I wonder how many times people like Schaffer are going to get away with this just because they're "indie'.

Are you sure you really care more about that? :P

My KS experience:
- Knock-Knock - delayed, but I'm sure it'll make it sooner or later. My faith is still with Ice Pick Lodge.
- Torment - nothing makes me doubt those guys.
- A Vampyre Story: Year One - failed to reach the goal.
Don't think this will affect crowdfunding as it did with it's campaign.

the 400K project was apparently for short (maybe even 2h) flash or so game made by DF on the side while they work on other projects. it was never meant to be used for full fledged game.

this is what i heard on the internet. no idea how correct that is.



wonder what budget gemini rue had, Telltale MI games?
i like Britney spears. i never understand why people hate her.

Something to do with the period she shaved her head, I suppose. Once your reputation takes a hit, it is impossible to erase the past completely.

GR was (mostly) made by one man, on his free time, so if it had any budget, it wasn't much. But we have some information about equaly great Resonance:
Resonance Kickstarter Page

I already don't like the direction the game is heading in - the art style doesn't appeal to me AT ALL and feels more aimed towards teenagers instead of going for the people who actually funded the project.

For the funding to go so badly wrong despite getting such a huge amount of money, is just baffling. People wanted a solid adventure game - it didn't need all sorts of costly specials to make - even a game like Ben There Dan That which had a very low production cost would have been brilliant if taken to the old LucasArts standards. But no, let's blow 2 million and, apparently, need 6 million more to complete the game <.<.

Seriously, if games take such ridiculous amounts of money to be made, the games industry is fucked. Too much money goes towards stuff that isn't needed - most of what makes a good game, can be made cheaply anyway! Unless you pay your people high salaries (in which case they're in it for the money and not for the love of making games), no way it should come anywhere near 2 million dollars to make a low-tech but solid adventure game.

If they were linked with a publisher and announced this to the public everyone would be cheering Double Fine for increasing the project's size, but upset at the possibility of it not coming out.
Most of the anger would be with the publisher itself.

Instead we have a crowdfunded project that seemingly ineptly went over budget because it increased it's scale, and most of the anger seems to be coming from people who aren't even invested in it.

because someone worked for free it does not mean it didn't have budget.


Opportunity cost. By working for free how much he not earned if he spent that time on working for pay. add this to whatever was spent... wonder how much it was.

What board game Kickstarters are you looking at? A large number of them have been enormously late, or turned out to be disappointingly bland products that people likely wouldn't have spent the same amount on if they'd seen the rules before buying in. Some have been good games, but it's obvious why many of them were passed on by big board game publishers.

Video game Kickstarters have become all about nostalgia wrapped around classic developers. Board game Kickstarters have become all about stuffing as much extra crap in the box as possible. Neither much resembles the whole 'new ideas coming to light' part.

That's probably hard to calculate... But, another bit of trivia - I remember reading Dave Gilbert (who lives from running WEG) statment about second Blackwell game's budget being $800.

One of Kickstarter's greatest social achievements will be making investors out of everyday people.

The frustration everyone is experiencing now, as a result of this, is the same frustration that investors face when dealing with companies that have mismanaged investment or are not achieving results. The only difference is, with Kickstarter, you don't have the power to start replacing people or pressuring them to do their jobs in the context of what they are given.

If I was CEO of a small company and took investment to make my idea happen, investors expect results for their money. If I ran out of money, went back and asked again, I'd be lucky to have a 2 or 3 month window to start getting results before I get sidelined (aka fired or pushed aside, depending on how it was structured). They'd replace me with another CEO and get their results. Some see this as evil, but in light of what is happening here, I wonder if they'd still think the same thing.

If this happened and they took 'real' investment, people would start being replaced or demoted and someone with the ability to make it happen on budget would be put in charge. I can understand projects that raised $80k or even $300k going over time and over budget, but not for $3m. I understand games are expensive to make (art, music, licensing, etc), but for $3m+, they should have been able to make it happen, far more has been done with far less. This smells of mismanagement and lack of oversight.

It almost makes me wish that Kickstarter had a pledge threshold where, once reached, some oversight was provided on projects, similar to what you'd have with a company and real investments.

Let's see :

- they run out of money
- they will castrate the game
- the game will be released in two parts
- Act 1 will be released in January 2014 on Steam ( Early Access )

Apples, oranges. You only increase the scale if you can afford it. The money they had, was set right from the start. Unlike many devs, they knew exactly how much they could spend so they had all the cards faced up on the table. Let's look at the facts:

- they got many MANY times the budget they wanted.
- they are fully in charge of what to fund, how to fund it and how much to fund it.
- they have full knowledge of every aspect since there's no publisher involved.
- they have full freedom of which direction to head in so no publisher making them do u-turns on certain aspects

Basically, they had an IDEAL situation for making a brilliant game - they had the funds as well - and the end result is a game that will take many times longer to complete (which is fine by me) but also several times the truly MASSIVE budget it already received!!!

On top of all this, most people I talk to, didn't demand a top-end adventure game with fancy animations and suchlike. They wanted a charming adventure game in the old Lucas Arts style with wonky graphics, witty and funny dialogue and some good puzzles. What I've seen of the game so far, is the wrong kind of wonky for starters so I'm not holding my breath to even get a game anywhere near what I expected IF it ever gets released.

Yeah, the smaller projects can turn out to be bland and nothing special, but for example, Zombicide? One of the biggest board games kickstarters ever and one of the most successful games?

It even got published in Poland by a regular publisher! And it's a major hit even though it's expensive as hell.