I wonder how good crowd funding really is.
Often times when I watch games grow big and the community getting more vocal and putting pressure on the developers to listen to their “ideas” and suggestions, the games got considerably worse.
Couple of examples:
World of Warcraft, Dota 2, League of Lehendas, CoD etc.
Now I imagine it’s difficult to realize your ideas when you’ve got to answer to every single guy who has spent a dime on your game.
I feel like if you try to make everyone happy, you get half-assed shit that disappoints everybody.
Imagine how gamers nowadays would’ve reacted if you told them that the next big Castlevania title goes RPG-style, or that Metroid is gonna go fps-style or that in 3 years Super Mario is going 3D.
In the end people loved those games. I don’t know though how the fans would’ve felt if they knew this stuff in advance and how much creative freedom crowd-funded games actually leave you with.
I haven’t seen good crowd-funded games so far except for Faster Than Light.
I bought Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2, Divinity Original Sin and played many others.
SR and WL2 suck some major balls and somehow still got praise from todays retarded critics, either out of pity of because they’re dumb as rocks.
Divinity Original Sin was decent but left much to desire and has a lot of flaws in my opinion. Also it was already as good as finished before they went to KS to ask for polish money.
So seems like while Kickstarter is a great idea in itself, it only produces hot garbage and I wonder why that is the case.
Kinda off topic, sorry but I felt like asking that in the face of all the anger people throw at Comcept.
4 million dollars for licensing, marketing, analysis, and development get you almost nowhere. You forget that he only knows the products that will sell are the ones that were pledged, money which is already put into other avenues for this game.
I think the best games come from creators that are allowed to do what they do without input from a mass of indecisive people. Gamers do not know what they want.
I wonder where the 4 million went into.
It clearly didn’t go into the game. It always makes me laugh when said indie company who kickstarter is like “LAWL, GUYS IT COSTS LIKE… 1239482903482490 DOLLARS FOR A STAFF… AND 492384234823948920 FOR MARKETING… AND LIKE EVERYONE’S BWM’S FOR MORE STUFF!” which I believed at first. Then having worked with several projects, you realize it’s just pure bullshit.
Most game devs are so concern in regards to marketing and trying to get their product out there, that sometimes they forget to add “fun”. And sadly, I’ve seen this happen several times.
Here’s where I’m at: after the project being over-funded by millions of dollars, it’s absurd for us to be asked for anything other than patience or ideas while they work on what we paid for. It’s truly insulting at this point.
I fear that the Inafune I loved for many years is not the same man (or perhaps this new sense of freedom has gone to his head). Megaman fans are going from the frying pan (Capcom) to the fire (Comcept). I hate to admit it, but Hideki Kamiya pretty much nailed it over 2 years ago:
He’s actually been the same person. I know Capcom fucked up a lot, but there’s a reason why Capcom had to get rid of Inafune. And yes, it’s showing in the Mighty No. 9 project.
Path of Exile is a crowdfunded game, just not through KS. I’d say that’s the best one of the bunch.
Crowdfunding is merely another method of getting funding for a project. It doesn’t replace other avenues. Crowdfunding has its own set of problems which were already touched on, and for that reason is probably something I wouldn’t pursue if I were to seek funds. The thing with game development is that things can change halfway; I don’t want to commit to something that I feel doesn’t work for fear of chargebacks or whatever. A common issue with non-developers is they don’t know much about game design, but they will tell you something as if they know. Something that they think is as easy as flipping a switch to create could take many man hours. Any dev will tell you that making games is hard. Just recently, one more person talked about how hard game dev can be. I don’t want things to be even harder when I have no control over what I want to include in my games, otherwise I risk losing support.
Shocking revelations brought forth by the rise of crowdfunding:
Every developer you like is a bright-eyed idealist with a poor concept of time management and funding allocation, because they were hired to be idea guys and not business owners. For all the complaining about the Triple A industry and all the censorship and lack of funding, those systems were put in place to stop people from being cash sinks because they don’t know when to stop a project and don’t understand the scale of the game in relation to money input.
Tim Schafer and Keiji Inafune are people with good intentions and fun ideas you can really get behind, but they aren’t people you should trust your money with as sad as it is to say. With no one to pull the leash they get way overzealous and can’t control themselves. One thing I’ve certainly learned from all the shit I’ve put money into, I do not trust anyone who doesn’t have a playable build ready to go at the time of crowdfunding no matter who it is. Until I have a game in my hands and playable, you’re all liars.
I feel it’s western Triple A model that’s shit. It disgusts me that Activision dropped $500 million on Destiny knowing how badly it turned out. Ubisoft got like 10 development teams chugging out annual Ass Creeds to the point we’re getting two this year. We do these fuckers over spend so much?
the only thing that will die are triple aaa games. There are still markets for other games and those will continue to thrive no matter what happens to the triple AAA industry, because those are labors of love.