I wonder why so many people are so strongly for Kickstarter projects, when not a single game was finished yet.

People really like the idea that they are personally helping fund something they want. They feel like they've actually done something good (when instead they've only clicked a few butons and entered their credit card number).

And they did something good. If it helps bringing old franchises back, and making games big developers doesn't want anymore, it would be great.

But I would wait with the enthusiasm until first big kickstarter project is finished and is not a big failure.

I am worried that in most cases these games will be developed for like 2-3 years, and people will loose patience or interest in them...

I didn't read past your statement here. But I wanted to share my EA-hate story.

I got a new hockey game to play with my brother. A few months after I got it, EA decided that enough people didn't play it, so they pulled the plug on their servers. But they have no way to actually direct connect to play the game. You can only play on their servers. So I paid for a game that was only a year and a half old -- still sold on the shelves -- and they yanked their servers shortly thereafter.

Now, I understand that they can pull servers. I understand that it's their right to pull servers and that I agreed to allow them to do it after my purchase. And now they need to understand that the $200+ I tended to spend on them every year is gone. And I hope that others that get burned do the same.

There's the primary source of my EA hate.

I should also say that my blacklist only goes so far. Sometimes I accidentally buy EA products without thinking about it (I bought a ME2 DLC -- some of that $ surely goes to EA). But I do my best to keep my money going into their hands while I patiently wait for 2K or someone else to come out with a good hockey game with direct-connect capability.

Can't you play NHL 09 by hamachi?

It's on my XBOX. I wonder if you could still link up by a router some how, though. Hmmm. I bet google knows!

Oh, console game. Then I don't know.

I still could play NHL 09 by hamachi with my friend on PC.

They all still CHOSE to sell to EA. The way some of you people go on ad on, you'd think they were forced at gunpoint, for fuck's sake.
It will happen. Kickstarter has been going in the board game industry for a couple of years already, and the amount of constant complaining about any small delay is insane.

Of course, some of it is caused by completely unknown entities who totally overestimated what they were capable of making in a certain amount of time. And that's also going to be an issue in the computer/video game Kickstarters. Some of these groups are brand new to making games. They don't know how to completely set a project budget. They don't know what goals are realistic for what time frame.

He asked why people hated EA, I provided the reasons, simple enough.
You'd think the early studios who sold to EA had any idea of what is going to happen: Origin, Westwood, Bullfrog etc. Though yeah I agree that Bioware's to blame for being greedy. I'm no longer a fan of them anyways.

And you of courser know that those studios were still financially viable and had plenty of original ideas and new products ready to go? No, you don't. Nobody does. But this blind assumption that of course they were viable if it wasn't for that evil EA is just childish and silly.

My understanding of the whole Bioware thing (and I could well be wrong), is that they were owned by the private equity firm Elevation Partners (there was this middle company VG holding corp, but it seems they were owned almost completely by Elevation Partners). It's the job of a private equity firm to sell when a deal is profitable, those kinds of firms are never long term owners.

So BioWare didn't sell out, they just never really owned themselves.

I'll cheer when the behemoth known as EA is out of business.

Unfortunately, the dudebros that keep buying every iteration of sports games will keep them afloat for a bit yet.

If those developers felt they had any long term viability staying on their own, they would have. The fact that they didn't and sold to EA IS their doing. And again, if those studios cease to be producing anything profitable for any period of time (Pandemic being a prime example of that), is the corporation supposed to keep them open for nostalgia purposes? Had Pandemic remained independent while releasing as many bombs as they did (and by the way, while Saboteur's release date was pushed up, Mercenaries 2 was pushed back multiple times. And it was still a mess), they would have ceased to exist anyway. There's a good chance a lot of those studios would have gone under. Okay, you've got me there. Agreed. :)

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170623/Report_EA_loses_lead_developer_for_topsecret_AAA_social_game.php

IT

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