Kickstarter Project: Planetary Annihilation

[Zor]

An RTS Game where you can command armies on the ground, colonize moons and drop asteroids on your enemies

Looks kind of cool. Hope these guys manage to get it off the ground.

Zor

[Dave]

Jon Mavor from Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander? Wow.

[atg]

Looks pretty interesting. Hopefully they can make the pathfinding better than in supreme commander.

[eion]

kicked in $20 bucks.

2 people have already chipped in $5,000 to get one of the units in the game named after them. I like that method of game development funding much better than selling ad space in the game.

[Skgoa]

It looks like another Spore to me: huge amounts of Cool Ideas but not much of a clearly defined game beneath it.

[CaptHawkeye]

That problem is typical of the indie game community and therefore endemic of kickstarters really. Lots of great ideas and features with no real organization or coherence.

Just a gut feeling, but I sort of believe that Kickstarters are little more than a fad, and will disappear in a few years.

[Skgoa]

Kickstarter is just a (relatively young) plattform for crowdfunding. The method of fund-raising by giving pre-order benefits has been around a long time, just not this extreme.

[Stark]

Hawks is probably correct in that you'd expect the harsh reality of results to blunt the enthusiasm a little bit; some people have pretty absurd ideas about what the kickstarter thing means (thinking they're real investors, thinking they're owed something, attempting to control development whilst not understanding business, etc). It'll definitely change the way fat entitled nerds feel about their expectations.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. The only kickstart I ever joined was a fundraiser by an artist who's been running his own webcomic for... what, eight years now? And all he was trying to do was get together enough pre-orders to justify another print run of some of his comics. A kickstart like that is unlikely to disappoint. You're dealing with someone who already has experience, competence, and reputation. And the project is something you know they can deliver.

As long as things like that are going on, I don't think crowdfunding will go away, even if a bunch of kickstarter projects fail.

[Skgoa]

Though games are inherently a different kind of product. Warren Specter says it best in two points he made in his game design class: 1) after 9 months of concept phase you have a somewhat rough idea how the game is going to be but it will change all the time untill it is finished and you just can't predict what it will be in the and and 2) nobody sets out to make a bad game, yet only 20% of all games succeed.
IMHO people will find that these games won't be the second coming of christ and they won't continue to jump on any new kickstarter funding drive. On the other hand Project: Cars seems to be very successful, although they use their own crowd-funding platform.
Fake edit: And most kickstarter campaigns fail already. It's just a selection bias at work due to the causal relation of successful kickstarter drives alse being the ones that get mass attention.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm.

Are you talking more about the 'big extravaganza' type of game with fifty-man production teams and million-dollar budgets? Or the smaller, faster turnaround type of game? Things comparable to flash games, mobile games, or the way PC games used to be, where you don't need so many programmers and you aren't spending three years trying to get the graphics beautifully right?

The big games can't be funded by kickstarts. I'm not so sure that it won't stay viable for the smaller ones, because the cost is low. Although I wouldn't fund anyone to create a new 'small game' unless they'd done one or two successful ones already, either.

[Zor]

And it managed to get past $900,000 and will be funded.

Zor

[Starglider]

Saw this pathetic project on Kickstarter yesterday; Internet, please give me lots of money to buy expensive computer(s), because I made a program that animates ugly dots. The guy has no actual physics knowledge and a quick comment confirmed that he actually just wants a free high-end gaming machine ('SLI' is purely for gaming, it has no relevance to compute).

[Terralthra]

Even without knowing anything about the guy, I wouldn't back a project for an "experienced programmer" who can't screen-capture video straight from their monitor out, instead of pointing a video camera at their screen.

[Tolya]

Hm. The only kickstart I ever joined was a fundraiser by an artist who's been running his own webcomic for... what, eight years now? And all he was trying to do was get together enough pre-orders to justify another print run of some of his comics. A kickstart like that is unlikely to disappoint. You're dealing with someone who already has experience, competence, and reputation. And the project is something you know they can deliver.

As long as things like that are going on, I don't think crowdfunding will go away, even if a bunch of kickstarter projects fail.

Thing is, the stuff that drives most kickstarter games is OH CELEBRITY! Usually meaning, there is a "famous" designer of some sort involved, or two, or three.

However, you cannot make a good game without all of the invisible back end that big studios have - programmers, artists, QA's. You can spew good ideas all around, but you need a good programming team to actually make it happen and then LOTS of testing to tweak all the small bits right. Even though it can always go wrong, like it did with spore being a series of uninspired minigames.

Right now there is lots of kickstarter hype, but I guess, in a couple of years, when the projects that are currently mass-funded get actually released and MAYBE some of those projects turn out to be shitty mess with most of the money squandered on coke, hookers and pizza (DNF anyone?), then probably people will start being more critical of indie industry. Because for every Quentin Tarantino there are fifty Uwe Boll's.

There is a project I am interested in - someone wants to make an "old school" style tactical shooter, like old Rainbow Six's. They got their funding through skillful marketing (their promo video was quite good), but they didn't have a second of actual in-game footage. Problem is, if they just recycle all the old features into a new game... well, rainbow six was basically a trial and error game, with no real tactics involved (fatties like to think they are just like Andy McNab by playing this game) and lots of ridiculous stuff (like 0,1 sec that took a tango to raise his ak and kill all of your squad). If they just recycle that, we'll end up with a RS clone when they stopped being fashionable.

[Covenant]

You can make a good game with just a handful of people, but it won't be a triple-A title. Kickstarter as a method for funding small-team efforts by a few interested fans and developed by passionate developers will work out just fine. I think people will indeed see a bubble burst, since you can't run a whole studio on Kickstarter whims, but I think it's a tad silly to be so pessimistic about what constitutes a good game. People have been making very successful games with 2-3 people. Especially if you define success in either an artistic sense (indie games have been doing this for a while) or in a financial sense (indie game revenue being split 4 ways can be very lucrative even for small sales).

[Stark]

I think people are more amused by just looking at the big kickstarter games being pushed by brands or individuals. There are indeed plenty of good things coming out of the program, but 'xyz game got millions from obsessed nerds because INSERT NAME HERE' is funny as hell.

[madd0ct0r]

kickstarter seems to be reinvigorating hardware ideas in silicon valley - it lets you demonstrate a market and raise some cash for the up front costs.

plus the whole tricorder thing.

[Zor]

If Kickstarter means that people can get projects off the ground without pulling mortgages, i am all for it.

Zor

[CaptHawkeye]

Sure, if it means that a new avenue exists for new developers and studios that would have gone unheard of without even a little funding. Their is plenty of use for Kickstarters in the indie market. Problems arise when internet "personalities" like Tim Schaffer can use it to farm money off of spineless fanboys. Or when said fanboys think they can influence development with it.

[Alyeska]

Kickstarter is at best comparable to the investors who first put money into OnLive. Even if the concept is sound, that doesn't mean shit. It can still go down in flames. Its a risk. Know and accept that. Just because its funded doesn't mean anything. There is no contract. They can turn around and do something else with the money. After the first several spectacular failures and a couple of cases of fraud, Kickstarter is going to see a lot more cautious donations.

[Grumman]

There is no contract. They can turn around and do something else with the money. After the first several spectacular failures and a couple of cases of fraud, Kickstarter is going to see a lot more cautious donations.

I wouldn't say that that's set in stone until there's actually a court case over it. Some of the tabletop games manufacturers have been using Kickstarter rather blatantly as a preorder method, so it wouldn't surprise me if they were found to have the usual obligations under consumer protection law even if Kickstarter does not.

[Stark]

Kickstarter is at best comparable to the investors who first put money into OnLive. Even if the concept is sound, that doesn't mean shit. It can still go down in flames. Its a risk. Know and accept that. Just because its funded doesn't mean anything. There is no contract. They can turn around and do something else with the money. After the first several spectacular failures and a couple of cases of fraud, Kickstarter is going to see a lot more cautious donations.

But the best part is where people who buy preorders invest in kickstarts then act like they own it and should be able to dictate creative or business decisions!

[Alyeska]

Kickstarter is at best comparable to the investors who first put money into OnLive. Even if the concept is sound, that doesn't mean shit. It can still go down in flames. Its a risk. Know and accept that. Just because its funded doesn't mean anything. There is no contract. They can turn around and do something else with the money. After the first several spectacular failures and a couple of cases of fraud, Kickstarter is going to see a lot more cautious donations.

But the best part is where people who buy preorders invest in kickstarts then act like they own it and should be able to dictate creative or business decisions!

The investors in OnLive didn't get shit. Even if Kickstarter donators had shares in ownership, it ultimately wouldn't mean anything. Kickstarter is for people to donate to things they like. To Donate. You take the risk when you make the submission.

I'm willing to take a risk on Planetary Annihilation. But its a risk none the less. And they owe you nothing ultimately. If they succeed, great. It might continue. Though I don't see myself doing much more in Kickstarter. Now that I think about it, I'm paying more than the normal value of the game I would have purchased had it gone retail. If I'm going to help finance a game's development, it has to be something that I would honestly want. I already pay $50 for shitty games. I don't need to pay more for games that might never exist.

[Blayne]

Watching the trailer for this game my first thought has probably been "War for Cybertron mod NOW!"

The graphical aesthetic reminds me a lot of Transformers Prime to be honest.