Veeno

The exact effects are really unpredictable. Take this into account: - Such a huge early surge in donations is sure to garner the campaign a lot of media exposure, i.e. attracting a lot of attention and, thus, bringing more people to check out their KS campaign than compared to how many would have done so had it had a slower start. - Basic psychology × 2. Let me explain: With so many backers coming in early, the limited cheaper tiers will all be (have all been) snatched away pretty quickly. Since the campaign goal has been reached so early, this enables them to add stretch goals, additional rewards to higher tiers etc., which incites people who've already backed the project to increase their tiers and pledged amounts (this is basic psychology #1 - "I've already pledged to give them some money, might as well increase it 'a bit' now"), very slowly but steadily freeing up a couple spots on the low limited tiers now and then. People who come to check out the campaign after the initial boom will see that all the limited tiers are taken and some will get hooked to "snipe" for an open spot (basic psychology #2). So not only do they get money from people who've already pledged by inciting them to increase their tiers and pledged amounts, but also from people who wait for an open spot in the limited lower tiers to snatch it away.

How does "KS failing to raise enough money" equate "you need to fire people"? Just put up a new, better planned and executed, Kickstarter campaign. Unlike "KS failing to raise enough money", "you making a sucky game and failing to get enough money from its sales" is what actually does equate "you need to fire people". Instead of spending your funds on making a video game and finding out that it sucks from it selling poorly, isn't it better to pass that "suckiness check" via a Kickstarter campaign, before you've started seriously investing into it?

That's pretty useless, they're obviously all at 0$ at the very beginning.

I totally see this happening when PE comes out: "so yeah guys uh i bought PE and i went to the store and bought 8$ worth of chewing gum what do i need to do to join"

Then they can just ignore it. I really don't see the problem. My entire point relied on the assumption that a developer wants to get backer input. If a developer cannot decide whether backer input is useful for them or not, then I don't think they'll make good game design decisions themselves anyway.

Well, that's their problem then. But with a publisher instead, neither Obsidian nor smaller start-up developers have nearly any creative freedom.

You're forgetting a very important detail there, though. It's ok to trust the developer (Obsidian, in this case) enough to think that they're perfectly capable of making a great game on their own with no outside input whatsoever (and I agree with you on that one), but you can't say that the backer input is equally detrimental to the development process as the publisher "input". What I'm talking about should be obvious from the fact that I put the word "input" in quotes after "publisher" there. Backers really are only providing input. Dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of backers, however many of them decide to join the developer's forums, are only sharing their own inputs when the developers prompt them for it - they're sharing their opinions, discussing them, forming ideas etc., and from this "soup" of opinions and ideas the developers can take away whatever they want. Maybe they'll decide someone's ideas are garbage, maybe they'll decide someone's ideas are brilliant and will use them in the development of the game, maybe they'll find something that they never thought of themselves, or find a way to see something from a perspective they never even considered. This is valuable, useful and non-detrimental kind of input. If you've (slacker-)backed Double Fine Adventure and have access to the backer forums, you can easily go there and see a multitude of examples of what I'm talking about right now. Publishers, on the other hand, don't really "provide input" per se. They control and demand. The worse thing that can happen to a developer if they don't listen to a certain (egotistical) backer's suggestion or opinion is that he or she potentially won't back their next project. That is highly "potential", though, because even that is not certain, for the backer may change his/her opinion once they get to play the game and see that it's a great game after all, even without their "genius" idea in it. If a developer doesn't listen to a publisher's demands, however, they will cut their funding and won't let them finish the game. Once again, Tim Schafer explains what making a game with a publisher behind your neck is like much better than I ever could, . In short: Backer input is just outsourcing (or, well, crowdsourcing) opinions and ideas. Publisher "input" is having your hands tied.

You seem to have completely missed the entire point of crowd-funding. 1) Sure, crowd-funding (i.e. the backers) could technically be considered a form of "publisher". But it's the right kind of "publisher", exactly the kind of "publisher" they would want to have as their publisher in the first place - the gamers, the fans, people who play video games, people who care about video games, people who know what a good or a bad game is, as opposed to sales experts, people who don't play video games, people who only care about how much money they can earn from selling video games and not about video games themselves, people who know what a "good selling" or a "bad selling" game is but have no idea what a good or a bad game is. So even if your semantic tendencies are such that you prefer to refer to crowd-funding/backers as "publisher" in their own right, sure, you're not wrong about that. But that was never an issue to begin with. Whoever provides the money for the budget is the publisher. Even without crowd-funding, couldn't the gamers be considered the actual publishers as well? They're the ones who buy the game, it's their money that the developer gets and uses to develop the next game (the official "publisher" serving as the needless middleman); the only difference is that, without crowd-funding, gamers are blindly providing the money for a future game that they have no idea what it's going to be like. Moreover, if the publisher funds multiple developers (as is often the case), gamers could, by buying a certain game published by said publisher, be actually providing money for some random third developer who they don't care about at all. 2) How is relying on crowd-funding for the development of each following game any less stable a business model than relying on current game's sales for the development of each following game?

Well, the limited 28$ tier (which they added after the campaign started) still has plenty of spots left - over 17000 of 20000.

I really don't have a problem with this. So what if a developer relies on crowd-funding to secure the budget of each of their games? So long as they let enough time pass and their customers' wallets to "regenerate" (which, I think, the average development time of a video game is quite enough for), I don't see the problem. Just because this particular crowd-funding website is called "Kickstarter" doesn't mean crowd-funding can't be used for more than just kick-starting. Because, when you really stop and think about it, what would be the actual benefit of them making enough money off of sales of their games alone for the budget of their next game instead of turning to crowd-funding for providing the said budget? Personally, I actually see none. For example, this way, by using crowd-funding to fund each of their games, they're able to accomplish direct customer participation in game development of much higher quality, because knowing who their backers are enables them to easily distinguish useful customer input from "noise", i.e. an opinion of a customer who cares enough about the game that they were willing to fund its development from their own pocket clearly has more weight than some random on-line nobody's opinion. Admittedly, a crude distinguishing method; but it works, as opposed to everyone who provides the outside input being some random on-line nobody. Likewise, this way it's also easier for them to make games which their customers actually like and enjoy playing (which is what all of them say they really want to do), because the backers' response to every of their project pitches serves them as a clear indicator of whether they're heading in the right direction with their games, whether they're doing things right or if they're screwing up. If they get no such perfectly direct user input before making the game it would be much easier for them to screw up, make a crappy game, not get enough money off of its sales to make a new game, thus having to turn to crowd-funding once again, but this time right after making a screw-up of a game - then, obviously, much more difficult to get the funds they need via crowd-funding.

They said the game won't have any combat or stealth like Dreamfall had, which is what annoyed me the most about it. It's pretty much going to be a pure adventure game.

Well that's kinda silly. It's a sequel and it's a part of the TLJ series. What would you have it be, a racing simulator? Besides, I haven't seen them describe it as "a game between TLJ and Dreamfall" anywhere.

Because they can always use more monnehs. PE was funded pretty quickly yet people kept pledging till it got to almost 4 million, and the game is going to be better for it. *shrug*

I haven't seen this one here, so I thought I'd share. Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey Less than three days to go. Get in on this, like, right now.

This is kinda technical and probably not what someone would expect when entering a thread with this title, but I just wanted to make a request as a programmer towards fellow programmers in Obsidian. Project Eternity is, of course, going to simulate dice rolls and otherwise generate random numbers for whatever reason. With that in mind, I'm asking you, nay, begging you, please oh please don't just use the lame rand PRNG from cstdlib for random number generation. Use something better, like Mersenne twister, which is available in STL in C++11. I'm kinda pedantic and I'm irked when programs and video games which use pseudo-random number generation extensively use a bad PRNG. So yeah... that's all.

Are they still taking only 5% or did they up it to 10% to "compensate" for Amazon not getting 5% any more? If they still take only 5%, then god dangit if this had happened before Project Eternity, Obsidian would have about 200,000$ more in the budget.

I'm surprised no one had any thoughts to share (or holes to point out) on the idea I presented earlier in the thread. I'll repost it in case someone has some input but missed it: I like this idea. The more a character wears a piece of armour the more he or she will get used to it, and this "learning" over time can be simulated by giving the armour some bonuses over time (but only for that character). It could even get certain special bonuses based on something the character experienced with that armour, e.g. (I don't know) fighting an ogre for the first time and getting a strong knock on the head could give the helmet worn at that moment a certain special bonus. The only problem with this is that it is very difficult to balance, because if it's overdone then the player will never be motivated to change the character's armour.

Well... this thread is advancing rapidly and I have no idea if this has been mentioned already, but I'd like to copy-paste something I saw in the comments for this update: I like this idea. The more a character wears a piece of armour the more he or she will get used to it, and this "learning" over time can be simulated by giving the armour some bonuses over time (but only for that character). It could even get certain special bonuses based on something the character experienced with that armour, e.g. (I don't know) fighting an ogre for the first time and getting a strong knock on the head could give the helmet worn at that moment a certain special bonus. The only problem with this is that it is very difficult to balance, because if it's overdone then the player will never be motivated to change the character's armour.

Not to mention that only a minuscule portion of those 50$ actually go to the developer.

I LOVE IT!!! I may consider changing the colouring of the silhouette a bit, but it's awesome regardless. THANKS!

I know, machine translations always do that, but since "Project Eternity" is basically just two words on their own, I was hoping it would be able to correctly translate each word separately.

I was just going by what Google Translate spat at me for "project" and "eternity". XD

Finnish: Hanke Ikuisuus Hungarian: Terv Örökkévalóság

In Serbo-Croatian: Projekt Vječnost. But hey, judging how difficult it is to learn languages by comparing Slavic languages is kind of cheating.

Oh ok... YAY my title got changed! Fank ye! ^_^