Eitr, Hearth forth Alicia, Forsaken Castle and other infinitely coming games

[Melusina]

We all know kickstater is fancy scam, so it's not unusual to see people actually scammed.

 

but some games didn't have kickstarter, yet they are totally in infinitive development: Eitr for example

other put on store page and demo on steam, like Forsaken Castle devs

other games are still fooling around like Hearth Forth Alicia dev(s)

or that Psychonauts 2 it's coming next year! scenario at the end of every year

 

 

Is there any chance these games are not a scam? Why simply not run with money? Why devs (or maybe scammers) open a store page that cost actual money or simply post any update?

Edited January 15, 2020 by Melusina

[melkathi]

Psychonauts is Double Fine? They already abandoned that space station simulation. So they do have baggage of not following through on a project.

 

I'm unfairly biased towards Forsaken Castle as the name is too similar to Forsaken Fortress

 

Then again I backed:

The Mandate - proper scam

Dwarven Delve - Devs said they ran out of money and have slowly been working on it while having returned to proper day jobs. We'll see if we will truly get it this year (instead of February 2014).

Unwritten: That Which Happened - Dev said he had a health family emergency and used the money for that instead, if I remember correctly.

Haunts: The Manse Macabre - Programmers left. New programmers joined and couldn't understand what the hell the old programmers had done. Game died because they couldn't get it to work.

Reincarnation: The Root of All Evil - Dev lost his team, tried to find a new team. New team left... was due August 2013. February 2019 the creator gave backers a link to the dropbox with the beta version of the game they had managed to get to. Basically a project by a person who had been doing little flash games for fun and thought he'd try to do a "proper" game with help of a small team and Kickstarter. It didn't work out, but it does seem that he gave it his all.

 

 

 

[Melusina]

1 hour ago, melkathi said:

Unwritten: That Which Happened - Dev said he had a health family emergency and used the money for that instead, if I remember correctly.

that sounds.... so American

and sad, definitely sad.

Edited January 15, 2020 by Melusina

[Hurlshort]

It's not a scam because you should be aware that there is risk involved. It's more of an investment. Some are riskier than others, and you need to be realistic about what the end product will be. Greenlight and everything else is the same idea. You are paying to help something get produced, but you are also risking your money. Buy finished products if you are worried about not getting your money's worth.

[Melusina]

truth to be told, do I even have to get something back in return? if I'm backing something real prize should be project that happened not the project that arrived at my address.

[Hurlshort]

I've backed about a dozen projects and they've all turned out pretty well. Space Quest guys are the only ones who didn't deliver. I paid for that doublefine space game too. It was a bust, but they did release a playable thing, so I can't call it a scam. It just wasn't worth the $20, but plenty of fully finished games let me down as well.

[ComradeYellow]

The best games always seem to come out of nowhere.  Which is why I think both Kickstarter and AAA titles you're drooling about for years sort of seem like two sides of the same coin.

Happens every time.  I wait for a game for a year or so and it turns out to be horrible, but then I'll wake up the next day and suddenly see a game on Steam that looks interesting and hesitantly try it out and turns out to be so much better than the overpriced crap I've stupidly spent tons of money and time on.

The Outer Worlds and New Vegas were the only two games where I've spent significant time and energy pre-release looking forward to that actually managed to exceed expectations.  But unfortunately the former ended too soon. 

Edited January 15, 2020 by ComradeMaster

[Hawke64]

I backed PoEII (as the badge confirms) and it turned out great. Also there were Read Only Memories (an adventure game in cyberpunk setting), Black The Fall (a platformer in dystopian setting), Red Goddess (a platformer, I tried it, but did not finish), Prey for Gods (in development, an action-adventure).

1 hour ago, Hurlshot said:

It's not a scam because you should be aware that there is risk involved. It's more of an investment. Some are riskier than others, and you need to be realistic about what the end product will be. Greenlight and everything else is the same idea. You are paying to help something get produced, but you are also risking your money. Buy finished products if you are worried about not getting your money's worth.

Agreed.

[melkathi]

I feel no ill will for projects where I know people honestly tried but failed. And if they have been persevering for years and are still trying to do right by their backers, I admire them.

The Mandate seemed pretty clearly to have been a scam.

 

And non-gaming kickstarter wise I was a Grimrock webseries backer, where the creator basically then sold the project and decided it wasn't his fault it failed, since by that time he had abandoned it.

[ShadySands]

Yeah, the Mandate was the most disappointing project of the 70 that I've backed with successful campaigns. I've only read a few articles, tweets, and rants about the development but it sounded really bad.

 

[Hurlshort]

Reading up on the Mandate, it sounds like the former employees are the ones who were really scammed.

edit: This made me check on Spaceventure. Apparently they have an update in the works.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Hurlshot

[injurai]

Scams exist, I also think you have people pursing dreams without the capital, business, and even technical/creative savvy to pull off their dream project. Life events can totally derail these projects, like healthy concerns, losing one's primary job, etc.

I think kickstarter somewhat eschews the responsibility of the backer in taking risk. Traditional investment is much more centered around risk. I think since people aren't buying into a company they are left extra entitled that they receive the product as the payout.

But once the project falls through, you do have people endlessly drinking from subsequent funding despite the project clearly being in the ****ter. Those instances are certainly scams, but it can be hard to tell when the project keeps telling people what they want to hear. Which is why normal investors might actually sit on the board of a company, can walk through the studio, request proof, and generally control allocation of budget to specific sub-goals through a accountants and a producer.

But you can't get your average person to actually take an skillful and more involved approach to half the things that they are willing to throw cash at, and let other's do all the hard work, then bitch when it doesn't meet their expectations.

Grassroots venture capital as a lot of growing up to do.

[213374U]

I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the Kickstarter scam par excellence: Star Citizen. Which, funny story, is not a scam at all but rather a case study in how crowdfunding success can completely bog down a project. Ironically, I'm sure it will be a wildly successful commercial product... at some point in the 2030s.

In any case, how many actual demonstrable scams have come through Kickstarter? Seems one of those words that people throw around so often that it's become almost meaningless.

[xzar_monty]

31 minutes ago, 213374U said:

In any case, how many actual demonstrable scams have come through Kickstarter? Seems one of those words that people throw around so often that it's become almost meaningless.

Precisely. It would be extremely good if people were more careful with their wording and/or understood the terminology they use (preferably both!). The OP's first words in this thread were "We all know kickstater is fancy scam", which, as far as I'm concerned, is an excellent way to undermine one's credibility right at the start.

[Gorth]

Yeah, generalizing generally makes yourself look bad, not the stuff you're generalizing.

 

Sometimes the devil is in the detail. Claiming 70% of kickstarters leads nowhere and linking to documentation for it is a fair go at the type of platform. Claiming they're all scams means, you lose the argument already at best, getting accused of libel at worst.

 

My own, anecdotal experiences so far with kickstarter has been positive. The 3 games I supported all came out and delivered (and then some) what I expected. Pillars of Eternity, STASIS and Expeditions: Conquistador.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/291650/Pillars_of_Eternity/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/380150/STASIS/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/237430/Expeditions_Conquistador/