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"Exploding Kittens" Blows Up Kickstarter Records
The Register reports that the crowdfunded Exploding Kittens card game from Oatmeal (and Tesla museum fund-raiser) Matthew Inman, along with X-box veterans Elan Lee and Shane Small, has become the highest-grossing game project yet on Kickstarter. After an intensive fundraising campaign, the trio collected $8.78m from 219,382 backers to launch the game. This breaks the record for the largest ever Kickstarter game project, previously held by hackable Android gaming console Ouya.
According to the blurb on Exploding Kittens' (now closed) Kickstarter page, players "take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game."
It is called Russian Roulette . ( i.e. exploding kitten brains ) It was a favourite pastime in USSR and had to be kick - started in a bar.
It's truly incredible what people will spend money on. This is neither the worst nor best example, but it definitely amazes me.
I backed this up for the simple reason that I like card games and I love The Oatmeal's illustrations. I also like cats. It is that simple.
And I also think that creativity is at a premium nowadays, and each manifestation of it should be embraced and supported as much as possible.
Even more incredible is how the summary is written to make it sound a lot worse than it is.
looking at the kickstarter page, the game reminds me a bit of aye evil overlord, passing the buck around, trying to get other people to explode. Sounds like fun. It's nothing like "take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game.". You can make anything sound bad by taking a single sentence out of context. There are cards to prevent exploding, to pass exploding cards to other players, etc...
Sounds like fun :).
I'm really starting to wonder why i'm still on this site. Even more than it used to be, it's just a stream of clickbait and articles containing half truths just to make it sound controversial...
Protip, the summary is an atrocious summation of the game, like always.
The game is FAR more than "just pulling cards until you explode".
Ah, a fellow rationalist. Wanna know a little secret? There's this whole big secret world out there not governed by strict and unbreakable laws like science. It's based on ephemeral qualities like popularity, beauty, fashion, trendiness, gossip, hearsay, social status, and celebrity. It leads to irrational things like printed cardboard skyrocketing in value because they include the magic word "Pokemon" (and actual laws being passed to prevent anyone other than the "owner" of that word from printing it on other cardboard), or shoes selling for $150 more because they're named after a famous basketball player, or a product selling out because a certain popular TV show host says she likes it, or a semi-popular cartoonist getting lots of people to pay in advance for a game they've never heard of before which doesn't sound all that fun to play. I hear this stuff can even influence whether or not you can land a job, or get a date, if you can believe that!
Weaponized Backhair
Looks like a potentially good/funny game. But $9 million in funding? Why? Print, advertise, profit.
As a rationalist of some experience myself, I can readily point out that the practical act of funding this game is not irrational at all. They are not buying or funding the game itself. These people see the creators, the art, and their reputation as having the ability to create entertainment experiences that they have enjoyed immensely in the past, and thus have a good chance at doing it again here.
To respond to the parent's statement:
Only a complete idiot would fund a game this bad.
That is correct. It is also wrong. Only a complete idiot would fund such a simple, easily replicated game. These people are not funding that game, they are funding the experience they expect to get from the people making the game which have quite a pedigree in creating experiences.
In short, just because something prima facie irrational does not mean that there are not other factors that make it rational.
So a still fictional game get's to have its own Wikipedia page but the Nim programming language, in development and publicly available for years, only got to have a page a few days ago and is still under threat of deletion from rabid mods. WP truly has a fucked up sense of priority.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
As an owner of two cats, I love the name. Besides the whole game is about preventing the explosion of a kitten on your watch.
That is a great response, I wanted to add one more point to your observations.
Although I did not fund this Kickstarter, I would have if I had found it in time. The reason I would fund it is as you say " funding the experience I expect to get from the people making the game which have quite a pedigree in creating experiences.".
But more than that, even if I don't enjoy this particular experience I wold not care because I also consider whatever money I would put in as funding past enjoyment that was free on my part.
I funded an Order Of the Stick Kickstarter for this exact reason. I would either get something great or at the very least deliver a reward to someone who made something I loved.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Kittens are much cuter than human babies ever will be.
No: Even better: It will actually deliver what was promised.
I read the internet for the articles.