It's not easy to produce/market a new product. Kickstarter has made it *easier*, but it's not a magic bullet. It briefly *was* a magic bullet before people got smart and realized that giving money away for something that has almost no chance of ever being a real product was silly.
Perhaps people are wise to the Kickstarter business model of "heads we win and take all the profit when we sell out, tails you lose and cover our losses if it flops" and are unwilling to provide handouts for these people to use to run off and make their (in some cases, additional) fortune.
With Double Fine, there's a lot of questions about how the money was spent - many of which have gone unanswered. For instance, Tim Schaefer initially said he would need $400,000 to make a full game. Granted, he arrived at that number using numbers from games he made in the early 90s, but then it spiralled out of control into a $3.3 million project. The numbers he HAS released show that he spent almost the entire initial amount - $400,000 - on "backer rewards".
The $3.3 million barely covered the first half of the game, and that was on top of another few million in crowdfunding that Schaefer did shortly before release date. They still don't have a released date set for the second half, other than "We're working on it and it might be out by the end of the year."
I'm always amused when wanna-be novelists want people to give them $50,000 to write a novel in a year and discover that no one will give them money. The novel must be written first. Kickstarter is useful for getting ~$3,000 to pay for editing and publishing the novel, especially if the writer already have an established fan base.
I guess many people don't recognise anyone's name except for a couple of really high-profile guys like Braben, Molineux or Carmack.
http://rtf.utexas.edu/faculty/...
He's not a complete duffer though, seems he has done stuff. That seems fair enough to me, even though I would like to see credit given for the rest of the team behind those games.
If you aren't a known developer, people want to see some evidence that you have the ability to make good on your plans. Game development isn't simple, and many people are not prepared for what they are going to have to do to bring a successful game to market.
So Doublefine or inXile can get a good bit of funding with nothing but a design doc for a game because people have faith they'll be able to deliver since they are experienced game devs. New crews are going to have to show something to get people to trust them.
Particularly in light of past KS failures in that regard. I've backed a number of games on KS and two of them I knew were fairly high risk: They were being done by an individual who hadn't done a game before, and there wasn't any sort of demo up front, just some basic concepts. I decided to take a risk on it, but fully understood that failure was likely.
Sure enough, both are floundering/failing. One hasn't had any updates in months, the other does update periodically but it is still extremely rudimentary, despite being way past the planned launch date, and it is pretty clear the dev just doesn't have a good idea how to proceed from here.
On the flip side, the games by established studios have either delivered or are well on track (Shadowrun Returns was brilliant, Wasteland 2 ships next Friday, Pillars of Eternity is in beta, etc). Likewise the indy titles that had a demo and were a good bit along with development have delivered, like FTL.
So no surprise many people aren't willing to take the risk. They want a better chance of return so they stick with established devs or with things that have some proof.
Kickstarter barely cares what you try to fund anymore, and the other sites are even worse. It doesn't matter if your project clearly violates copyright laws -- or even the laws of physics -- you can post any project you want. This makes the entire crowdfunding ecosystem look incredibly shady.
That said, this has led to some pretty funny stuff over at Kickfailure.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous did fine on KickStarter back when they were still using it. Eventually both stopped using KickStarter and started using their own methods.
Well kickstarter campaigns are limited length, so it's natural that after a successful campaign a group would switch to their own methods of taking preorders.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
As evidenced by this.
most kickstarters that I've seen get big money, like the iPod dock & blender/boombox/coolerwere recursive projects...the 'thank you' gift is the product that the company you're supporting is trying to make
it's silly...but i'm glad kickstarter and the like exist...they should just adapt their message & rules just a bit to make this weird moebius strip of commerce and charity unnecessary
as far as gaming, if people want to donate money to an idea, screenshot, and prayer then I think they should be able to...
fyi, that ipod dock kickstarter i linked to above is an insane roller coaster & exhibit A of how kickstarter can be good and bad...the guy ended up barely breaking even after a new ipod design came out right during his production and he had to do several recalls...it was a disaster...
IMHO the Elevation Dock is an example of...something...i'm not hating but it's obvious most of these kickstarter millionaires have no clue what they are doing & spend more time on pictures and the video than product design at times...but that's my jealousy. If people want to throw money away for questionable 'innovations' then that's their choice...the system exists, not all kickstarter products will be crap
Thank you Dave Raggett
There is nothing that is actually free. Yeah, a lot of people are going to have to show how serious they are by investing their own time and money into it first.
You can't get it risk free by doing kick starter and expect everyone else will absorb the risk.
I think the idea for kick starter is that you come up with something fantastic, you then start working on it.
You got this cool prototype that has a lot of potential, but you want to make it soar. To do that, you'll need funding for wages, to pay for your
expenses while you devote time to it, for licenses, for materials if it's not digital, for equipment to make it. Then you hit up kick starters.
If your ideas were fantastic enough to have absolutely nothing but an idea written on paper that will get you funding, you'd hit up a developer / corporation
who is willing to fund you.
Also, maybe a lot of people didn't think the concept was as good as you thought it was, and that people wanted to take that chance on it.