Kickstarter Gaming - for $10.000,00 you get a "don't steal my money" emoji

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Kickstarter Gaming - for $10.000,00 you get a "don't steal my money" emoji

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Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Quarex posted:

Except hmm I am supposed to do a Wasteland Let's Play, aw dammit, whatever.

�and it must be a video LP complete with pc-speaker beep sounds. :allears:

# ¿ Apr 12, 2012 15:21

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 22:28

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Hmm� if remaking nostalgia classics is the current trend, I wonder how much longer I have to wait until someone remakes Radical Castle. I'd pledge a buck or five for that�

# ¿ Apr 16, 2012 21:10

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Quarex posted:

I was looking through a few dozen pages of finished Kickstarters the other day, and it really is kind of amazing how almost every non-funded Kickstarter ends at somewhere between 0 and ~40% of its total. There is definitely an economic study just begging to be done here about excitement/momentum/peer pressure; it would not surprise me at all if, ceteris paribus* [!], people are more likely to try to drum up additional support for a project that looks likely to succeed than for one that does not. You might think that just sounds obvious, but "things that sound obvious" are often great subjects for research!

*Latin for "pretentious academic rear end in a top hat"

I think the interesting piece would rather be on how additional support is being created for projects that are already fully funded, as those who are already invested and who have already been promised that the thing will happen now have an incentive to try to get more for their money by reaching whatever stretch goals the project has set up.

On the aforementioned list of things that sound obvious, this would be a third category in terms of the backer behaviour and the way the tail-end of a backing drive transpires.

# ¿ May 5, 2012 23:52

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

NINbuntu 64 posted:

I'm mixed on Carmageddon. On the one hand, it was a loving amazing game when I was younger. On the other hand, so was Duke Nukem 3D and we all saw how Forever turned out. I know Duke Nukem Forever had its own set of problems but I have to wonder if this will feel as anachronistic as it did.

The way I look at it, the fun part in GTA[huge number] is still to run over old ladies and bashing gangbangers over the head with a baseball bat. This holds true today as much as it did in the top-down 2D days. Carmageddon is a game with only that, so it should be in good shape.

But sure, DNF's problem was that it was trying to be modern and include all the things you're �supposed to have�, most of which were highly unsuited for a Duke game, while at the same time retaining some of the older things that are highly unsuited for a modern game. I'd imagine that Carmageddon could easily fall down on such a simple thing as the control scheme or overly repetitive graphics and sounds � things that were there originally, but no-one cared because they were kind of the norm for the day.

Tippis fucked around with this message at 20:00 on May 9, 2012

# ¿ May 9, 2012 19:56

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

NINbuntu 64 posted:

Except that's only a small part of the game. The GTA series is fun in part because of that, not exclusively. These things don't really exist in a vacuum.

Sure. It also becomes a question of what kind of game it's intended to be: a �quick bash� pick-up-and-play kind of thing, with more of an arcade sensibility, or something that's supposed to be a bit more engaging. The trick is finding the right �bite size� for the gameplay it offers and managing to offer enough variations on a theme.

For instance, the reason I feel GTA IV fell on its face was that, unless you only did some faffing about and free-roaming stuff, it was far too long-winded and repetitive. I know some railed against the tutorials going on for at least half the first island, but to me, that was the more entertaining part since at least each new mission wanted you to do something new.

Also, see my on-second-thought edit above.

# ¿ May 9, 2012 20:05

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Megazver posted:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1675907842/pathfinder-online-technology-demo

There are so many things that are wrong with this.

Oh hey! It's Ryan� yeah, that'll be a disaster :cawg:

# ¿ May 11, 2012 03:11

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Beef posted:

Another puzzling fact is that Ubisoft sold 300.000 boxed copies, but somehow didn't make a profit on the game they payed $250.000 for

It's no more puzzling than how many blockbuster hollywood movies apparently make very little profit (because if they did, all those pesky and pointless low-life screen writers would be able to cash in their points). Pah� as if they made any contribution.

:whip:

# ¿ May 22, 2012 10:24

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

fondue posted:

Holy poo poo, Traveller on Kickstarter! I own the issue of Dragon magazine where you could invent your own Traveller alien races. My brother and I used to play this all the time.

Note to self: if I find a project where I'm going to buy the final product regardless, don't watch the pitch video or judge the project on the basis of the reward tiers. :eng99:

�oh well, at least he designs good games.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2012 15:01

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

GrandpaPants posted:

Lilly Looking Through put up a modest Kickstarter, with only an $18,000 goal that is already a third of the way there as of this writing, undoubtedly because RPS gave it some coverage. I haven't played the demo yet, but that is some great animation in that video.

Going by the demo, it's definitely cute and very well-drawn, but it's also more of a pixel-hunter than an adventure/puzzle game.

I could definitely see it as something to put on a tablet and hand off to small kids, though.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2012 23:59

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Saoshyant posted:

Carmaggedon has 29 hours to go. They are probably not going to reach their last stretch goal, but they are safe.

It has picked up a bit in the last day or so, but it seems unlikely that they'll reach the $600k goal for Mac/Linux support.

On the other hand, there are some mumblings about PayPal (and similar) pledges, but I haven't been able/bothered to dig deeper into that. Does anyone know if they have a secondary collection going on as well like so many other projects?

# ¿ Jun 5, 2012 23:17

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Davincie posted:

Valve makes a poo poo load of money, Gabe owns all of it and constantly sponsors new things (buying the Portal and L4D teams) plus he lets his teams do whatever he wants with near infinite funding. If the guy wants to fund a sword fighting game, he can.

�which is why he's letting them build the engine and proof-of-concept the entire thing on someone else's budget and then buys out (and sells licenses for) the finished thing.

They make money because they acquire stuff that already has proven to work, rather than lose money on experimentation.

I'm sure Gabe himself will drop an accidental 10k just because Neal is a cool guy, but wasting company money when there's no need to? Nah.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2012 22:11

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Achmed Jones posted:

Yeah, agreed. For a sword game with a 1:1 control scheme to work, the controller has to be able to stop when it hits another sword or a person or whatever. And that's not really a thing that's possible.

Otherwise you're just doing the same old 'waggle horizontally to slash THIS WAY' 'waggle vertically to slash THAT WAY' that we've already seen in Wii games.

�also, with 1:1 controls, it kind of removes the whole �game� part, I feel. To do what they're describing, you have to already know how to sword-fight and this just does away with the gymnasium they normally train in. That will rather limit the appeal of the whole thing. The development would basically be a massive tutorial and some pretty spiffy AI that will beat you over the head until you've achieved sufficient levels of sword mastery.

It's a neat idea, but it seems to have rather narrow applicability. I suppose, building on what I said earlier about someone buying or licensing the engine, I could definitely see the whole thing feeding into a more classic fighting-style game, along the lines of Bushido Blade, but that would undo the core idea behind the project and just map stances and attacks to button combos.

I kind of get why he wants to do it � Hiro Protagonist needs to be made real

� and looking at my re-enactment buddies, they sure are willing to dump a whole lot of cash into gear, but still�

# ¿ Jun 9, 2012 23:40

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

NmareBfly posted:

Well, mouthbreathing 12 year olds continue to be upset about the Tropes v. Women kickstarter.

�thereby further showing the need for the project.

I wonder if they'll ever manage to realise that bit of irony and what any such realisations will do to them.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2012 19:38

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Overemotional Robot posted:

I'm expecting a lot of "well, isn't it a good thing that those people did that because..."

I suppose. Validating its own stupidity is really one of humanity's most highly evolved skills. :downsgun:

quote:

I don't think gamers want to confront their latent sexism and will sooner shoot themselves (here's hoping!) than reflect on their faults.

Here's to hoping.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2012 22:30

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Randallteal posted:

People need to move away from the Everquest model. You could build a Diablo-style game where dungeons and loot are generated from tilesets, or an Eve-style MMO where the players have more agency and the premade stuff matters less, for a lot cheaper than WoW or TOR.

�also, people need to move away from the WoW/TOR model, where you rely on a long-established IP to draw people in and then throw tons of money on it to retain them. Yes, an MMO can have high running costs, but they'll depend on how you choose to approach the whole content angle, and you don't need to have millions of subscribers to make it all work.

So many MMOs have failed in the last few years because they did exactly that: take an IP, wring it through GenericMMOTemplate 1.0�, assume that you have 5M+ subscribers, and scale all costs and investments to meet this assumption. Very few seem to stop and think that, just maybe, GenericMMOTemplate 1.0 went out of style 5 years ago (and/or is already covered in full by WoW) and thus won't generate those millions of subs, making the whole thing overpriced and doomed from the get-go.

The move to F2P models and user-generated content is the best they've come up with so far to work around those miscalculations, but I'm willing to bet that there are other methods of doing it and making a good living out of the whole thing.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2012 23:48

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

I slightly related news, some guy is failing spectacularly at collecting $40k for a Sierra documentary.

The sad thing is that I'd probably really like to see something like that � nerd history docus such as Get Lamp and BBS The Documentary are hugely fun � but wow, that sales pitch just� wasn't there. Maybe someone should poke Jason Scott and see if he could make another one about a non-text-based topic for once.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2012 00:54

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

NINbuntu 64 posted:

What pitch video? It's just a bunch of clips from Sierra games with next to no context or information about what the documentary even is. If he can't convey an idea in his pitch, I don't see why anyone would trust him to do so in a documentary.

Exactly. My threshold for throwing money at this kind of idea is very low, being both fond of documentaries and of the old Sierra, but with the amount of effort that went into that presentation (viz. none), you know that 39 of those 40k are already billed as �beer money�.

TwoDayLife posted:

Check out Part 3 of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The book is a real interesting read and Part 3 is all about old school game programmer stuff including Sierra. Might be right up your alley.

Interesting. Definitely seems worth checking out. Still, if someone with a bit more sense than whomever is behind that KS project could pick up the idea and make it credible, the history of Sierra, from Softcore Adventure to (say) Half-Life could be spectacularly fun to watch.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2012 02:04

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Quarex posted:

Did we talk about Traveller 5th Edition in this thread? It is the "other" kind of gaming (tabletop), but as Marc Miller's Game Designers' Workshop was run out of my hometown, I feel it is my responsibility to promote the local economy from afar! Even if he lives in Bloomington instead of Normal

It was brought up at some point (otherwise I wouldn't have noticed it and back it a long time ago), and at nearly 600% funding at half-time, it's not like they're doing poorly.

They could have made the reward tiers a bit clearer, though. It has improved some since the start, but with the many different editions and swags and options, it takes a bit of reading to figure out what you get (and even then, it's not entirely clear how the editions actually differ).

Still. 600 pages of P&P RPG � what's not to love?

# ¿ Jun 17, 2012 04:03

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

ekuNNN posted:

Credit cards are for Americans, I like to spend the money that I actually have

It doesn't have to be a credit card, though.
I don't have a credit card and can use the Amazon payment option just fine.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2012 01:11

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

ekuNNN posted:

The positive thing to not being able to give money to kickstarter projects is that it has saved me like 300 dollars already, because there's so many good games on there.

I'll grant you that one, and with kickstarter, it becomes rather CC-like anyway since you pledge to spend a whole lot of money at a later date when you most likely won't be able to afford it. :ohdear:

# ¿ Jun 18, 2012 01:50

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Bieeardo posted:

Francois Kofko posted:
His first stretch goal is double his goal. His last stretch goal is four times it, and for that much extra money he can... make a new character and world! It takes double the cash to add time attack and leaderboards. These are just so bad.
The guy behind Crystal Catacombs has taken that approach too. Twice base goal for a map editor? I dunno, maybe. It's fifteen grand. Thirty grand to hold a bloody level design contest? And finally forty-five grand, a whopping six times his base funding goal for co-op multiplayer in a game that really doesn't look like it would be well served with a second player.

I can see some sense in doing that, from a general perspective. If you assume that a lot of that stretch-goal funding will come from people who are already chipping in and who are bumping their pledges to higher levels, meaning you have to send them more stuff, thus reducing the actual value of the extra on-paper cash�

�of course, that only really shifts the problem to one of having poorly conceived tiers and rewards, but still.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2012 04:24

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Dragonrah posted:

Dead State jumped 7-8k in about 9 hours so things are looking good we'll hit most of the goals.

�now if they could only take a firm stance on supporting other platforms. :choco:

# ¿ Jul 1, 2012 00:36

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Jimb posted:

Divekick is some kind of elaborate troll right? What the gently caress is going on I don't understand

It's computerized thumb wrestling dressed up as a fighting game spoof.

Tippis fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Jul 5, 2012

# ¿ Jul 5, 2012 08:52

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Torabi posted:

But why can you only use Amazon to back the project? Is it like this with all of the kickstarters or did Hidden Path choose that themselves? I would much rather use Paypal or something. Mainly since Amazon doesn't even exist in Sweden.

�that said, there has been a couple of Swedish kickstarters, and they seem to (slowly) increase in number. So there's obviously some way of doing it in spite of Amazon's non-presence around here.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 11:50

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Bieeardo posted:

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but Super Techno Kitten Adventure only needs to raise $94,000 of its $100,000 goal in the next eleven days! I'm sure we can pull it off!

What the hell did I just watch.

:catdrugs:

# ¿ Jul 27, 2012 10:06

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Well, that has to rank pretty high on the list of most undervalued funding goals. Castle Story got funded in, what, four hours? It seems to be jumping by $1000 every time I reload the page.

Well, good luck to them. :cheers:

# ¿ Jul 27, 2012 20:16

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

LumberingTroll posted:

Trending is just really simple math, $s gained / number of passed days then totaled by the duration, so for instance this is trending that high because its $155k each day at 30 days. Trending means nothing and should really be ignored.

That said, given the data they must have collected by now, it really shouldn't be that hard to come up with a proper �standard evolution of pledges� formula that could give a much more accurate estimate. It would still be simple maths, just not na�ve maths.

Sure, it could still turn out to be way off since it doesn't include (or accidentally include and generalise) late-stage developments such as a good media upswing and/or recommendations from people with a lot of reach, but that wouldn't be more off than the current method is.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2012 17:48

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

buttopticor posted:

Isn't that what the Prediction (not the "Trending") that pops up after the first few days is? Or did they get rid of that?

By the looks of it, the prediction is just taking the na�ve linear calculation stuffed into an equally na�ve log function or, at best, trying to make sure the prediction curve's shape matches the actual pledge curve � it still doesn't seem to take into account how projects tend to develop over time, with early and late peaks and a slump inbetween.

I'm thinking about something that's more along the lines of Evidence-based Scheduling: taking into account how accurate previous estimates have been at any given time during a funding round and feeding that information back into the formula for calculating those estimates.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2012 19:35

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

MikeJF posted:

Dr. VooDoo posted:
I'm a little confused on the Castle Story tiers. Do I get the beta when it comes out or do I get a discount on the beta when it becomes available?
You straight-up get the beta and the game. I think they got a little English Second Language on the description; they clarified on their twitter.

From what I understood, they're following the minecraft model fairly closely: you pay for and get �the game� and all the updates that come after release. If you pay early you get it as early as when it gets a beta release, and the transition from beta to full release is just another update.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2012 21:43

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

PSI-5 posted:

I'd literally murder everyone in this room for an Ultima X done in the style of Wasteland 2.

The intro would be the Avatar, trapped in a dungeon in Despair, waking from a fever dream with the words, "What's an Avatar?" on his lips.

�add in very poorly disguised cameos of the writers from UIX that need to be subjected to endless misery for their blasphemy and you might be on to something.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2012 13:10

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Thewittyname posted:

Rad Russian posted:
This is awesome but should have been their first stretch goal. Metal planets don't cost $200K.
The stretch goals aren't really about the new map types, they're mostly about the new unit types that come along with those map types. In the case of the metal planets, they're adding more orbital units and the ability to find and reactivate planet-sized weapons. So yeah, I can see needing $200k for balance and testing that sort of thing.

Depending on what they're doing, it could also be a case of switching from special-case to �generic� rule sets. If all you have is a handful of environment, it's often easier to purpose-write each one of them to conform to what you're doing. As you start adding in more (�of anything, really), at some point you'll run into a situation where it's actually more effective to design a generic set of building blocks and rule sets that are then puzzled together to create the environments/units/equipment/whatever, and that step is often a large one.

Just doing it for one more [whatever] might not be worth it, but if you're already kind of balancing over the edge with what you have so far (and if it looks like there's a chance that you'll want to add more of the same in the future) it's a step worth taking.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 20:35

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Shalinor posted:

Definitely. I don't know if this is the thread for it, but it would be interesting to see some sort of percentage-of-disposable-income-spent or similar from people that have done the $250+ reward tiers. Whether that was a huge purchase for them "but hey I love the company!", or a drop in the bucket for them, or what.

I'd kind of been assuming it worked like Freemium, with the same "whale" concept. People with tons of disposable money happily paying more just because they can, etc - but this sounds like quite a different thing.

With the games that kicked off the current craze � WL2, Doublefine Adventure, possibly SR:R � and maybe even more so with the ones that followed in their wake, with the resurrection of a crapton of old IPs and half-forgotten genres, I got the feeling that a lot of the �over-pledging� came from people who simply wanted to send the message that, no, these games and markets are not dead; we are willing to pay for them and screw you market for denying us access to them because you're all trying to be WoW or COD these days.

All of those record-breaking campaigns at the beginning of the year quite specifically spoke to this sentiment, both among developers and among the customers. The pledgers that went for the lower levels might have just picked it up because, hey, neat game for (often) lower-than-usual costs, but I wouldn't be surprised that the higher-level pledgers implicitly tried to deliver that particular message. In other words, it not just because they can, but because doing so actually means something and this gives them a new voice to say what they've been trying to say for quite some time.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2012 00:26

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

�that said, and after thinking about it a bit more, if kickstarting becomes a new kind of industry standard way of doing things, then I'm also fairly certain that the pattern Shalinor describes will emerge and will be what the projects are banking on to get through their campaigns.

One doesn't necessarily exclude the other, but with this first batch of high-profile games, I definitely feel that the �screw you publishers; we'll take out money elsewhere now� theme was fairly explicit and consistent.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2012 01:16

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Shalinor posted:

This is the first Kickstarter I've thrown $20 at. My purse just kind of opened in a blur, and then there was a credit card, and now I'll finally have a proper new isometric RPG

�the only thing holding me back from wrecking next month's gaming budget is that there has been no mention of other platforms. Hopefully they'll introduce them as a stretch goal (which they'll meet with roughly zero effort). :eng99:

# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 22:29

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

KoB posted:

One interview literally said "we're tired of developing for consoles and console controllers."

I'm talking about the other PC platforms.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2012 22:52

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

�and it now comes with some neat stretch goals, including OSX and Linux support for those (like me) who held back pledging until some more concrete promises than �looking into it� were made.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2012 03:44

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

I don't know�

The maze of QfG2 was just a matter of getting that first dinar to buy the map, and then it solved itself. As far as �issues� (or even puzzles) go with old Sierra games, it was pretty light-weight one.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2012 15:51

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Shalinor posted:

It only sticks out because, aside from that, QFG was a bastion of relatively good, straightforward design. If that had been in a King's Quest, Space Quest or Leisure Suit Larry, alright. Hell, Leisure Suit Larry's swamp was even worse (since that was back when most of us didn't have color monitors).

I suppose. I'd say it's more in the vein of the LSL3 nectarine song, though: part �soft� copy protection, part exploration puzzle, and part RTFM for hints. I also felt it was right at home, thematically.

quote:

... speaking of, I kind of want Roberta Roberts to do a Kickstarter and make a modern just-as-hard King's Quest. Remake King's Quest 3 or something. It would be awesome, to see how today's gamers did with a game like that.

I was always partial to KQ4, but hell yes. Now if only she hadn't sworn never to indulge those dirty low-life nerds ever again�

# ¿ Oct 22, 2012 18:58

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:

Instruction is an extremely important part of any complex game. I know tutorials aren't sexy, but they're necessary.

For reference (and introduction, if anyone has missed this excellent series).

# ¿ Oct 28, 2012 23:10

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 22:28

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

signalnoise posted:

Kickstarter audience making better decisions than big name publishers by not giving Peter Molyneux money

To be fair, that's still not exactly ascribing much in the way of amazing decision-making ability to the kickstarters.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2012 19:31

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Kickstarter Gaming - for $10.000,00 you get a "don't steal my money" emoji

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