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.
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Re:Ah... (Score:5, Interesting)
I always enjoyed games that had a good core and then released expansion packs later that actually expanded on the game. It was almost like getting two great games. Total Annihilation was good, Core Contingency made it better. Diablo II was good. Lord of Destruction made it better (although in this case, the expansion was essential to actually finishing the storyline). StarCraft was good, Brood War made it better. It seems expansions that really expanded the game died out around ten years ago. Since then, expansions are more like content packs - they tend to just add more of the same.
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Someone hasn't looked at Civilization V, then.
Civ V was good.
Gods and Kings made it better.
Brave New World (releases in about 4 hours for me) according to reviews is making it even better still.
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To me Civ3 was the ultimate in gaming fun. Certainly Civ4 was easier to play on Linux, but they so overdid the graphics that gameplay seemed to be a secondary consideration. As for Civ5, my understanding is that they severly restricted the ability to build decent armies.
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Re:Ah... (Score:4)
I think the armies are the biggest improvement by far from iv to v. No longer stacking units allows you to actually place your units in strategic locations (spearmen defending archers, etc).
Actually Civ 5 allows more of this. Spearmen sit in front of your archers, archers shoot over the spearmen. This and cities that can attack make it a game of turtles. Forget any other strategy.
Add to this the fact the AI is crap and you have the reason I still play Civ 4.
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As someone who has played all 5 of the Civilization games to-date I have to say that they've streamlined the game.
I've always loathed the process (in Civs 1 - 4) of naval invasion. It's my least favorite part of those games.
In Civ 5 they have removed *most* of the hassle of naval invasion. You don't have to build transports. You just send your unit to the coast and say "embark" and a transport appears out of nowhere to carry the unit across the water.
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Though "Transports" aren't in Civ5, the embarked units are implied to be in transport ships, in the sense that they don't defend as usual while embarked. Defending your embarked units with real navy is essential in any contested water.
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It's possible that your experience was not universal... I ran into a couple bugs, but no more than most games have (and far less than some, such as from Bethesda...). Crashes were pretty rare at the beginning, and I can't recall seeing a crash in the last hundred hours of gameplay.
As for the missing content, much of the "missing" content Civ4 was added in it's expansion too, and honestly not much of value was lost. I didn't like the religion system in Civ4, but the Religion system added in Civ5's expansi
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Finally! Someone who likes Total Annihilation. I still play it though, it works great using wine!
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I don't remember if I played the multiplayer using wine or VirtualBox. I think it was VirtualBox with Windows XP.
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Wow Planetary Annihilation looks awesome, I can't wait for it!
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To me it's still the best RTS ever created.
Re: Ah... (Score:5, Funny)
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Especially considering the largest maps (IE: 81 x 81 iirc) are still massive compared to almost every other RTS made since then, although 40x40 was the largest that came with the game. Supreme Commander is the only one I can think of that you can have maps on that scale. TA was also years ahead in terms of integrated fan-made content from the ground up. Download a new unit? Just drop it in the totala folder to use. Same for maps. No installing, no editing, and there were some great fan-made tools to resolve
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Another TA fan! Wohoo! okay, I mostly turtled, built vulcan, and then just sent waves of Hawk's until the enemy base were gone, mine were gone, or he'd built too much air defense..
Anyway.. As a TA fan, I keep a close look on Planetary Annihilation [uberent.com] - I just hope they get that good old TA feeling into it (they say they focus more on TA than SupCom, but we'll see)
Alpha is out, and there are a lot of gameplay videos [reddit.com] out, but I am waiting for beta before I get my toes wet.
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There was this time I was playing against a single friend in a huge map. As usual, I started building a massive wall of air and land defense and sending small waves of land forces to distract the enemy. Guess what? Around the time I had my Big Berta almost built, suddenly all my base got covered with enemy bomber and fighter planes! I could not believe it, I couldn't see anything else than air planes flying! It turned out that my friend spent the whole game producing airplanes into a remote map area and at
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Hehe, yeah, the AA defense in TA had some problems with large air swarms. Think they just moved too fast for the in-game engine and defenses to keep up properly.
Hence, why you made large fucking swarms, and just set them to patrol the enemy base. They'd need an equal fuckton amount of air defenses to stop it, making it impossible to do anything else (and they slowly got killed, too.. And then your base stop existing)
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Why not? Off the top of my head I can think of a number of different angles that could justify an expansion. Play the game from a different character, the opposing side, after the ending of the original.
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Or add new abilities to a game. Your character can fly now, or gets a nifty whip, or a pet
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Sometimes that tight fisted manager standing over your shoulder demanding results yesterday actually has a useful purpose.
Putting a creator and an editor and a producer all in the same person results in problems. Look at the "director's cut" versions of movies, they rarely are better than the trimmed down original. You need someone to say "you're done now, please stop".
Yes, they realized after funding that their small adventure game didn't have to be small and could be the size of one of their older games
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not every project needs an upper limit, but some certainly do. A friend of mine did the 3Doodler kickstarter and it also wound up unexpectedly successful. (Blew through the original goal in the first few hours, and wound up making a few million dollars at the end of the 30 day campaign.) When they sold out of the planned first batch, there was a bit of a scramble to estimate how quickly a second batch could be made, how big it should be, etc. But, they didn't change the design of the product, so they we
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This just in.... (Score:2)
Project costs way more than expected. News at 11.
Re:This just in.... (Score:4, Funny)
--- a/Message
+++ b/Message
- Project costs way more than expected. News at 11.
+People are not able to forecast accurately costs of a project (time, money, etc.). News at 11.
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If a project that was projected to fit within a $400,000 budget can't be completed with $3.3 million the issue is a lot bigger than bad estimation.
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When the Kickstarter brought in more money then asked for the scope of the project was expanded. Unfortunately, it was expanded a little to much.
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Yeah - I think some games have much saner budgeting than others. Both games I've backed are still listed as on-time and within budget, and one is almost in beta (and not due for another year) suggesting they may be ahead of schedule. The other hasn't given as many specifics, but has said they are progressing well and are still on time. They didn't say anything about on budget, but most of their add-ons were localization related (and since voice work is outsourced, probably realistically obtainable goals to
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.
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It doesn't seem like they had a plan for the additional money as the kickstarters I've funded had. I've chosen not to help fund a couple because their stretch goals would delay the game significantly, but this wasn't one (I believe that is why I didn't help fund Star Citizen, for instance, but I can't look again because that page is not accessible). The one's I've supported had smart stretch goals like additional localizations, which is almost entirely outsourced work (some sync and QA needs to be done, but
Another possible lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
Only buy a finished product unless you have money to burn.
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How do you know that?
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Secondly because his company managed to deliver several games already, so he is obviously capable of doing so.
And last but not least because he already announced a solution. He will deliver the game in two parts. The first part will be available at about the expected date and the sells will be used to finance the second time. Kickstarter backers and whoever buys the fi
Re:Another possible lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is what I am doing. Yes, some corporate games suck, but I don't have money to blow funding someones pet project. Plus I don't know what I will be doing years from now. Maybe I gave up gaming altogether. Maybe they drastically change their concept to something I don't want. Maybe, they just flat out lie(WarZ).
You can give to kickstarter groups. I've been screwed before, thanks.
Re:Another possible lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
Kinda.
Kickstarter is a lesson to investors and publishers etc. that there is money available for things they didn't think there was a market for. If no one funded star citizen or project eternity or the like then we would go another 10 years without good space combat games and isometric RPG's. As it is we'll probably see a lot, some of which will suck (and some of which will be the kickstarted projects unfortunately), but the 'product' you're buying on kickstarter is really paying to create a genre or a product family or the like. Sure, you might get star citizen or some adventure game that *might* be good. But expectations are high on those. I'll be happy if funding star citizen means one of the big guys picks up on 'space sims can make money again? Hurray!' XWing vs Tie Fighter 2015' or whatever.
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If no one funded star citizen or project eternity or the like then we would go another 10 years without good space combat games and isometric RPG's.
You are mentioning it as if Star Citizen was already released and delivered what it has promised. We might have similar discussion in another 2 or 3 years, this time mentioning Star Citizen running out of budget and hoping to sell under-developed version on Steam to get some more money...
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.
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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 so true. I know some people with a successful Kickstarter campaign begin to get caught up in the hype and promise the Moon and anything else they can think up in order to keep the ball rolling. They really shouldn't get caught up in the hype, other than to be promising minor cosmetic things or as suggested promise that they will be on the development path well after the original release. I completely agree.
I've been involved with several startup companies over the years, and the worst disaster wa
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We blew over a million dollars in the course of about 18 months
I saw a start up do 70 million in a similar length of time. It was obscene, but more entertaining to watch than the usual train wreck. I think the business plan went something like:
1) Come up with a great idea and get 70 million dollars.
2) Ok, let's hire a few hundred college grads, pack them in our styling Silicon Valley cube farm, and party!
3) Here comes the investors. Everyone look busy!
4) Shit. We need actual product. Better hire some contractors to write that crap.
5) I rock at ping pong!
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We blew over a million dollars in the course of about 18 months (surprisingly not that hard to do). It wasn't even anything exotic, just some equipment, rent, and a trip to a computer convention (where I actually landed a contract with enough profit to pay for that trip anyway.... that really wasn't the problem).
If that really wasn't the problem, why on earth did you include it, just to say it wasn't the problem ?!?
It was an "expense", and frankly trips like that were at least addressed as a potential place where money was "needlessly spent". You obviously missed the point that even a well financed start-up can struggle to be successful, which was my main point.
Strangely, it is companies who struggle and pinch every penny that seem to be doing better. They definitely do better when the revenue comes in and they can keep expenses consistently lower than income while well-financed companies seem to struggle with keepi
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The problem is how kickstarter seems to work. They include the stretch goals right there in the initial pitches. So not only do they have to get the time and resource planning reasonably correct for the first goal, they need to also get good estimates for all subsequent stretch goals. So the more stretch goals that get funded the more likely it is that they're going to slip up.
Now sometimes the stretch goals are probably not too bad. Project Eternity as I recall had stretch goals that were relatively si
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dude, it's a sw product. they can just weasel out on the stretch goals.
the REAL PROBLEM is that they apparently don't/didn't know what they wanted the game to be, so wearing the money as clothes was what they did with it.
they had no idea what the core product should/would be! that's why they need MOAR MONEY! they would always need MOAR MONEY! until they had a stroke of luck and figured out what the game would actually be.
don't fucking pay them upfront.
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The $ 400K project is really a different game than the $ 3.3M project. The bigger budget allowed for a bigger story, a wider scope of characters and locations and in the end basically a whole different game. A better game probably. So what's the problem? That it's taking a few months extra? Who cares?
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People pledging through Kickstarter aren't investors. They pay money to enable the creation of a product. That product is being made and because there is more money, the product is bigger and better than advertised. Never ever did they promised a delivery date and I doubt anyone really cares if the game is released in October or January or July.
There are other dangers (Score:5, Interesting)
Like not taking into account the Crowdfunding site share, Paypal transfer tax (depending on where you live and what site you did use), country, state and city taxes. If you are opening a business there are costs for that too. To properly employ someone is very expensive in some countries (guess what: taxes, social security and so on).
People will eventually learn how to calculate all this, but indies went too eager to the crowndfunding bubble and did not consult their accountants to see how much game development actually costs. Ow yes... accountants also cost money.
You could say that Tim was victim of his own success, but I say he was victim to his own creativity combined with over-excitement.
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You could say that Tim was victim of his own success, but I say he was victim to his own creativity combined with over-excitement.
Well, hopefully it's too soon to name any victims yet... though I have to say I'm glad to see the scope was extended to a larger, more in depth adventure game, almost all of his others have been well worth it. Then again, I'm fine with waiting until it's actually finished to buy it...
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Yes, Tim is pretty good at his job. Full Throttle would be at my Top5 game of all time if I ever bother to make such list. What I meant is all this discussion is blown out of proportion because of hype. If it was a non-kickstarted project it would be canceled and thrown into Limbo until someone really asked about it and the fate was revealed. They were open about what is happening and deserve some kudos for that. And while you can say they have the moral obligation to be open in this case, they could simply
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...You could say that Tim was victim of his own success, but I say he was victim to his own creativity combined with over-excitement.
Sure, one could say that...or one could also say that someone who has been in business long enough to be referred to as "legendary" should at least know the basics of business before making rather large financial guesstimates on general costs. Things like employer taxes and medical insurance plans aren't exactly corporate secrets.
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Well... It is very common to go over-budget in most, if not all, games. And the costs of running a business are no secret. Any local, trustworthy accountant (yeah, pretty limited bunch but they exist) can tell exactly how much it will cost. But Kickstarter stretch goals are a completely new beast, and therefore hard to predict.
I don`t have business experience, but it`s pretty obvious to me that, as you make a bigger project, more and more money is spent in management. Management that can barely keep things
That is where publishers are useful (Score:5, Interesting)
While developers like to hate on publishers, and often with good reason, one thing they usually do is have some business and accounting sense to keep projects on track. Developers can have a "just another couple months and it'll be great!" mentality whereas a publisher understands that time is money, a lot of it. Every month you spend on a project has a big cost. Hence it can be important to release earlier, even if it does mean cutting back.
Shadowbane and Duke Nukem Forever are two great examples of developers just running away with the "we'll just work on it until it is whatever our vision is," sort of thing and failing massively.
The problem with the Doublefine thing is that it seems to be a creative person at the helm, and that can mean bad business decisions. It's a nice sentiment to say "Let creativity run wild," but in the real world, you have to consider business concerns.
I'm more optimistic on Wasteland 2 because Brian Fargo is at the helm and he's a business person. He seems to well understand the need for getting things out the door and working on doing what you can with the resources you have, even if it is less than you want to do.
Todd Howard had some good points on this during his keynote about this kind of thing: "Your ideas are not as important as your execution," and "We can do anything, we just can't do everything." Both are very true. You have to decide what is going to be in and what isn't, because you haven't the time or resources to implement it all, and what you do implement needs to be good because the grandest ideas are blunted in an unplayable game.
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I agree that if you want to make a game you must understand that you don`t have the resources to do everything. Being so, the secret here is what you do first and when to stop making new stuff to make the stuff you already have the best you can.
That said there is reason why publishers are hated. They are business only. They care little for creativity. They care only for profit. And you may say that for capitalism in general, but you can`t let that be the guiding line in a creative industry. A industry that
Nothing to do with goals (Score:3)
Actually, there is a problem with goals here-- specifically, that there wasn't one set in the first place. The Doublefine Kickstarter was an experiment that asked for money to finance the creation of a game, and a documentary film of the whole thing. Nobody knew what it was at first, certainly nobody expected it to get out of hand, and then Tim decided to make something Totally Amazingly New and proceeded to torpedo the budget.
What he has now is a fantastic idea, but it's the kind of fantastic idea that wants a whole lot more money than the KS brought in, because it's going to require a lot of artists working their hands down to the wrists.
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My theory is that Tim realized that people will give him money for making stupid videos and promises (that at least are backed up by his reputation as a great game maker, unlike a lot of other KS campaigns), and therefore he almost has to try to see how much money he can get before making the game. It is a giant snowball effect. The more money he gets, the bigger and better game he can promise, which means he needs more money, so more video shenanigans and dancing around trying to get people to give him yet
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.
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Screw that! We aren't talking about a government or non-profit organization here...
Release the $400,000 game you said you'd release, and everybody paid for. If you overrun the budget a bit, no problem. Just think of the rest of the money as extra sales of the game, in excess of your break-even point. Deliver them the copy of the game they paid for, and they'll all be happy.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to use SOME of t
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Bingo.
I'm about to launch my own kickstarter campaign, and one thing I gathered from the tons of advise that is out there by now is that you absolutely have to be clear on your goals and stretch goals.
If at all possible (it's a lot easier with software than hardware), do what the parent said: Release what you promised and then invest the additional money into a free expansion pack.
With hardware, I don't get why people invest feature creep at all. Your backers funded the item that you promised, and that is w
This subject was adequately explored (Score:5, Funny)
in "The Producers".
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Unlike the producers, they won't lose if the game ends up wildly popular.
Pebble watch is another example (Score:5, Informative)
Originally wanted $100,000 in funding, wound up getting over $10 million. That changed the size of their problem from making 1000 watches, to making 100,000 watches. So now they had to scale their manufacturing by a factor of 100, which is a totally different set of problems to solve.
There has been a lot of angst (some anger) at the delivery delays, most of the "investors" have been reasonably patient, some have been downright ignorant. One of the most popular forum topics is something like "I funded it on [date], why haven't I got my watch", where [date] was only a small number of days after the kickstarter campaign began, but in reality was when they were at over $5 million going up.
Disclaimer: I'm still waiting (patiently) on my two watches. I should have just ordered black, or changed to black when they made the option available. sigh!
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My primary beef with the Pebble campaign, is the fact they are shipping to retail before they are shipping to backers.
What's up with that?
I put my money on "AGENT Smartwatch" instead.
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well they already have the pre-order money so what's the hurry delivering those?
Yeah, major problem (Score:2)
Mission Creep is deadly (Score:2)
The key is to stick to your original stated goals, and not to expand them just because you get a bunch more money.
People knew what they were buying with the KS, so there was no reason to radically up-scope the mission, especially to the point that the mission became unobtainable.
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No, not really.
90% of the time I get a KSer is because I know the game will have 200% more details than the developers had originally planed at that price point.
And specifically, all money they raised must be spent designing the game, or it is fraud.
I did see a KS project were the stretch goals were just more toys for the backers. But I personally thought that that went against the idea of KS backing, if not being technically fraud.
it's no surprise (Score:3)
When you've got a "creative type" in charge of managing a project, you get "creative project management".
Where I work, if a 6-month project ended up taking 3 years, people would be fired. Or overthrown. Or lynched by a mob.
Re:it's no surprise (Score:5, Funny)
we moved to a new building in 2009, while moving we found memos in the basement about the upcoming move
dated from the 80's
Better titles (Score:2)
The Dangers of Scope Creep
The Dangers of your eyes being bigger than your stomach.
This is why we're in a recession. (Score:2, Interesting)
I just don't understand why the scope was expanded at all.
If I need $X to do W, and then find myself with $X+Y, I spend $X to do W, then keep $Y for a later Z.
More specifically, he said "I want to make this game, and need $400,000". Once he got $3.3 million, he should have created and released the original game he had planned, and reserved the other $2.9 million for the next game.
What kind of fucking idiot decides to spend all the money he has simply because he has it?
Let Tim himself explain why. (Score:3)
Statement titled "A Note from Tim" [gamasutra.com]
Scope creep (Score:2)
Scope creep has always been capable of consuming even the most generous of budgets.
Misunderstanding on the part of backers (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue comes from backers believing they're preordering a product.
This is not what is going on here. What is going on is more akin to the Medieval practice of being a patron to an artist.
We hand our collective money to an artist who says "I want to make something like this... And the more you provide me in funding the bigger and more grand a statue I can make."
We as a group come together and pool our money and hand it to the artist saying "We like your vision. Here is a bucket of gold coins, go forth and create awesomeness".
This makes more sense when you consider that the high end rewards are usually something like "A copy of the widget, plus lunch with the widget visionary"
Noone pays 1000$ for a game. People pay 1000$ for artistic vision and being a part of seeing the vision realized.
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As long as we can behead them if they don't deliver what we asked for, I'm ok with that. If you want medieval rules, let's go all the way.
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... and this is what I get for not going with a car analogy! :)
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there's options for that kind of crowdfunding too.
but kickstarters by far and large always have products listed that you will receive - with delivery date estimations and the videos are all about giving the impression that "yes we can deliver because xyz".
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I'm certain that artists throughout history have made similar claims, human's don't change that much :).
And similarly, I'm sure patrons said "It'd be even more awesome if you made it 10' taller, with the same delivery date. What about it? There's an extra sovereign in it for ya?"
There's was a sign hanging on my boss's wall when I first started in IT (yes, it was a granite tablet). It sayth:
"You can have it Fast, Good or Cheap, pick any 2 of 3"
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a game doesn't get good just because it's late..
cheap and good (and slow) can't happen anyways since they're burning the money by day.
the art type of kickstarters are tricky in this way though, but these as well did make promises - to people they were taking money from. the real problem however is that the fraud portion was in the part that they said they knew what game they were making when they didn't know, this is a problem with many ks game projects - they they don't actually have any scope and the scop
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oh well, I just hope elite turns out ok eventually! if not then it's money paid as compensation for pirating frontier and ffe!
It amused me greatly that Shroud of the Avatar had a tier for people who had pirated ultima or a previous game and were cleansing their karma :)
Min
Can't they just ... (Score:2)
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.
Well I'm also not sure how good a plan they had (Score:3)
Some of the games that have come on KS have had a pretty good business plan behind them. They know what they want to make, the basics of the world, the story, the scope, all that kind of thing. They then can determine based on funding what sorts of things they'll be able to put in the final project. I mean this goes on with any game project, you will have more ideas than you've ability to implement, so you decide what to keep and what to cut.
However the Doublefine Adventure really didn't seem to have that.
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Stretch goals are probably the biggest pitfall. Before the campaign, you plan everything out and you're hopefully pretty sure that your plan works and you can meet your commitments, and when the kickstart campaign goes live, suddenly everything explodes, you meet your goal way too early, and people expect stretch goals from you, which you have to invent on the fly without any kind of real research.
For most projects, it'd be better if they just stuck to the initial goal. Just pocket the extra money. Or use i
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just because I made a great movie/game/story last time doesn't mean I will do so next time
Tim Schaffer isn't exactly a one hit wonder. He has a proven track record of producing great games. I don't know what his track record is for delivering on time and under budget, but he does know how to consistently make quality games.
But what is his track record with being handed a giant sack of money before any code is laid down? What says he wont just flee with the sack?
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Tim is smart enough to know that he cannot run. The Internet is everywhere. We will track him down, lock him up in a small room, Misery-style, and make him write the game we want. Along with the whole Broken Age team, of course. Can't expect Tim to do the programming and artwork, even if we hack off a foot or two.
Anyway, point being, Tim isn't going anywhere. I'm perfectly confident the game will be made, and it will be Schafer-awesome.
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No, but I could see Tim and Ron singing "Bootay!" and throwing doubloons in the air.
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.
Re: Hmmm (Score:3)
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I'm not saying he is a one hit wonder. Hey may be good because he's willing and able to look at his work, realize when it sucks, go back and fix it, and do better. That can eat up time and money, and the bigger your project the more staff you have to change gears with.
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I don't know about yours, but my Pebble is awesome. Like 6 months late, but awesome.
I think the most important thing for these "preorder" type Kickstarters to do is limit the number of backers for the physical reward pledge levels, and if they do add additional slots move the estimated reward date out. Pebble screwed up by not having an initial limit, and then finally set a limit after the campaign exploded that was unreasonably optimistic given the original estimates. They had zero units available by the o
Re: (Score:2)
Why I Cancelled My Pebble Smartwatch Order [readwrite.com]
For one thing, he didn't like them going straight to Best Buy (which was not a smooth launch either apparently) while backers were still waiting.
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