What went wrong?

A small number of wealthy backers with a contract agreement and a single focused agenda also proves to provide better oversight for a project.

Established corporate investors are often in their position precisely because they've been trained and educated how to spot potentially profitable ventures. The average person has not been trained as easily to spot scams so naturally kickstarter is more abusable because the average person is more easily conned than somebody who has run a company that has managed to make millions off of smart investments and has trained a whole cadre of yuppies to sniff out scams or just bad ideas and survive in the dog-eat-dog competitive capitalist world.

In the case M#9, I think also a lot of people wanted to stick it to Capcom.

I also think there's been a serious mystification of the independent game development scene. A lot of people have this impression that independents "mom & pops" are less likely to scam people.

This. Any project with "stretch goals" is basically saying "This is going to be an unfinished product no matter how much money you give us."

Sure, you are not a trained corporate invester, but then again you are also not playing with money that you can't afford to lose (at least, nobody SHOULD be doing that). If you don't understand that, you probably have a lot more things to worry about than just kikestarter taking advantage from you. We should accept some risks in life and even relatively stupid people should be able to take some risks.

First, people with more money than sense look at kickstarter as being a pre-order website or a vidya store, rather than the investment that it is, so they pay into the scheme thinking that it's guaranteed that they'll get the product at the end with no regard put to how reliable the project leaders are.
Second, kickstarter markets itself as an investment, but you don't get anything in return for your investment other than maybe a half-hearted game. You're really better off actually investing in the company and making bank from your shares.
Lastly, it's clearly weighted towards the people setting up the project, in that it's remarkably easy to just never deliver the product, or to deliver something shitty for a fraction of the investment. It's inherently anti-consumer and I'm pretty sure the only way to get your money back is through a charge-back or a class action lawsuit.

It's always fun when a Kickstarter finishes and some corporation comes along and buys them off, you're a retard if you still fall into this shit.

That's kind of the big problem though. You have a large number of inexperienced and untrained investors with lots of disposable income combined with people who probably are begging on the streets more or less for handouts but who are not under any corporate pressure to actually produce a product or who are in that position precisely because the corporate investors got tired of their crap. Keiji Inafune is just example but people were so focused on "big ebil Capcom" that they ignored the obvious.

I think Kickstarter would be a great idea for very small projects which could then be pitched to larger investors, but when you have people who can set a 500,000 dollar goal for a final product and get 2-5 million dollars with just some pretty presentation and no actual product to and no contractual obligation to return that money should they not deliver the product, it's almost like snake oil salesman of the Wild West taking advantage of stupid people.

Giving money to a company that have no real reason to give you finished product when even large companies have problems with finishing some of their products.

Double Fine managed to make Psychonauts good because people pushed them to do that and most companies of Kickstarter are much worse than Double Fine. No surprise it fails.

It is absolutely possible for it to be good, even through I am unsure if Divnity or Obsidian just used it as glorified pre-order instead of needing a fund boost.
Still a site that have something like 1/3 of gaming projects never finished is no good in any way or form.

Except the snake oil isn't produced yet, but with your money it will be, Swear my snake oil on it :^)

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Just like most things, it's not the service itself but the people that abuse it. Instead of it helping artists secure money to do a print run or board game designers get set up with the means of production you end up with pie-in-the-sky ideaguy faggots who say they're going to make an MMO with bigger scope than WoW for $200k in six months. And people fucking believe them. Who's at fault there? The hustlers or the idiots that fall for it?

I'd say the same thing about Patreon. The service itself is fine but it's used as hipster welfare, SJW cliques to distribute wealth amongst them and "I have a vagina, give me money" whores.

I kind of agree with you that things like getting a lot more money than at first asked for as well as endless "stretch goals" may very well be something that ends up decreasing the quality of products (and the ability to become reality). Perhaps it would be better if the amount they ask for is both the minimum as well as the maximum goal, and they simply make a new project based on the previous one once they delivered. I especially dislike how sites like indiegogo have "flexible goals" which mean you get the money even if the goal is not reached, which should just not happen, if you make a project, the amount you ask should be the minimum to make your project a success, why else would you ask for that amount of money? Thats just pure greed and giving scammers a very easy way of scamming dimmer people out of their money.

I also think we should not look too much to the early projects were some huge bullshit got funded. Those times have kind of passed with only every now and then a dodgy project getting through the nets. Its a lot more stable now, in my opinion.

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So many jews, hipsters, sjw getting their free money and I didn't get 1 cent out of any of these crowdfunding platforms.

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the nose knows

Kickstarter would be ideal for someone who say has already written a book, has a manuscript and just needs a few extra hundred dollars or so to print a few copies to sell at a convention or present to bigger publishers. With respect to video games, it would work great with someone who has a small scale idea and simply wants 1,000 dollars to help him make a short beta of a game and a series bible which he can pitch to a bigger studio.

But when you have someone who was just fired from the previous big company he was working for, or who hasn't made anything in years, or who hasn't made anything before and has no experience saying they want 200,000 dollars to "revolutionize a whole industry", you get shit like the Ouya. You also have the cancerous, money-grubbing, highschool clique culture of indie developers who are using these avenues of social media, crowdfunding & Steam precisely because they want to make quick money without a whole lot of effort (vid somewhat related)

It's not an investment, it's a gamble. If you are lucky, it in fact becomes a pre-order, with anything that you paid above the pre-order tier being a donation.

The only game that I'm aware of where backers were actually investing on it is Project Cars, since they actually got paid dividends.

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Having the minimum also be the maximum is definitely helpful, but one huge problem is the general lack of actual knowledge of how much the product will cost, which is something endemic to kickstarter most of the time.

Vague idea of the cost of the product + Ignorant backers + no contractual obligation or corporate pressure to bring the product to completion within a set amount of time with a set amount of money= lots of wasted time & money for mediocre products that cost more than they should or where most of the money given to the project was spent on some other shit without the backers' consent with the backers unable to take legal action to get their money back

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Kickstarter is a good idea in concept but a bad idea in practice due to those in charge of KS wanting money and not setting up enough security measures. Frankly I think what was mentioned by a developer a while back would be best for Kickstarter. Milestones.

Milestones would fix a lot of kickstarter issues, so that a full demo is required to get the first installment of cash, then get maybe 25-30% done before the next payout from the kickstarter purse, etc. It'd fix Kickstarters easily abused system.

You're shitposting and baiting, but what you said highlights a lot of the actual issues in gaming. Some developers are greedy, some are no talent liberal social signalling types and some are good but often social signallers anyway. Kickstarter has also brought out the majority of developers poor financing plan which often leads to half finished games.

As bad as publishers can sometimes be, crowdfunding has made a lot of people realize that the idea that the corporate execs are the worst is kind of a myth. For all their flaws, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Capcom, Square-Enix, etc. have gotten where they are because, generally speaking, they know how to run a business and know how to spot talent or potential and if they have sometimes crushed our dreams, the ability & freedom to crush those dreams at least has been necessary to their survival in the industry and has allowed them to exercise the utmost discrimination in picking out projects worth people's time.

Didn't Planetary Annihilation turn out to be trash?

Yeah, boo to stretch goals. Booooo.

At the very least they could let you choose which stretch goals you actually want to push for, I hate it when you couldn't care less about, say, the first three, but the fourth sounds nice. Bloodstained was a perfect example of that.

Agreed user. Which is a shame because obviously Kickstarter wants these million dollar projects too, since they get a slice of it. So you get this snowballing where Kickstarter promotes bigger projects, so they get more attention and funding, and so on.

Like said: if anything it's highlighted just how fucking bad some devs are with budgets and timelines. It's no wonder publishers are sick of them.

Only partially. My honest opinion on it is that Holla Forums is just jaded as fuck and has severe rose tinted glasses for the past. 20 years ago, you were fucking lucky to have 3 great games come out a year for your system of choice that you liked, and even then, games were often buggy and had poor quality control. I'm not even that fucking old and I remember this.

Nowdays, great games come out literally every few days, but Holla Forums is too fucking stuck up and jaded to realize it and how far we've come from bugs and no polish being commonplace and loads of shovelware to where we are now.

The industry isn't perfect but it's a hell of a lot better then it used to be, but as a result the standards for what makes a game has risen exceptionally to where in order to not be a shit a game has to score 10/10s.I fucking remember when a 7/10 was considered a good score.

The industry isn't ruined or being ruined, Holla Forums just has impossibly high standards, and uses every excuse possible to try to pin the blame of the apparent lack of good games, to publishers to fundraising, to whatever, except for their own skewed perception. I'll admit that there's a lot less variety and innovation on the AAA side of things, but that's about it

I agree, though I think where we are now is a great balance. You have publishers and the AAA side of things for huge fucking projects and that extra layer of polish at the cost of creative control, or you can do it yourself via crowdfunding and you get full creative control, but then you risk not getting the funding you really needed.

WELL, THE SANDWICH STORE NEAR MY HOUSE TURNED INTO A FRANCHISE, SO NOW THEY ONLY MAKE BLAND AND EXPENSIVE STUFF

SOME HIPSTER DUDE OPENED A STORE DOWN THE STREET THAT SUPPOSEDLY SELLS THE KIND OF SANDWICH I USED TO HAVE, BUT WHEN I WENT IN THERE WAS ONLY BREAD, AND WHEN I ASKED FOR SOMETHING ON MY SANDWICH THEY WOULD CALL THE COPS ON ME BECAUSE THEY FELL THREATENED

MORAL OF HISTORY IS THAT INDEPENDENT BUSYNESS THAT IS INCAPABLE OF MEETING PROMISED STANDARDS HAS NO MORE WORTH THAN DONE TO DEATH, FRANCHISED, BLAND FUCKING VIDEOGAMES, OR SANDWICHES, OR ANYTHING

It failed because only scam artists picked up the trend, as talented content creators don`t need a scheme to make themselves notice, their work speak for itself

Kickstarter gave the impression that you were making an investment without any of the protections. You were basically throwing your money at ideas hoping they would become reality, rather than funding the creation of an actual product.

Nowadays there are crowdfunding websites where you can get the protections and garuntees for your money that other investors do.

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You see, you have to use words, implying that I am baiting is not enough to refute what I said

kill yourself

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The industry is far from better. Graphics have just gotten prettier, often to the detriment of creativity and unique gameplay. Oftentimes every game in its genre plays exactly the same compared to the PS1 or N64 era where games tried to be different and maximized fun over looks or narrative. Vidya nowadays could do with the love that was shown 20 years ago. It's one of the few good things about KS, developers are allowed to risk things and make older styled games like POE, Shadowrun or Shovel Knight.

Uh huh. Prove it.

This nigger gets it.

Stretchgoals trick idiots into dumping money into a project because it makes them feel like they are part of something bigger, like they are accomplishing something by tossing money are worthless projects and enabling talentless shitstains to make a living doing nothing.

Even without stretchgoals, I think we might still have this moronic culture of people donating to projects out of spite. Like those idiots who donated to Sarkeesian twice because they thought it would hurt us and "fight sexism".

This lead to KS's having an abysmally low target and not being able to produce the product even after getting twice the amount.

Those are some of the reason I can think of atm, but I'm sure there are more.

Kickstarter kind of reminds me how financial aid works. A lot of times you get more financial aid than you need, people don't always spend it on school and they aren't really motivated to limit what they spend it on cause it ain't their money and nobody's really gonna punish them for spending it on vidya instead of school books (which they just bought on amazon for three times less anyway, leaving them plenty of extra cash to dick around with)

Epic :D

I'm glad you like it. You have my permission to copy it on your computer ;^)

So did anyone in here try to attempt any scam projects or well-meaning projects, but never succeeded?

I never got to make a kickstarter because I didn't have an eligible bank account and debit card in the US. Paypal is garbage.

it's the same as private venture capital investing but exposed to the general public with no protections and no return.

it's a honeypot for the financially retarded.

ok, I just shit on it for this very reason but… it's both.
it's an extreme case of caveat emptor, a backee should approach crowd funding like a charity, not an "investment." I backed Xenonauts for example, because I really wanted to see the project happen.
I also backed Takedown: Red Saber and I don't regret it. It was charity to a genre I love, and their biggest mistake was asking for too little funding.

If you read my whole post I said that theirs definitely less innovation and variety. But my point is is that virtually every game that comes out of a publisher nowadays is, if rated objectively at least an 8/10 or better.

Holla Forums has just raised the bar for what you need to be good to be like a 9.5/10 in response, so if it's not virtually perfect, it's shit.

Absolutely, and that's why I think the system we have no is good. Publishers put out polished games that are guaranteed to at least be good (well, on console, PC gets scraps, sadly) but are often bland and don't have much spirit, and then you have indies putting out a ton of varied experimental shit, some of which isn't great, some of which are gems.

I don't know how I really can do that other then pointing at steam and other digital platforms.

Nothing really. In the beginning KS ran into legal troubles because they advertised themselves as an investment platform.

Now the small letters say that if you put funding into a KS campaign you're a dumb retard who loses his money.

Don't blame Kickstarter. Blame the people who use it.

Nothing could posssibly go wrong with a platform intended to give people free money for nothing.

This

Obviously not all Stretchgoals are bad when they make sense but usually it's all bollocks.

I disagree. Do you know how many great jrpgs the PlayStation 2 had?

Blog time:

I don't enjoy online cancer and social media. This industry is leaving me behind.

I would compare the relationship between publishers & developers to the industry relationship between pimps & whores.

whenever you have a situation where you have a gaggle of hoes and no pimps to keep them in line, the result is usually disastrous from an industry perspective. Why? Because either the hoes never make as much money as they could because they're just dumb ass, skanky hoes who may know how to please scumbags with very low and easily satisfied tastes, but don't know what they're worth, either valuing themselves too high or even too low, or the johns themselves get conned by a bunch of greedy, money hungry sluts who never give consistent quality of sexual services and sometimes take their money without giving any services.

Pimps, ie publishers, have two jobs: make money & make sure the johns are given a consistent quality of service that keeps them coming back so that the pimp and his hoes have a consistent income.

Independent game developers using crowdfunding services like kickstarter or indie go-go are not like small scale publishers who provide a more free ground to work albeit with a more limited market and set of resource, rather this combination is more like a bunch of hoes who may or may not have any pimping experience trying to pimp for themselves without being smacked by anyone, whether it is for just having attitude or for conning johns out of their money, which makes them complain and causes the pimp to lose cheddar. Whether it's a small, local business or a big corporation, businesses always work better when the creative element is kept in check by a more rational, money-minded element who deals with a strong, paternalistic hand and puts himself between the consumer and his employees. Kickstarter and other services like Steam that make publishing so easy makes it so a hoe can give you a handjob for the price of oral or anal sex, or even allows to her to just simulate sex for you and charge you like you're actually getting some. It's really insane when a service makes an industry like prostitution seem like it has better ways of ensuring quality control.

Explain this. You mean AAA games like FO4, Skyrim, and other things? Give me, say, 5 - 10 games that you mean by this.

First off, what "objective measure"? I do agree in that there is objective quality to games, but I want you to define it.

Secondly, give me an example of what a 0/10, 5/10, and 10/10 game would look like (or if this is logarithmic, a 1/10, and 9/10 instead)

I'd still pound it

stretch goals and con artists like Tim Schafer taking advantage of the platform.

Nothing, it was always a shit platform.

Publishers are evil. There is no doubt of this. They are however, a necessary evil. You can't let the idea guy run the budget. That way lies madness.

Losers with no sense of project management bite off more than they can chew. Pretty simple actually

Things you need to make a good game:

Things you don't need to make a game:

Seriously anyone who pledges to a pixelshit game on kickstarter with a goal of $10000 is asking to be meme'd on.

So the pimp analogy works then

Fundraising isn't bad but the main problem is that you have devs either not delivering what they promised, or is making a barebones product so they can cash in on the retards of the internet who throws money at everything they see. Shitty people who makes these kind of games are the main reason indie games have a shady reputation in the first place.

Also I'm sure there's good developers out there making wonderful games but the shit that's going on with fundraising needs to end.

So…all I have to do to get rich on YouTube is complain about video games for 15 minutes straight, make funny faces and slightly(if at all) funny commentary?

That sounds really easy…

How's your channel coming along, user?

fuck i meant to make a new thread

Stop making shit threads

The closest analogy to the current "indie game boom" today is probably the time of the video game crash of 80's. I'm not saying we're necessarily in a crash right now, but there are some parallels in how the indie game scene has resulted in a bigger saturation of the market.

In the 80's, when the crash happened, you had a whole lot of games made for cheap but which were by and large of very low quality and many of them were simply rip-offs of more popular games that sometimes had worse mechanics, some of were simply quick cash-grabs by people who saw a market that was easy to get into, and there were some good games sprinkled in there that either earned notoriety or didn't. And the average consumer of course was pleased with the availability of cheap as hell games. The Android market and the indie game scene has created a similar though not identical situation.

There is an overwhelming mystique assigned to the independent video game scene that often makes it seem as if the indie scene is somehow more pure of heart and returning back to raw gaming, but that's not necessarily the case

The vast majority of independent developers lack talent, lack business experience, or are in fact only in the industry to make a quick buck because it's so easy to make a cheap 3.99 game and put on the Google Play app store or Steam and will even go so far as to throw creativity out the window and just imitate greater works for this purpose. There are some indie titles that stand out, but they stand out precisely because they are by people who take their job seriously and have an actual vision coupled with talent and aren't just looking to make quick dollars off impulse buys or off their dependable network youtube subscribers and blog followers who will buy it no matter how mediocre it is just to support their friend.

best post

what the fuck happened here

idk ask Inafune

NEVER EVER EVER

I wonder if I could make a well-handled crowdfunding site myself exclusively for video games and with all sorts of restrictions.

10k - for a short demo trailer
50k - for a short playable demo
100k - for the game

Anything above 100k will not be allowed unless you already have a working game which fans enjoy.

And even then I'd micro-manage and check what the user is doing with all that cash.
I'd make him keep his money on my own website's version of paypal where I could very easily take away his money along with checking if he's blowing it on hookers and drugs.