The Kickstarter Game Successes: Where Are They Now?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/28/the-kickstarter-successes-where-are-they-now/

by qznc • 14 years ago

123 71 14 years ago

rockpapershotgun.com

sami363• 14 years ago

in essence, the crowd-funding model is working just fine. Game publishing will never be the same.

Devilboy• 14 years ago

Only one single game in that list actually got released and half of the rest are way overdue.

sami363• 14 years ago

the dev cycle for a game is 12~24 months. The first Kickstarter breakthrough was Double Fine Adventure in Feb 2012. It's on track as most are per the article. It's too early to tell but I don't expect a higher failure rate than publisher backed games.I'll concede much, most creators were over-optimistic with their timelines.

belorn2• 14 years ago

But what does it actually mean compared to other game companies? Looking at valve and blizzard, both has had a long standing style of only releasing a game once its is "done", no matter the years that has passed since the first estimated release date.

And maybe this is wrong and the future of game development will shed those tendencies. Looking historically on game development, rushing a product out of the door to meet a release date has rarely produced a good game (anyone heard of E.T?). So the question might be, what alternative do we have between rushing a product for relase date, and waiting until it is "done", which might mean fifteen years to find out that the game is rather crappy (duke nukem forever). We can also look at development processes like Debian, and compare a static release schedule with a dynamic one.

coffeeaddicted• 14 years ago

Two games - Faster Than Light and Project Giana. Also I haven't seen too many project in the game industry yet which were right on time, so as long as the guys still work on it that doesn't worry me too much.

aw3c22• 14 years ago

that really is not what I took from it. many (half?) of them are behind on their schedule. 3(?) good ones were released.

they were successful for the developers (and only those were selected).

for the funders there really is not much closure yet to say anything about the future.

pfisch• 14 years ago

Most of the other projects have been posting updates so they definitely are working on the products. Unless those devs are really in dire straits it would be kind of silly for them to abandon the games.

They already have so much time put into development and the point of a kickstarter for games is not to make a bunch of money on the kickstarter. It is to make a bunch of money on selling the game since a publisher isn't basically taking everything on the actual sales of the game. Then there is more money to be made on actually getting to own the IP because you didn't get gouged by a publisher.

If they were going to run off with the money they already should have by now. At this point it is really in their interest to finish the game.

It isn't a guarantee of course, but it seems much more likely now then it did when the games were initially funded.

greggman2• 14 years ago

I'm really curious if the people funding these projects have a good idea what they're going to get.

I know that creative and inspired teams can do great things but ... for example Wasteland asked for $900k which is barely a budget for a SNES game. What I assume people expect though is a Fallout 3 level game. I'm guessing Fallout 3 cost $10-15 million to make.

I don't know what the original Lucas adventure games costs to make in the early 90s. Double Fine asked for $1mill? I suspect that's close to what those original games cost. Things have changed. I'd argue it would be challenging to make those same games but at today's expected quality for the same price.

Of course I hope they all do great and the games all rock and there's certainly plenty of smaller awesome games to be made. FTL for example. But, for certain games, sequels, or games that are supposed to be very inspired by older games there are expectations I think the developers will have a hard time meeting.

rrreese3• 14 years ago

I backed Wasteland, and I'm expecting a game similar to Fallout 2 with modern graphics and probably little to no voice acting.

They're using unity so they making big savings right away, but are constrained with what that engine can do. And that's fine. I think most people who backed it want a game that's true to its roots rather then has the latest graphics etc.

Finally Kickstarter doesn't preclude additional funding sources. $900k might have gotten them half way there with the assumption that they can get additional sources of funding after that point. bear in mind that they will be getting sales to people other then current backers after they release.

I think the key thing though is that a small focused team, using an engine like Unity can get a lot done, and the constraints will be excepted by a community who is far more interested in a classic RPG then the latest graphics.

greggman2• 14 years ago

Engines are great but engines don't make games, people do. Mostly artist and designers. A typical AAA game is 80% non engineers.

Lots of AAA teams use existing engines like Unreal. It still takes them teams of 70 to 200 people a couple of years to make all that content.

My point is Unity may br great but it's not really the solving the harder issue in games, Asset Creation

As for expectations you might be right. Time will tell.

ergo145• 14 years ago

Actually I think that people pledging there know exactly what they will get. Especially if you bring FO3 and a SNES game into the discussion - then I'm affraid that Fallout 3 has less depth than many SNES games.

As I have personally pledged to some projects there I can tell you what I'm expecting from the projects. I want them to deliver good gameplay - and good gameplay equals good ideas - not great AAA visuals - and those cost a lot.

I've also backed Elite:Dangerous - they wanted 1.25kk pounds - a massive amount of money - Have you seen what did they manage to do with Frontier First Encounters? Check how many people worked on it, I estimate that given realistic expectation of what we might get - we can have massive value for our money out of kickstarter.

rrreese3• 14 years ago

Which SNES games have more depth then FO3? I understand a lot of people where disappointed with FO3 but this is a genuine question.

kayoone• 14 years ago

As long as everybody doesnt develop its own engine and tech i think alot of stuff has changed today that makes game development cheaper. There are alot of good engines (Unity3D for example) that can get you going pretty quickly and still have a mighty set of features and possibilities.

tmh88j2• 14 years ago

>for example Wasteland asked for $900k which is barely a budget for a SNES game

>the original Lucas adventure games costs to make in the early 90s. Double Fine asked for $1mill

I'm just curious, why are you comparing game development 20 years ago to current day standards? Is it just because games were much simpler back then?

One of the guys from Hello Games did an AMA on reddit a little while back (creators of Joe Danger) . While he didn’t give a dollar amount, he made it seem like it cost several hundred thousand to develop. For what it cost, I'd say those guys did an awesome job.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/117p42/i_quit_my_job_a....

lifeformed• 14 years ago

Dustforce dev here (http://dustforce.com). Our game cost around $100k to make. It was basically just living expenses for 4 people for 1.5 years.

geon• 14 years ago

> $900k which is barely a budget for a SNES game.

Just to be clear: Did you mean the budget for a SNES game back in the day, adjusted for inflation, or a new game today, with SNES quality?

DanBC• 14 years ago

It's a bit worrying when you see projects like the Yogscast game (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterkewlgames/yogventu...) - Yogscast have a young audience and I'm not sure they have any idea what happens in game development.

And I get the impression that a lot of people think game dev is just plugging a bunch of graphics into a game engine and a little bit of scripting, with some level design.

[1] Interesting to see that paypal froze a payment until they could be assured that a game was actually being released. There's not much information on the pre-order page (http://www.winterkewl.com/games/yogscast/) (and the forums link has an expired certificate).

illuminate4• 14 years ago

If you're concerned about the audience, wouldn't you be more worried about an 8 year old with direct access to a credit card?

Shorel2• 14 years ago

'Quality' is something different for different people.

For the big studios is about huge and complex environments that are indeed very costly to do. That's what sells in consoles for $59 a piece.

But they refuse to try to make any other kind of game that does not bring the same profits.

The end result is a series of similar games and no innovation in new genres or no new titles of other not so popular genres, because we want that but we are not profitable enough for the studios. Only Halo after Halo and Madden after Madden. We don't want that.

This is a dedicated group of people voting with their wallets to get something that the big AAA studios will not give them.

Different and engaging gameplay at a smaller scale than big budget games.

Of course the environments will not be as detailed as the big budget games. But the gameplay will be different.

The rules will be broken. We will get something like Braid, Limbo or Bastion. We will never get that with the Big Studios.

mattchew• 14 years ago

I backed Wasteland 2, and if I see voice acting with lip-synced animations I'll be disappointed at the waste of resources.

Like the other guy said, I'm expecting a play experience similar to Fallout 1/2.

However, if I end up getting nothing, that's OK. Backing a project on Kickstarter is a gamble. This is obvious to me but the rest of the world doesn't seem to get it. I can only hope that people adjust their expectations a little after a few spectacular splats, rather than, say, throwing around lawsuits and ruining the whole idea for everyone.

chucknelson• 14 years ago

Maybe someone can make a similar update list, but for kickstarter electronics (how is that OUYA going?).

julius• 14 years ago

Lets quickly add that all up. Roughly 24 million dollars in total have been raised for crowdfunded games (just the kickstarter projects mentioned in the article).

For how long have we been doing that? Is crowdfunding games a 2012 thing?

sami363• 14 years ago

Things changed dramatically after Tim Schaefer managed to raise 3 Mil $ for double fine adventure in Feb 2012. Since then, many games managed to raise above 1 Mil $, 9 actually per Kickstarter stats. Star Citizen, a flight sim, raised the most , 6 Mil $ just as of two weeks ago. Before that Project eternity was the record holder with 4.2 Mil $. Yeah, it's definitely a 2012 thing & if anything, it's acelerating.

shardling2• 14 years ago

Oh hey, they mention the one game I backed and have beta access to: Word Realms. (By the Kingdom of Loathing guys.)

It's basically a complete game at this point, just polishing and minor bug fixing left. (Well, maybe the devs secretly plan to add additional features, but certainly nothing feels missing.)

cdmoyer• 14 years ago

At least one feature is still locked out in the betas. ;). And it's pretty cool. Zack is going to give me a heart attack with the design though.

coroxout• 14 years ago

I'm glad to hear this is still coming along because I was interested in it and forgot to fund for a very stupid reason (I clicked "Fund" and then forgot to hit "confirm"). I've been sporadically checking the website, which has no news for non-funders, so it's good to know that I may soon be able to give them my money.

Kingdom of Loathing + word games = pretty much my dream combination.

adrianhon2• 14 years ago

Zombies, Run! wasn't covered in RPS' roundup, probably because we're smartphone only and were quite early - but we were the biggest videogame project of 2011 with $73k from 3500 backers.

Through a pretty herculean effort, we launched on time in February. Since then we've sold almost 250,000 copies across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and grossed somewhere in the region of $1.5 million.

So yeah, I'd say it's working for some people. Did backers know what they were going to get? I don't know, Zombies, Run! is a very original idea so we couldn't just say "It's like X but with Y." But they seem pretty happy as far as we can tell.

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

They state they only covered games with over 100k$

adrianhon2• 14 years ago

/me looks again

Yes, and just for 2012. Oh well!

shawnc• 14 years ago

I'm someone who didn't back the project (I've just never backed anything on KS - I'd love it if it offered paypal). But I bought it immediately upon release. And you guys fulfilled your promises and you've done a great job releasing more content.

Overall - really impressed by your product!

exterm• 14 years ago

More detailed progress updates for planetary annihilation are posted in their forums: http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=61 Look especially for post by project lead Jon Mavor aka neutrino

funksta• 14 years ago

He's also posted some good stuff at http://www.mavorsrants.com/. They have been pretty transparent about the dev process, they just haven't used Kickstarter updates as the primary medium for that.

louischatriot• 14 years ago

tldr: http://tldr.io/tldrs/50b76494ada40f0817000160

It seems to me that most of these problems are communication problems. You just got a backing of XXX hundreds of thousands of dollars and don't want to disappoint with some bad news, but that's a poor long term strategy. People are surprisingly forgiving if they feel like you're telling the truth and you're doing your best to make good on your promise.

aw3c22• 14 years ago

That tl;dr is not a representation of the actual content. You reduced it to the last few bullet points.

ajaimk• 14 years ago

Carmageddon: Reincarnation has already been released on iOS. They just put it as a free game on day 1 on the iOS store as there isn't a simple way to only give backers a game due to Apple's rules. Mac version coming soon maybe.

What bothers me reading through this is the rather pessimistic tone vs an objective one

mikecsh• 14 years ago

That's not true. The version released on iOS was a port of Carmageddon 2 and has nothing to do with reincarnation..

bvttf• 14 years ago

Lost interest the third time they said there were only updates for backers.

Yes, they should be providing more updates for the people who might buy it. I think the backer-only updates were listed as features since that was presumably one of the big draws of the doublefine kickstarter success.

But RPS: do some journalism and ask someone who did back it? Or email the project? For a story titled "where are they now", having half the entries be "they protected updates so dunno, lol" is annoying.

JonLim• 14 years ago

I came to make a similar comment, and am still reading my way through, but RPS seems to have a bias against updates only for backers.

In my opinion, the games that are still far from being released are doing just fine by not marketing themselves a little too early. If I'm not mistaken, games typically ramp up their marketing efforts much closer to actual release dates than during the development process.

Kickstarter enables a different method of capitalization, sure, but I think the game development process remains consistent as with other types of funding available to developers.

The Kickstarter Game Successes: Where Are They Now?

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