Shralla

Except that "AAA budgets" are used to pay everything, from the janitor at the offices to the CEO of Activision. "AAA quality" has nothing to do with budget. Torchlight 2 is a game with AAA quality on an insignificant fraction of the budget. Blacklight: Retribution offers all the quality of the Call of Duty multiplayer in a free-to-play game. By cutting out 95% of the redundant people involved in the process, you cut the budget by leaps and bounds. That's the entire idea of the whole Kickstarter craze. Unless you're going to tell me you don't think that Planetary Annihilation is going to have the same overall quality as Starcraft II, which would be frankly insulting to the experienced and dedicated team working on it. You might as well be telling me that I should pay as much for an apple from a supermarket as I should at the farm it originated from. One involves packaging, shipping, and stocking, increasing the cost of an identical product. Going straight to the source (in this case, the developers), allows them to do much more with the same amount of money. The budget of "true AAA" titles is a complete joke, and it's ridiculous that so many of you are acting like it takes $100 million to achieve that level of quality. The fact that it doesn't is the whole reason Kickstarter is taking off in the first place. I know I had a kneejerk overreaction. I'm not dropping my pledge or anything, but Unity is still the Unreal Engine 3 of smaller development teams. It gets used indiscriminately despite any shortcomings it may have, simply because it's easy to access and use.

Bandwagon, ho. Unity is just a cheap alternative that is made affordable and easy by way of not offering the full functionality of other engines. Sounds like a kick in the **** to me. I'm not buying a bloody iPhone game, especially not for $20+. I'm considering dropping my pledge because my understanding of the conditions of us offering them several million dollars up front to make their game is that we would be receiving a game with AAA fidelity, both in terms of story and dialog (which I am not worried about), as well as graphics and audio, which we are simply not going to get on the Unity engine.