The Dangers of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal 168
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."
Ah... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that's not scary enough though.
Another possible lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
Only buy a finished product unless you have money to burn.
Bad Planning (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.
This is called feature creep; mission creep (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.
Re:Hmmm (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.
Re:Ah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another possible lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
Misunderstanding on the part of backers (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
Re:This just in.... (Score:4, Insightful)
People keep saying this, but would you really have been happy if they had stuck to the 400k project and kept the rest of the money on their bank account?
Obviously, the increased budget has allowed them to expand the project. This is a good thing, it means the money people put in is actually used on the game. More money = more game.
So unfortunately, the bigger game they are making now has gone over budget. It's really no big deal, as they have found a good solution, which is to release part of the game early in order to generate income to finish the rest of the game. They're not asking for more money, they are simply adjusting the release schedule.
Projects going over budget are a fact of life. These things happen all the time. The only reason we're hearing about it at all is because it's a crowdfunded project and the crowd has a right to know what is happening with their money. But don't think other games you are playing were finished on time and within the projected budget, because they're not.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Three million dollars isn't "a giant stack of money" for a game studio. Remember that John Carmack interview on games for mobile, where he said it's cool because you only need 30 million to create a great game instead of 300? AAA-games cost a shit load of cash to develop. Having a talented team working for over a year on something burns money like crazy.