AwesomeOcelot

Yes, I see it the FAQ now, I usually use search for answers but KickStarter for some reason hides FAQ answers. I didn't say it was. So the hi-res and the non-hi-res is the same resolution but you'll have to extract it from a PDF? Well I guess that's OK if it's not particularly useful for playing the game. The physical rewards get additional copies, the digital rewards don't apart from one tier at $80. $65 is barebones compared to $50 apart the $20 additional add-on you'd have to get for them to be comparable, but I imagine that the postage and packing, the physical items that have to be made, make up around 20% of that (at least that's around what the DFA rewards were). So for paying more for the digital you're getting 3 extra novellas and hi-res concept art that if I understand it right, comes with the $8 add on digital concept art book. The $80 tier vs the $125 seem fair, you're paying less for the same in digital plus you get beta access, you're funding the game more in proportion, but the $130 vs $275, and the $350 vs $525 I don't think come close considering the physical gets nearly all the digital rewards as well. If you take out the costs for the physical rewards and the funding for an equivalent digital tier that is mostly there with the physical reward, that's around $70 or $90 for the physical rewards. Unless people planned to donate beyond their reward level anyway, it makes no sense to get a digital reward above the $80 tier, even if you live outside the US, as far as I can tell. Beta access add on is $20.

The rewards are a bit confusing, probably too complicated. Not a fan of the soundtrack being a reward, especially not in MP3 V0, I'm just going to rip it from the game. Hi-res map and concept art as separate rewards? Why is the concept art book low-res? Isn't a map coming with the players guide or manual, why wouldn't it be hi-res? Digital reward only tiers don't seem to compare well to the physical tiers, especially considering that physical copies cost a lot more than bandwidth.

The questions for a backer is are a) will they deliver, b) will it work. Innovation is not good or bad, bias towards what's worked in past is only logical. I'd rather have something that works than something that's new. Broad concepts aren't the problem, selling people on city management isn't hard, actually convincing people that it can be delivered is another thing. If something is innovative and works, developers need to prove it with a prototype, release it as a demo before launching a campaign for a full game, build from small to big. Stabs in the dark aren't going to favoured in any form of funding, it's the not the best use of resources if you want plenty of good games. I think people would be willing to fund small amounts for prototyping an interesting innovative concept. It's harder to sell a good book on storytelling, there's no getting around that, you have to appeal to previous works of the creator and popularity, you just have to give books a shot. Planescape: Torment would be a hard sell to crowd fund now, but actually I think there's room for that type of innovation in projects that are sold on completely different terms, just by virtue of having unknown but amazing writers.

Overlord, or squishy imp babysitting simulator. This is an incredibly fun and unique game. The writing is great, story, dialogue, characters spot on, the setting is a bit generic and while the maps are way more open and unlike corridors than a lot of other games, they're a bit small. There's a mixture of clever gameplay involving combat puzzles. The combat is surprisingly good, but really simple, you've got to get your positioning right and attack at the right time. Imps are so vulnerable and stupid though, you've got to really be on your toes. Love the looting mechanic, imps loot weapons and armour that they use, it's really cool. It's a charming game you should at least try. There's an annoying farm (also literally a farm) for "life force" to get more imps, it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the same areas all the time because ransacking different places with imps to get resources would have been fun, seeing an imp mount a sheep and bash it in the head was fun the first 100 times. I would have liked to see this part expanded upon, been able to target farms and towns that were not my followers, on raids. It would have been nice to also been able to dedicate imps to this, so as to get an income of life force that's lower but gets you out of the farming and onto the missions. The control system is hilariously bad, but it's clearly a game that needed to be mouse driven but was designed for gamepad, it's amazing that it works at all, clearly the devs are talented, but it's completely futile. This game should have been isometric with a Warcraft 3 style control scheme, or at least a World of Warcraft control scheme, then it could have been a masterpiece. You can't really target anything, you can lock on to some things more by luck than judgement, other things get locked onto that you can't see and are in another room. Would have loved AI to auto target and bring me resources. I tried Overlord 2 but wasn't feeling it in terms of story or style, clubbing baby seals and hippy elves was a nice touch though, gameplay was way too much "more of the same" for me while not really improving anything.

I don't see the problem, that's still early bird, it's just in multiple stages.

Early bird rewards are used for a number of reasons, in this case and a lot of the time it's for momentum, since a lot of backers tend to hang back, but successful campaigns get a bonus in "me too" backers and visibility.

FTL, I didn't back it but bought it afterwards, pretty much a must buy for the price. Chivalry, I haven't got around to playing but it's a highly successful KickStarter funded game. From the gameplay videos they nailed medieval melee multiplayer, it's amazing what they achieved with little money and time. Gianna Sisters: Twisted Dream I backed, it's a great game if you like 2D platformers, one of the best, if you don't then it's probably not the best entry point. All available on Steam, FTL and Gianna I believe also on GoG. Is that really all there is so far? I don't know of any others, so I'm going to have to watch this thread.

It might have been a good game but they've destroyed it through DRM and the business model. They want the WoW factor of making a commitment to play with your friends, but they've clearly only done this for business reasons, shoe horning in arbitrary co-op that could easily just be single player, it's the opposite of Minecraft in this respect. It might have been a great game, if you could play it and it didn't force co-op. They could easily enable single player, by not pausing cities although with their server load issues at the moment that's probably a bad idea. They've apparently disabled the fastest setting because it was putting too much pressure on servers. There is no good reason for this game to be always online.

A mid sized studio could probably function quite nicely on $3m a year, but it's questionable whether even Brian Fargo will get $3m on a third project. While number of backers and funding is going up overall on KickStarter, competition for those funds is also going up, and while Fargo has an advantage there's only so many old franchises to be resurrected. A couple of hundred thousand sales with 30% going to the online retailer, credit processing, bandwidth, is going to be a lot better than what developers usual get for sales which is nothing. That's $2-4m at $20 at a low estimate? They're going to have money fights and start "making it rain".

Look what can be accomplished when you don't blow 80% of your budget and have 60 man teams working on graphics, animations, and cutscenes. The game looks great, it looks like it has great gameplay, everything is even better than expected.

I couldn't back Project Awakened because they talked about how good the PC platform is and how they loved PC gamers, but they shopped this game around to publishers as a console game for the next generation (PS4, next Xbox), stilling calling it a console game on their site as the KickStarter campaign launched. Their campaign page was filled with marketing speech. To back a KickStarter you have to have some trust in the people, and these people were making it hard to trust them. Which makes all that "modding" business seem like complete bull****. I didn't see what all the fuss was about. Yes. I believe it was called Hero. As Duke Nukem and Colonial Marines have shown us, when games go through various iterations and take a long time to be released, they're bound to be good.

Victory: Now with gameplay video. Not going to lie, this seems pretty uninspired. Setting is WWII, art style is realism, gameplay is very familiar. Why would someone play this over Dawn of War II or Company of Heroes 2? Also Death Inc. did not get funded. After playing the demo, completed it after twice running into a game breaking bug, I'm not sure the control scheme was ever going to work, and it was solving a problem that didn't really exist. Was it really superior to Starcraft 2's control system in anyway? No. I liked the concept and the art style a lot, but I don't really think they ever demonstrated they could deliver enjoyable gameplay mechanics.

Victory by Petroglyph Games, another studio with unsurpassed RTS pedigree (C&C, Red Alert, Red Alert 2 are definitely in my top 10 fav RTS). They say it's not a RTS because it has no base building or resource management. It has in-game currency and levelling for more powerful units which I'm not a fan of in multiplayer games. Do people actually want this? I'm not sure. Frank Klepacki soundtrack, definitely want more of that.

I couldn't stand Soul Reaver or the various lock on bull**** combat games that were so prevalent on consoles. Darksiders 2 reminded me a lot of it. I wouldn't mind them so much if they had a little more depth to them like Dark Souls or DmC, but they always seemed like button mashers where timing wasn't required so much. I'm also a bit bitter about them because the adoption of that combat gameplay ruined many a platformer and action adventure game for me. Aligning, trends, immersive, tablet? No thanks.

There has to be a bit of marketing. Lets not kid ourselves, developers create packages full with marketing to pitch a game to publishers. The early bird thing I think is not about "deals" it's about momentum mostly and people who might not be able to commit much money getting a chance. If you raise $1m in 7 hours then the media is going to take notes, early bird helps that, some reward tiers might come into range of people. Kickstarter is more like a "pay what you want" pre-order service that happens to help fund the game upfront, and I think that's a great model. I think the "honest discussion" is way more down to personality regardless of funding model, but whether people are allowed to talk without a PR machine in front of them or not is down to funding model. I don't think KickStarter has changed since Double Fine Adventure.

InXile made Choplifter HD and The Bard's Tale (2004), while pretty fun and worth the price they weren't exactly master pieces. Like with Wasteland 2 they've brought people in that we can trust. The footage of Wasteland 2 was impressive, really a job well done so far. The concept art on the campaign page looks great, perfect even.

If you cut out the shell parts and just had the face I wouldn't even think that was meant to be a ninja turtle. I didn't bother with TMNT since the original cartoon, my childhood nostalgia for it remains intact, it shall not be defiled, just like Transformers, unless they bring the 80's with them, I'm not interested.

That's such bull****. Fans: I want X! *Publisher funds Y, names it X* Fans: X wasn't a third person cover shooter with QTE, why does Y have the same name as X? Publisher: Muhahahahahaha. So many publishers and developers ****ting on franchises they couldn't even attempt to create themselves.

Any multiplayer, not just MMO. It's hard to judge that beforehand, if not impossible. How do you know a really good looking set of armour is overpowered until you've discovered what you'd also get without the pre-order bonus? Until you've played the game you wouldn't know. It also means you have to actively research these bonuses before even playing, if I pre-order or get a GOTY/ultimate version, I don't want to read about items so I know to avoid them. Also what happens when inevitably, and I think this has already happened, when the scummiest of publishers decide to balance the game toward the DLC/pre-order bonus?

Finally got around to playing Bulletstorm. It's two games, a competent shooter with a wide selection of fun varied weapons and nice fast simple gameplay, and then there's the other game, that's full of QTE, rail shooting, press Q, R or Space to do something, unskippable in-game cutscenes, and other bull****. If I were to give an example of what's wrong with modern games, I'd probably say Bulletstorm, but that's probably because I don't plan on ever playing Duke Nukem Forever. It's too linear, I don't get to explore or find my own way, I'm presented with only an illusion of anything but a corridor. I blame consoles for much of this, because gamepad's are so bad at FPS they can't make a straight up FPS you want as little shooting as you can get away with (the game defaults with aim assist) and they haven't got the memory to have large detailed maps. The macho dumb bull**** and "epic" "massive" scenes with explosions and giant things don't do it for me either. It's crazy that the people behind Unreal Tournament and Painkiller can come up with this crap. That stuff about going back to the good old days of FPS is a complete lie.

People keep saying this but a used game sale gives as much money to the publisher as an illegally copied game, and look at the lengths publishers were willing to go to try and stop that. Sony have already said they'll let publishers implement their own systems, and if they didn't then the PS4 would look like the Wii and Wii U, devoid of 3rd party games. Sony and Microsoft lose money on console hardware, they're not going to care that people who don't buy their games aren't going to buy their consoles. There's ways of letting people use their copies over a friend's house and all the other objections I've heard while still killing used games. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft make the disc locking "feature" optional for publishers and users, but with incentives like free DLC and anti-theft. Are the people who buy new games going to be upset and boycott the next Xbox? I don't think so. How about the many PC gamers who also own consoles? I doubt it. If it's true that they'll lose sales over this they'll have seen this in advance, and will plan to offset the losses by competing on service or price. Think of the money being made by retail on used games, even if Microsoft were to get 30% of that market, that'll be more revenue than they'd ever likely lose from this move. PC gaming is not suffering because you can't sell used games. PS3 games are not suffering because you have to pay for an "online pass" which is pretty similar concept to disc locking.

One set of players is going to get a badly balanced game. So far it's mostly been the people who pay more but that's probably going to change, some single player games have apparently followed the multiplayer free-to-play models in having a needless boring grind that you can buy your way out of. It's complicated when the unbalanced things you can buy look better, they come bundled with fun things, or come bundled with the GOTY/ultimate edition. A lot of these things would have been available in a console, it incentivises getting rid of command lines, and actively discouraging modding. It's just bad game design all round, this produces worse games.

That's only adding a shortcut in Steam, and they can't verify you own it unless they make a deal with the publisher so they're not going to add it to your account, that would be exploited to all hell.

If that's true, and I doubt it, then what you're saying is a) if Steam hadn't existed we would have been dominated by Battle.net, Uplay, Games for Windows Live, and Origin years ago, and b) that Steam bundling with games was a necessary component. Doesn't that leave us with what has happened as the much better scenario? Look how they are now, imagine what they would have been like without competition from Steam, left to their own devices. You can't really say that people who already had Steam from Counter-Strike or Half-Life 2 wouldn't have chosen Steam over Direct2Drive, it's nowhere near as sure as you're making out.

The sales generate massive profit, the increase of units sold make price cuts more profitable. Can you do this with a lower market share? Perhaps not, but you also don't need a market share as big as Steam's to do it, Amazon does it, GoG does it.