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'Limit Theory' Game Cancelled Six Years After Its Kickstarter Raised $187K (rockpapershotgun.com)
AmiMoJo quotes Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Sandbox space sim Limit Theory has been cancelled, six years after a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, because main developer Josh Parnell is simply exhausted from working on it for so long. He's spent, he says: emotionally, mentally, physically, and financially. "Not in my darkest nightmares did I expect this day to ever come, but circumstances have reached a point that even my endless optimism can no longer rectify," Parnell said on Friday. He plans to release the source code for folks to poke around but makes clear "it's not a working game."
Though Limit Theory blew past its $50,000 goal, drawing $187,865 in pledges (and remember Kickstarter takes a cut), development has gone on years longer than anticipated. Costs have burned through that initial cash and started eating into Parnell's personal savings but, more than that, he's just exhausted.
Though Limit Theory blew past its $50,000 goal, drawing $187,865 in pledges (and remember Kickstarter takes a cut), development has gone on years longer than anticipated. Costs have burned through that initial cash and started eating into Parnell's personal savings but, more than that, he's just exhausted.
running off with the money. The number of times this has happened on Kickstarter is ridiculous, and overwhelmingly it's carried out by Americans with grand ideas and pretentious pitches.
Serious question, why is it ALWAYS the Americans who steal and pull stunts like these? It's getting mighty difficult to trust you, and any time you deal with Americans you have to use extra caution.
So very tired.
Kickstarter is a 50:50 thing. As you also only pay something like 50% and as the games funded that way would never see the light of day otherwise, failed projects are not much of a problem, as long as about half succeed.
There is still a lot of people for whom this pretty simple math and economics is too complicated to understand and they will cry "fraud" and complain loudly, when nothing like that is the case.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Take the money and run!
He also said, Somebody get me a cheeseburger!
Though I am sad that he didn't finish the game, I rather feel more sorry for Josh Parnell than for me or my money.
He gave everything he got and it was not enough. Things like this happen. As far as I can see it, he did not spend money for things outside the project. Rather the contrary: my impression is that he poured is own resources and health into it beyond any reasonable expectation.
Other projects (e.g. Clang from Neal Stephenson) spent less effort for more money and tried to sell the sorry result (the game was less finished than Limit Theory by several orders of magnitude) as success.
As a result I am neither angry nor mad and wish Josh Parnell all the best.
I was a backer on the game, from me perspective, it was small money on a long shot cool idea. The guy didn't steal the money and run, he spent 6+ years of his life and got burned out. He's open-sourcing the project to see if the community will help continue it on, so at worst I just help bootstrap an open source game engine. It was a couple bucks, big deal. This isn't like these scam projects where the people disappear a few months after the project closes - this guy posted regular updates with screenshots and progress, etc.
Years later, this Dorkly video continues to get it right.
Another AC diversion, eh? Let me make some attempt to intrude in a more constructive direction. Or has "constructive" become a dirty word on today's Slashdot? (Only your AC troll knows for sure?)
Project management is hard, but Kickstarter doesn't care. They just take their cut without regard to results. From the Kickstarter perspective it's great if the project blows past its goal.
In terms of a constructive solution, I wish there were a crowdfunding website that EARNED its cut by providing project management support. Please let me know if such exists, but I've visited LOTS of them and haven't detected such an approach.
Let me try to make that more concrete: The imaginary website would vet the proposals before seeking funding. The proposals would have to be complete in terms of schedule, budget, resources (including people), such oft-forgotten factors as adequate testing, and success criteria. I actually think the success criteria are the most important part of project management. In exchange for doing that work, the website would EARN a percentage for providing the project management support, which should include evaluating the finished projects against their success criteria and reporting the results to all of the donors and to the public.
This approach would actually relate to MEPR, in that proposals involving people who have earned high reputations should be more attractive for funding. However I've already spent too much time on this topic for now, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I've been at my job for close to 10 years. I'm so burned out.
Millions in crowdfunding and years later yet still no release :)
This idiot never had a 'game loop'- the conceptual GAMEPLAY mechanism that defines how a game will actually play. Anyone can bang out a 3d spaceship demo and fool cretins who do not know how games are actually designed. I've seen it happen many times in this industry.
When Parnell had to produce a GAME, he found he didn't have the first clue how to do such. Worse, a space game either requires a massive experienced team OR a small group of people highly experienced in tabletop wargaming (see Stardock's strayegic output).
But why is this COMMONPLACE failure getting so much coverage? STAR CITIZEN. Who cares if one guy bites off more than he could ever chew, and naive no-nothings back him? It's an ancient story. But Star Citizen is a careful LONG CON that has raised a good chunk of ONE BILLION dollars and will never and can never deliver a playable game.
Parnell's failure is being used to set up the excuse for the collapse of Star Citizen. As I've said, these investment cons rely on investors having the BETA psychology meaning they fall for every sob story under the sun. Parnell raised far too much money and lived the good life off that money for far too long for me to have a shred of sympathy for him. But the scumbags behind Star Citizen are of an exponentially greater despicable class.
The 'collapse' of Star Citizen was built into that con from day one, and the entire con is dependent on idiots giving the crooks behind it every benefit of the doubt. The crooks use mega salaries, expenses and 'loans' to bleed the funding pool dry. Those in law enforcement despair for they know the form of the con, but investor 'enthusiasm' makes action against the conmen very hard indeed.
It has delivered what it promised: A life lived in delusion, destined to destruction.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
ipfs.io
No Man's Space came out meanwhile anyway (and failed). Maybe something where your action caused the world/planets/section of the universe to be regenerated based on what you did. Maybe you find a box on the planet and you regenerate it using the code you type on the console in JavaScript. No need to be slave to the original idea to the letter, it's enough to use it as a guidance but adapt as the world changes, as you change. I feel sorry for him too though.
Crowdfunding can be like throwing darts at a board blind after being turned around in circles dozens of times and hoping you score. Having funded design and development for a then crowdfunded device I can say that anybody blindly participating in such projects expecting results on time and as advertised deserve nothing. Nobody owes you anything. These projects are a labor of love to achieve something not otherwise feasible and maybe not even feasible at all. If there were loads of investors lined up to invest in such projects nobody would be crowdfunding them. I'm more irradiated at the idiots who fund fraudsters such as 'Purism' which claims to be focused on 'pure' 'free software' hardware efforts only to do the exact same thing that 'open source' projects do (but without the deception). But that company is worse and particularly the fraudster behind it in taking advantage of people's desires and then giving them a shit sandwich. If you are going to claim to be working on 100% free hardware you can't then go and design in components like NVIDIA graphics chips or similar that are 100% proprietary knowing full well you can't get the code when your only ever going to sell a few hundred devices.
Well the only obstacle is people who think being creative is easy. That's why creative types don't ask for nor expect money because it's so easy.
If you read the original Kickstarter page he admits to having the desire to take on the seemingly impossible challenge singlehandedly.
Why did he not seek help in developing the game? Or funding from actual investors? Clearly there was interest in this game. It failed (so far) because of mismanagement and poor decisions.
Really sorry to hear how this ended, although I'm sure this isn't the end. Having a cool dream take off and snowball into a huge commitment sounds like a nightmare situation but this isn't the worst that could have happened.
So would you prefer to donate your money to (1) a project that has several programmers who have succeeded in prior projects, (2) a project whose programmers have a consistent record of failure, or (3) a project where the programmers have no reputation at all?
I say (2), subject to the condition that they can convince me that they have learned important lessons from their mistakes. Just too unlikely that projects in the (1) group would need or seek funding from any crowdfunding website. Nor do I like the gamble of (3).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Fuck you - no refunds!
All the shit I produced from eating burritos will be open sourced (flung at you)!
Nobody is willing to donate money blindly to any of my completely mediocre and utterly attainable business plans.
He was right and you cheapen yourself with excuses instead of just saying you were wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Rather than cancelling the project entirely, release it on an open-source platform like github and allow other programmers to work on it as well as giving access to the game to all of the backers funding it.
... redone the entire engine?
He definitely bit off more than he could chew. For a Kickstarter you also should have some sort of team and not be just a one man show. Also: Waaaaaay underfunded.
It's a really cool looking game, I hope it gains critical mass as FOSS.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Kickstarter is essentially a way to get funding without having to give away anything much to the funder.
He may have bits of the space code finished that would be useful. Even if it was just procedural generation of planets or networks of starsystems, that could be quite useful in and of itself for other games, given a sufficiently liberal license (even LGPLv2/v3 would be good for all but a few projects, notably anything produced for consoles.) BSD 3-4 clause or MIT and it would be useful for everything.
Z^-1
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
He ... My god... what an idiot.
Where did all the money go?
One more Linux game coming up!
Looking forward to not playing this one either...