A general video games Kickstarter thread

Got my Drifter poster!

Using the term "tweedpunk" makes me want to take funds away not give them.

And being English.

Because no-one reads Brian's thread:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous

MULTIPLAYER ELITE

That's mean.

Thanks. I didn't read Brians thread.

Fuck it, I promised the wife not to back anymore Kickstarters... but motherfucking Elite. My first avatar here was the Elite-logo. I still remember the christmas where I got that game and played it all through the night...

Well, after reading I'm definitely backing, but it won't be expensive, since none of the promises does anything for me. Planet names, alphas, forums - bleh! The game and my name will do fine, thanks.

Yeah, they'll have to add some serious stretch goals and swag to the higher tiers for me to consider breaking £20. Even the £50 for beta access is too steep on its own (and I say this as someone who's backed a ton of kickstarters with less promise than this one).

Actually it's a very bad Kickstarter... and I say that even though I love Elite and have respect for Braben and Frontier (their newer games might not be the greatest, but they're very competent and a sure proof that they can deliver on a promise - Kinectimals and Disneyland Adventures are among the best for Kinect).

There's no video, no interview, no gameplay or graphics from the earlier games, no real details of gameplay and no real details on how the multiplayer will work. If this is true:

Why is there no concept art or videos? No pictures of people working on models of spaceships. Anything?!

As it stands, it only speaks to people like me with fond memories of the original - and I'm just looking at the £20 level.

It's gonna be a long way to the $2 million plus he wants.

It's done £160k already. It'll piss $2million.

I understand the desire for promo stuff but basically the pitch is "It's an updated modern multiplayer version of Elite". Concept art means bugger-all to me.

I'm in!

Yeah, if it's even simply as good as Jumpgate, it'll be awesome, but there's no way to even come close to discerning that. As much of a cheerleader as I am for space games, I can't fully cheer for this one yet.

I'm in for the game and my name as well. Elite is still my all time favourite game and like Hanzii mentioned, their last games have been very competently put together.

Apparently vids and screenshots are on the way:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-screenshots-and-video-are-coming-braben-says

Soon, I hope.

Because that pitch just couldn't wait another week, goddamnit!

He's already 1/5th of the way to his moon money goal of 1,250,000 L's.

Nerds will just give money away for even the faintest promises.

Because they don't have dates to spend it on.

What is a "nerd?"

I wish my dates only cost me £20 :(

ask for hourly rates!

;)

In London?!

Move to Thailand?

If they work like Kickstarter, the rewards go up as you spend more, but you can easily end up at the end of the process with nothing but empty promises and a feeling of disappointment.

Oh, I'm in at 20 quid allright. I'm just saying that with a bit more marketing, he could have made me spend 3x that - and he could have enticed people that aren't in their 40's too...

Yeah. I'm curious as to what this'll look like in a month's time - it's a looooong kickstarter - and whether they were just unwilling to make any promises with no knowledge of the scale of funding.

For those interested (the both of you) I've finished going through the 300-odd successfully Kickstarted video game projects (from 2009 to Oct 31 2012) and looked at how many actually released their titles.

The key table on that:



(All based on my interpretations of what "launched" meant and if I correctly caught them all.)

Other factoid: to Oct 31 this year Kickstarter has raised US$40.3m, with the top 10 most funded titles responsible for two thirds of that amount.

What % of those unreleased games are still on schedule?

What % of those unreleased games are behind schedule but still updating?

What % of those unreleased games have closed up shop?

The three games I backed so far in 2012 (DF Adventure, Klang, Planetary Annihilation) haven't been launched yet but they're not due until 2013.

Ridiculously early to do this and I'm sure it'll hit target, but after the initial rush the Elite 4 day by day numbers are less than stellar...

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous/#chart-daily

That tracks with a lot of other projects. You get a big bump at the start when everyone is talking about it. It tapers off over time then another big spike at the end to wrap it up. I think the only thing to be worried about is the lack of pictures, but I guess those are coming.

It definitely looks like a pretty engine, but I found the video for Sui Generis a little offputting. I think it's quotes like this:

"You might take a lot of what you see for granted, but consider that I programmed everything myself. There's no third-party technology. Graphics, physics, audio, user interface, all the backends, I wrote every single line of code. This is actually also a huge advantage, because I'm intimately familiar with every detail. Making changes, adding features, or just trying things out is something we can do very easily."

Honest question, why is that off-putting? I was impressed!

Because the history of one man acts is...mixed.

Hmm, true. Mind you, there really are some good things in that mixture...

Probably my own baggage, but I've known enough programmers in my day who want to spend all their time focused on technical purity over the quality that a user will actually experience. In that video he even admits that many of the amazing systems, such as weather and sky, etc, in their engine are overkill for an isometric RPG. He brings it up to impress us, whereas I view that kind of thing as wasteful hubris. Don't spend time creating a sky that I'm never going to see ... spend that time building better gameplay.

I don't want to trash him, because what he's created is really impressive, and I love games where I can explore a beautiful world. I also don't want to kibosh the act of pushing the frontier, trying new things, and just innovating, because that's how we move forward. But I really hope that there's someone on the team who can balance out Mr. Evans and push for something actually playable, so that they don't spend all of everyone's Kickstarter money focused on making the dew drops on a blade of grass look right, and wind up with nothing playable at the end.

Hey guys, I hope this is okay, but I wrote an article about my observations on Kickstarter campaigns as an SEO professional, so I hope it's okay to share it here. I'm quite proud of it, and hope it helps developers who read it make better campaigns.

http://www.spacegamejunkie.com/oped/off-topic-kickstarter-observations-seo-pro/

I hope y'all enjoy it. :)

Nice article, only thing I disagree with is constant updates. After I've backed a KS, I don't really care unless it's an update that it's passed, or there is something for me to download or something.

You might not care, but others might, and constant content generation is a key component in good SEO or marketing. ;)