Veeno

Ah, brilliant argumentation. But allow me to retort: No, and to disagree with me is stupid. Now what? I don't think there's a point, because by the way you're defining "modern" shooters, any I would name you'd proclaim a "retro" shooter. As I said, if you're defining "modern shooter" as "a shooter that sucks" then yes, I agree - those could never be successful on Kickstarter. BECAUSE THEY SUCK. Which was exactly my point in the first place.

Ah, so you're pulling that crap... Pffff... Please. Puzzles, exploration, crowd and resource management are as prevalent in Modern Warfare 42658 as they were in Quake and Half-Life. And quick reflexes... well yeah, that's a part of all the first-person shooters, isn't it? If there's anything in modern shooters you can't say there isn't a requirement for quick reflexes. In some modern shooters. In some modern shooters. Do you realise what you're doing here? You're proving my point - you're defining "modern shooter" by "a shooter that sucks". There are modern shooters which don't feature the stuff you're talking about, but you're referring to those as "retro shooters". Instead of "retro" and "modern" just use good old non-misleading words "good" and "bad" and then realise that you're saying exactly what I was saying - in crowd-funding, developers who make good games would be rewarded and get to make another game, while those who make bad games wouldn't. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Ah, true, how silly of me to forget.

Pray tell, what exactly are the differences between a nineties shooter like Quake or Half-Life and today's shooters that aren't among the differences between nineties space games and Star Citizen?

Well then there is everything equally nineties about throwing Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem into a blender. There, all first-person shooters are nineties!

...since when are 90s space sims like Wing Commander anywhere close to being more popular? I don't know what universe you're living in, that's an extremely niche old genre. You didn't watch the video, did you? There's nothing "90s" about that game.

See, once again, this is the perspective of someone who sees Kickstarter like regular shops, and pretends the two are nearly interchangeable "except some people may not want to pay that early". No, it's not. I am fully aware that Kickstarter allows the gamers to do nothing but pure investment. But your logic is flawed. Just because, so far, the games on Kickstarter have gathered support because they appeal to nostalgia of a certain crowd in no way means that other, more widely popular ideas, couldn't succeed on Kickstarter. Even now there are games which appeal to a larger crowd than adventure games and isometric RPGs do. Just because game ideas which get rejected by publishers can succeed on Kickstarter doesn't mean that those which wouldn't get rejected by publishers have no chance of success there. All it takes is for the awareness of why crowd-funding is better than publisher funding for both developers and gamers to spread.

How the hell is that supposed to make sense...? Also, I explained my point a bit better here:

I don't know of a single video game Kickstarter campaign where a copy of the game wasn't included in the tiers.

I don't see how there is zero risk. Read this. But I want to talk about the part of your post that I bolded. Have you even participated in the Project Eternity Kickstarter campaign, or any Kickstarter campaign for that matter? Check it out - any pledge of 25$ or more (or 20$ but those were limited) has the game itself as a reward for the backer.

Yes, that is what we're talking about here anyway, isn't it?

Kickstarter is not a bubble. A bubble is a "business" that gets loads and loads of money for not doing anything, and it bursts when people finally start realising "hey... they're not doing anything, prehaps we should stop giving them money". As I've said two times already, the success of Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general currently hinges on the success of Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 and Project Eternity. If those manage to be successful, it will prove that crowdfunding can work and thus provide a sturdy foundation for further growth of crowdfunding.

By the way, this calculation even takes the assumption that the 30 million $ the publisher got back comes from people who bought the game at full retail price. When you take into account sale discounts and over-the-time price drops, the average amount of money the publisher gets from each retail sale drops even further.

Ah, Aussie. Well yeah, that sucks for you guys.

My point also relies on budget vs. money people pay for a game. How much of the money people pay for the game gets to the publisher? The price of a brand new "AAA" game is 50 $/€. How much of the 50 $/€ I pay gets to the publisher? Some of it goes to the retailer/distributor, some of it goes to the developers, and some of it goes back to the publisher. How much is that - about 60% or so? (Yes, the developers get only crumbs.) So they invest let's say 20 million dollars. From retail sales, they get back let's say 30 million dollars - a profit of 10 million dollars. Estimating that those 30 million dollars is only 60% of what the gamers all together actually spent on buying the game, the actual total amount the gamers have all together spent on buying the game is 50 million dollars. And I'm not suggesting that Kickstarter could achieve that amount of budget (although I'm not saying that it couldn't, but that is completely beside the point now), but those initial 20 million dollars the publisher invested. The average pledged amount per backer for Project Eternity is 54$ - already over your usual full price of a brand new AAA game. That means that Obsidian got more money from each backer on average than publishers get from each retail sale (even when you take into account some of it going to Kickstarter and Amazon). Much more. From that, the number of backers obviously doesn't need to get as big as the number of people who buy retail games in order to achieve the same amount of budget.

It makes sense that you'd miss it, it was WAAAAY back on page 2: <snip> I never mention upper limits anywhere in there.

At the end of the day, both predictions are realistic. Only time will tell. Crowdfunding is the attempt of getting rid of the "semi-middleman" that is publisher. If it succeeds, it can only mean a better age not only for gamers, but also for the developers themselves. The ideal, to me, would be that there are only developers and players with nothing in-between them. And as I've suggested earlier, the modern infrastructure of Internet permits getting rid of the one remaining middleman - the distributor. But it's still not certain whether crowdfunding itself will succeed, so step by step I say.

Why don't we ask them? (Scroll down to the comments.) Ummm, wow. Its hard to believe those people are gamers, they are the most understanding and patient people who have ever spent money on a game that has disappointed them.....I'm shocked, hahaha. You have very little "faith" in people. Mostly, I do too - cynicism is the way to survive in the world. But, well, when investing in a video game project, it pays off to keep in mind that people behind that project are still only people. And to people, s**t happens - sometimes s**t caused by their own human faultiness, sometimes s**t that is completely outside of their own control. But then it all depends on how those people treat their backers in return - read that update and you will see that the guy goes into as much detail as possible to explain to the people who gave him money what exactly had gone wrong and how, understands the position he's put them all in and that he is still determined to make and release the game anyway and even offers to repay them the money they gave him, because that would only be fair if they wanted him to even though that would probably make him nearly homeless. I'm far from a happy-go-lucky hippie, but... as infinitely cheesy as it may sound, humanity has many faces and this is one of them, and Kickstarter seems to attract it. And that is exactly why I have so much faith in it. I think that's overdramatising it a bit. As I said, as long as the current big three (DFA, W2, PE) don't fail, it's safe to say Kickstarter and crowdfunding will get a pretty sturdy foundation to keep on growing. Sure, there will always be people who will start yelling about losing all hope in crowdfunding and never backing any Kickstarter campaign ever again when one ends up failing, but I think those are neither numerous enough nor loud enough to cause the entire crowdfunding thing to completely collapse. My estimation is that crowdfunded projects will succeed much more frequently than they will fail for the failures to have a detrimental effect on the crowdfunding system.

May your coming be well, thou who sings with the blades... of... freedom and... beauty. Butterflies. I think I overdid it.

Why don't we ask them? (Scroll down to the comments.)

Actually, because Unity is a 3D game engine, I'm pretty sure the "world" (as in the game world, what the game actually simulates) is going to be 3D, but the camera height and angle will be locked, the projection will be orthogonal (so the way characters look on screen will be the same whether they are in the middle or at the side of the screen) and the characters will actually "float" with the "world" (terrain) being a 2D backdrop behind them (which, due to the camera height and angle being locked, will look as if they are actually walking on top of the terrain). Yes, you're reading this right - they're "tricking" a 3D engine into making it look like a 2D engine.

I don't see how Unity is "older technology from the days of IE games". If anything, they're using new technology with visual tricks to make it look older.

Or they knew they needed 3-4 million $ from the beginning but it was their plan to go "lol we need 1.1 mils giv pls" expecting to reach it and go way over it, DFE-style. I'm tellin' ya, Obsidian is sneaky.

Exactly why I think it has to be done with and replaced with nothing but pure crowdfunding.

lolwut