Originally posted by Horusra My issue is people assume they are spending crazy amounts of money when no one knows how much they spent on advertising. If like I said they paid 10K to increase traffic to try and get to $100k do you have a problem? None of use seem to know the financials so to assume the worst is to assume their company is run by morons. It could be but then logic would assume everyone on Earth is a moron. So everyone posting here is a moron.
Cost and money are irrelevant red herrings in this discussion.
The point is whether it's morally OK to spend $ on ads while you beg for money in KS. There may have been other KS projects that also bought ad space while the KS drive was live, but I'm not aware of any others... are you?
there is the problem...you see it as begging. If you like this game then you are investing in it being developed. It is an investment but where the only return is that they will get to play it. that to me is the difference. A street beggar I will get nothing ever from.
Calling it begging IS stretching things for effect...obviously. What annoys me is that there is a noble and worthwhile place in society for KS. Crowd funding good things that could not otherwise get funding is a great concept.
But there are some that are chomping around the edges of the system that makes potential investor/donors wary about even the good, legit projects.
Advertising while you have a KS project going on is not even particularly egregious in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not compared to some of the well-documented scams there and in other less-reputable KS look-alike sites.
But it is an odd new twist I personally have not seen before with any other KS project. And it does seem to me that it creates a narrative that brings into question the legitimacy of the "stretch goal" incentives.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Originally posted by Horusra My issue is people assume they are spending crazy amounts of money when no one knows how much they spent on advertising. If like I said they paid 10K to increase traffic to try and get to $100k do you have a problem? None of use seem to know the financials so to assume the worst is to assume their company is run by morons. It could be but then logic would assume everyone on Earth is a moron. So everyone posting here is a moron.
Cost and money are irrelevant red herrings in this discussion.
The point is whether it's morally OK to spend $ on ads while you beg for money in KS. There may have been other KS projects that also bought ad space while the KS drive was live, but I'm not aware of any others... are you?
there is the problem...you see it as begging. If you like this game then you are investing in it being developed. It is an investment but where the only return is that they will get to play it. that to me is the difference. A street beggar I will get nothing ever from.
Calling it begging IS stretching things for effect...obviously. What annoys me is that there is a noble and worthwhile place in society for KS. Crowd funding good things that could not otherwise get funding is a great concept.
But there are some that are chomping around the edges of the system that makes potential investor/donors wary about even the good, legit projects.
Advertising while you have a KS project going on is not even particularly egregious in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not compared to some of the well-documented scams there and in other less-reputable KS look-alike sites.
But it is an odd new twist I personally have not seen before with any other KS project. And it does seem to me that it creates a narrative that brings into question the legitimacy of the "stretch goal" incentives.
I will agree with you that for every legit Ks there is probably 2 BS ones. I would just rather reveal them than assume one is with no proof.
Originally posted by Horusra My issue is people assume they are spending crazy amounts of money when no one knows how much they spent on advertising. If like I said they paid 10K to increase traffic to try and get to $100k do you have a problem? None of use seem to know the financials so to assume the worst is to assume their company is run by morons. It could be but then logic would assume everyone on Earth is a moron. So everyone posting here is a moron.
Cost and money are irrelevant red herrings in this discussion.
The point is whether it's morally OK to spend $ on ads while you beg for money in KS. There may have been other KS projects that also bought ad space while the KS drive was live, but I'm not aware of any others... are you?
there is the problem...you see it as begging. If you like this game then you are investing in it being developed. It is an investment but where the only return is that they will get to play it. that to me is the difference. A street beggar I will get nothing ever from.
Calling it begging IS stretching things for effect...obviously. What annoys me is that there is a noble and worthwhile place in society for KS. Crowd funding good things that could not otherwise get funding is a great concept.
But there are some that are chomping around the edges of the system that makes potential investor/donors wary about even the good, legit projects.
Advertising while you have a KS project going on is not even particularly egregious in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not compared to some of the well-documented scams there and in other less-reputable KS look-alike sites.
But it is an odd new twist I personally have not seen before with any other KS project. And it does seem to me that it creates a narrative that brings into question the legitimacy of the "stretch goal" incentives.
When you make your own project you make business decisions on your own.
Until the you either trust their judgement or not. And that is hugely dependant on people working on the project.....cough...Pantheon...cough
Lets be honest folks... replace the word kickstarter with the word capital investment and you pretty much have basis for any business venture. Kickstarter isn't for the poor and destitute anymore... even the guys with the deep pockets now use it. If it generates capital, they're going to use it.
The notion that these projects are being done in someone's garage are long over... you're not investing in the little guy, you just think you are. They are as much a corporate identity as the next corporate identity... only they claim they aren't. They rent office space do they not? Have a team of people working do they not? Seek out venture capital? How is this any different than any business out there... oh that's right, they're sticking it to the man...
Lets be honest folks... replace the word kickstarter with the word capital investment and you pretty much have basis for any business venture. Kickstarter isn't for the poor and destitute anymore... even the guys with the deep pockets now use it. If it generates capital, they're going to use it.
The notion that these projects are being done in someone's garage are long over... you're not investing in the little guy, you just think you are. They are as much a corporate identity as the next corporate identity... only they claim they aren't. They rent office space do they not? Have a team of people working do they not? Seek out venture capital? How is this any different than any business out there... oh that's right, they're sticking it to the man...
Please...
As long as they are transparent about it....who cares?
Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity wouldnt have been made without it.
Yes they rented offices. Yes they had team of people working on it. Yes they mads a lot of cash. And? But they didnt have to budge to publishers and make the game publisher wanted. But even publishers are picking up - sword coast legends imo is direct response to success of these typo of games
BTW, ive never seen kickstarter defines itself as platform for "the poor and destitute"
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
I don't know why people give money to kickstarter projects to begin with.
Kickstarter Projects that are asking for thousands of $, no, I don't get why people give their money, go give it to a bank where you actually get interest on it and where you actually get treated with some respect.
There is no oversight with Kickstarter projects, no one knows where the money goes, but I'm guessing a lot just goes into the back pockets of people and not actually to the project.
Kickstarter does not protect backers, they do not value your money, giving money to those large kickstarter projects is no different from throwing it down the drain.
I don't know why people give money to kickstarter projects to begin with.
Kickstarter Projects that are asking for thousands of $, no, I don't get why people give their money, go give it to a bank where you actually get interest on it and where you actually get treated with some respect.
There is no oversight with Kickstarter projects, no one knows where the money goes, but I'm guessing a lot just goes into the back pockets of people and not actually to the project.
Kickstarter does not protect backers, they do not value your money, giving money to those large kickstarter projects is no different from throwing it down the drain.
None of what u advise to do instead would give me the awesome game that invokes nostalgia that i want to play. None of it has in a kickstarter or two here and there famous game industry names attached to it.
Just the release of Dreamfall, Wasteland 2, new Torment, Pillars of Eternity, Divine Divinity, Elite Dangerous(in limbo and in work the longest out of all kickstarter games), not to mention pebble watch, various powerbank kickstarters, and bringing down the price and putting 3d printing into homes is worth all the failed ones and scam ones.
None of this would be possible without kickstarter, not in this form and way and not this fast, and a very big part of all the things would have never have seen the light of day. (How much did Occulus Rift jumpstart VR tech ?)
Kickstarter is the polar opposite of throwing money down the drain, throwing money down the drain guarantees ZERO chance of your hopes, dreams, wishes, and interest getting made, kickstarters on the other hand gives you a certain chance some of it will get made, and without getting into the statistical specifics of success vs failure, anything is better than ZERO, ...
None of what u advise to do instead would give me the awesome game that invokes nostalgia that i want to play. None of it has in a kickstarter or two here and there famous game industry names attached to it.
Just the release of Divine Divinity
Ok, let's go with Divine Divinity since I think it will allow me to get my opinion accross more easily I think.
It's a game from developer Larian Studios. A developer that has existed for years, they have always had some success, never massive success. They always had to look for investors and publishers.
Now that there is something such as Kickstarter, they no longer have to find an investor, the users are the investors.
That means that all risks are now instead of on them, on the players. If the game failed in the past, Larian Studios was responsible for it, the bank or investor would ask for their money back with interest.
Larian studios said they would have made the game either way, but they went to Kickstarter because hey can develop a game without any financial risk whatsoever, because regardless if the game fails or not, they are in the clear. You who invested money in the Kickstarter project, are not. You gave your money away and didn't get anything in return.
Luckily Divine Divinity worked out, many Kickstarter projects do not.
Maybe money is more valuable to me than to someone else, but as a Kickstarter backer, you are on the losing end of the equation. The backer who has the money has no rights and legal means to defend their investment like a bank, and the project developer has shifted ALL risk onto you.
Whether people consider it "ethical" or not, the people who own and manage Crowfall ARE a company. As a company, it's ultimately up to them how to spend their funds, and to decide how best to make money. If that's through advertisements, it's their choice entirely.
In the future, it wouldn't surprise me if we started to see more kickstarter games advertising for more backers. I imagine it's here to stay, so might as well get used to it.
On a lighter note, Crowfall advertisements are a big improvement from League of Angels.
Shouldn't the question be extended: Is it ethical to spend money on Kickstarter while you're begging money through Kickstarter?
Kickstarter fees alone are more than 100 000$ for a project that raises as much money as Crowfall has done. Shouldn't they have spend the money on actual game development instead of Kickstarter fees?
1) We have a product that we want to sell you. If you give us money today, we'll give you the product today.
2) We would like to make a product and then sell it to you. But we don't have the money to make the product. If you give us money today, we'll use it to try to make the product. And if we succeed, then we'll give you the product in a few years. Or we might fail, or give you a product totally different from what you expected.
The latter is, of course, intrinsic to Kickstarter. But in advertising Kickstarter campaigns, they've turned it into:
3) We would like to make a product and sell it to you. We have enough money to make a product, but instead of using it to make a product, we're going to advertise to try to get people to give us more money, and then try to use more money to make a better product. If we succeed, then we'll give you the product in a few years. Or we might fail, or give you a product totally different from what you expected. Or the Kickstarter campaign itself might fail, in which case, we deliver no product and are out the money that we spent on advertising.
I thought it was self-evident that (3) was ridiculous. Hence this thread, which was meant to poke fun at it. Of course, I think (2) is fairly ridiculous, too, but the number of things getting funded on Kickstarter seems to demonstrate that many people think otherwise. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that people who think (2) is perfectly reasonable think the same of (3).
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It matters tremendously how much it costs to develop good games. I want it to be cheap to develop good games of the sort I want to play. That way, more such games will be created for me to play.
When Blizzard decides to build a game, how much money do they spend on advertising trying to convince executives and investors to support their game? There is some time and resources spent on deciding whether to pursue this concept or that one, of course. But they certainly don't have Kickstarter take 5% off the top, and then spent some of what remains on posting advertisements all across the Internet to get people to invest in their game. All of that adds to the cost of developing a game.
Now, they do advertise after the game is done and they want people to buy it. But that's not at all similar to advertising a Kickstarter. If you make a game via Kickstarter, you're going to have to advertise the game again when it launches if you want to sell it to anyone.
And then there is the cost of failed attempts at creating a game. Sure, some games that a big studio worked on for a while get canceled. But the failure rate there is much lower than among those that go the Kickstarter route. And those cancellations happen for a reason; if they can tell that a game is going to be bad, stop spending money on it and pull the plug early. If a Kickstarter campaign succeeds and the game "launches" but is disastrously awful, is that really a success story?
The net result is that it costs more to develop a game via Kickstarter than via other methods, and more of the money spent on developing games via Kickstarter is going to end up being wasted. That doesn't mean that the developers of games that spend money to advertise their Kickstarter campaigns are morally evil. But at a societal level, that strikes me as rather inefficient, and not something I'd want to encourage.
Earlier in this thread, people brought up the issue of charities spending money on fundraising. Some perfectly good charities really do spend a small fraction of their revenue on fundraising. But it is undesirable for charities to spend a large fraction of their revenue on fundraising; only so much money is going to be given to charity, and that is an inefficient use of it. Groups that spend most of their money on fundraising arguably aren't really charities anymore, as they primarily serve to benefit of those who run them rather than the nominal beneficiaries.
But that's why I don't give $5 to every random charity that comes along with a slick fundraising campaign. That's an inefficient use of the money that I'll give to charity. I'd rather give the money that I'm going to give to charity in larger chunks to worthy charities disconnected from any particular fundraising campaign. If everyone did that, while still giving the same amount in total to charity, they'd be able to do more good with the money rather than having to spend substantial chunks of it on advertising.
And yes, I apply the same philosophy to Kickstarter. I'd rather my money go toward developers as a reward for having created a good game (or perhaps to their investors as profits to reward them for having invested in a good game) rather than scattering much of it across vaporware or terrible games.
Kickstarter fees alone are more than 100 000$ for a project that raises as much money as Crowfall has done. Shouldn't they have spend the money on actual game development instead of Kickstarter fees?
The Kickstarter fees are somewhat of a moot point if the money is raised through Kickstarter in the first place.
Sure you can raise money without KS, but what will that cost you?
How much is the Kickstarter publicity worth? Lots of people browsing there. Also, "Kickstarter campaign!" is a good buzzy thing for marketing that everyone immediately understands, that's a lot of value right there.
How much do other payment solutions cost? (they usually all take percentages) How much does it cost to roll and run your own? (customer service, dealing with fraud, back fees, legal, etc.)
How many potential customers would be scared away by not using a big known site like Kickstarter? (we all have those shady/scammy wannabe-ones in the back of our heads)
None of what u advise to do instead would give me the awesome game that invokes nostalgia that i want to play. None of it has in a kickstarter or two here and there famous game industry names attached to it.
Just the release of Divine Divinity
Ok, let's go with Divine Divinity since I think it will allow me to get my opinion accross more easily I think.
It's a game from developer Larian Studios. A developer that has existed for years, they have always had some success, never massive success. They always had to look for investors and publishers.
Now that there is something such as Kickstarter, they no longer have to find an investor, the users are the investors.
That means that all risks are now instead of on them, on the players. If the game failed in the past, Larian Studios was responsible for it, the bank or investor would ask for their money back with interest.
Larian studios said they would have made the game either way, but they went to Kickstarter because hey can develop a game without any financial risk whatsoever, because regardless if the game fails or not, they are in the clear. You who invested money in the Kickstarter project, are not. You gave your money away and didn't get anything in return.
Luckily Divine Divinity worked out, many Kickstarter projects do not.
Maybe money is more valuable to me than to someone else, but as a Kickstarter backer, you are on the losing end of the equation. The backer who has the money has no rights and legal means to defend their investment like a bank, and the project developer has shifted ALL risk onto you.
Honestly and I say this in all seriousness and no joke.
A large part of me feels sorry for nasayers of Kickstarters and Early Access.
So many great games it has been one of the best gaming years of my life starting in 2014
Lol. I don't even know why you keep bringing up early access in this discussion. KS and early access are not synonymous and I can easily see someone supporting one and not the other.
EA is just the new term adopted (thanks to Steam) for any form of playable alpha, beta or "soft launch," usually, but not always, for a price.
It wasn't that long ago that it was an oddity - i remember Neverwinter's prolonged "open beta" and this site's reluctance to publish a review for it because it was not officially released... meanwhile the cash shop was fully functional and we knew there would be no character wipe when it really, really launched.
That seemed like an oddity back then. Now it's the norm. People pay that money because they get to play the game in some sort of shape immediately. The developer can get the money while they keep developing and meanwhile the press takes it easier on them because, after all, the game is still "in development" (which is a funny concept with respect to MMOs since every single one of them is always in development - pre and post "launch".)
KS, is a different beast altogether. The distinction is easy: playable now / playable sometime in the future...maybe.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Honestly and I say this in all seriousness and no joke.
A large part of me feels sorry for nasayers of Kickstarters and Early Access.
So many great games it has been one of the best gaming years of my life starting in 2014
Lol. I don't even know why you keep bringing up early access in this discussion. KS and early access are not synonymous and I can easily see someone supporting one and not the other.
EA is just the new term adopted (thanks to Steam) for any form of playable alpha, beta or "soft launch," usually, but not always, for a price.
It wasn't that long ago that it was an oddity - i remember Neverwinter's prolonged "open beta" and this site's reluctance to publish a review for it because it was not officially released... meanwhile the cash shop was fully functional and we knew there would be no character wipe when it really, really launched.
That seemed like an oddity back then. Now it's the norm. People pay that money because they get to play the game in some sort of shape immediately. The developer can get the money while they keep developing and meanwhile the press takes it easier on them because, after all, the game is still "in development" (which is a funny concept with respect to MMOs since every single one of them is always in development - pre and post "launch".)
KS, is a different beast altogether. The distinction is easy: playable now / playable sometime in the future...maybe.
devs can also get immediate feedback and start making adjustments right away.
In programming the idea is called 'Agile Programming' and I think it could work very well with dev to customer realtionships to. Target to try and have a new build for the users to play every six weeks.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
"Please give us money so that we can buy more ads in order to raise more money."
I understand why they do it, as with rare exceptions, you have to advertise a product to get people to buy it. And I certainly don't blame this site for taking the money for ads that are undeniably gaming-related. But that doesn't mean I have to like this use of kickstarter.
Huh?
See the add for Crowfall plastered all over this site. I'm sure its being paid for and its currently just a kickstarter. So where are they getting the money to pay for all these MMORPG.COM adds to get people to fund their kickstarter ? (or to put it another way how much of their kickstarter will be going to pay their advertising debts??)
Kickstarter fees alone are more than 100 000$ for a project that raises as much money as Crowfall has done. Shouldn't they have spend the money on actual game development instead of Kickstarter fees?
The Kickstarter fees are somewhat of a moot point if the money is raised through Kickstarter in the first place.
Sure you can raise money without KS, but what will that cost you?
How much is the Kickstarter publicity worth? Lots of people browsing there. Also, "Kickstarter campaign!" is a good buzzy thing for marketing that everyone immediately understands, that's a lot of value right there.
How much do other payment solutions cost? (they usually all take percentages) How much does it cost to roll and run your own? (customer service, dealing with fraud, back fees, legal, etc.)
How many potential customers would be scared away by not using a big known site like Kickstarter? (we all have those shady/scammy wannabe-ones in the back of our heads)
Lots of questions.
I don't think Kickstarter fees are a moot point. You yourself raise the question how much Kickstarter publicity is worth. If we are to consider how ethical it is to spend money advertising your crowdfunding project, then we must also take into account that devs don't choose Kickstarter because it's the cheapest way to make sales. They choose it because it's good for advertising.
1) We have a product that we want to sell you. If you give us money today, we'll give you the product today.
2) We would like to make a product and then sell it to you. But we don't have the money to make the product. If you give us money today, we'll use it to try to make the product. And if we succeed, then we'll give you the product in a few years. Or we might fail, or give you a product totally different from what you expected.
The latter is, of course, intrinsic to Kickstarter. But in advertising Kickstarter campaigns, they've turned it into:
3) We would like to make a product and sell it to you. We have enough money to make a product, but instead of using it to make a product, we're going to advertise to try to get people to give us more money, and then try to use more money to make a better product. If we succeed, then we'll give you the product in a few years. Or we might fail, or give you a product totally different from what you expected. Or the Kickstarter campaign itself might fail, in which case, we deliver no product and are out the money that we spent on advertising.
I thought it was self-evident that (3) was ridiculous. Hence this thread, which was meant to poke fun at it. Of course, I think (2) is fairly ridiculous, too, but the number of things getting funded on Kickstarter seems to demonstrate that many people think otherwise. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that people who think (2) is perfectly reasonable think the same of (3).
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It matters tremendously how much it costs to develop good games. I want it to be cheap to develop good games of the sort I want to play. That way, more such games will be created for me to play.
When Blizzard decides to build a game, how much money do they spend on advertising trying to convince executives and investors to support their game? There is some time and resources spent on deciding whether to pursue this concept or that one, of course. But they certainly don't have Kickstarter take 5% off the top, and then spent some of what remains on posting advertisements all across the Internet to get people to invest in their game. All of that adds to the cost of developing a game.
Now, they do advertise after the game is done and they want people to buy it. But that's not at all similar to advertising a Kickstarter. If you make a game via Kickstarter, you're going to have to advertise the game again when it launches if you want to sell it to anyone.
And then there is the cost of failed attempts at creating a game. Sure, some games that a big studio worked on for a while get canceled. But the failure rate there is much lower than among those that go the Kickstarter route. And those cancellations happen for a reason; if they can tell that a game is going to be bad, stop spending money on it and pull the plug early. If a Kickstarter campaign succeeds and the game "launches" but is disastrously awful, is that really a success story?
The net result is that it costs more to develop a game via Kickstarter than via other methods, and more of the money spent on developing games via Kickstarter is going to end up being wasted. That doesn't mean that the developers of games that spend money to advertise their Kickstarter campaigns are morally evil. But at a societal level, that strikes me as rather inefficient, and not something I'd want to encourage.
Earlier in this thread, people brought up the issue of charities spending money on fundraising. Some perfectly good charities really do spend a small fraction of their revenue on fundraising. But it is undesirable for charities to spend a large fraction of their revenue on fundraising; only so much money is going to be given to charity, and that is an inefficient use of it. Groups that spend most of their money on fundraising arguably aren't really charities anymore, as they primarily serve to benefit of those who run them rather than the nominal beneficiaries.
But that's why I don't give $5 to every random charity that comes along with a slick fundraising campaign. That's an inefficient use of the money that I'll give to charity. I'd rather give the money that I'm going to give to charity in larger chunks to worthy charities disconnected from any particular fundraising campaign. If everyone did that, while still giving the same amount in total to charity, they'd be able to do more good with the money rather than having to spend substantial chunks of it on advertising.
And yes, I apply the same philosophy to Kickstarter. I'd rather my money go toward developers as a reward for having created a good game (or perhaps to their investors as profits to reward them for having invested in a good game) rather than scattering much of it across vaporware or terrible games.
So let me get this straight.
One charity organisation wants to build a house for orphans. They never even get close by "regular(your)" channels but then launches fundraising campaign and get needed funds. And thats BAD?
And company should use BEST tools to achieve its goals.
When Blizzard starts making games like Wasteland 2, Pillars, torment, even CF let me know.
Comments
Kickstarter is the best thing to happen to gaming since well the start of the gaming genre, ...
And the next in the long line of proofs it's the best thing to happen to the genre is coming out in 24 hours.
Calling it begging IS stretching things for effect...obviously. What annoys me is that there is a noble and worthwhile place in society for KS. Crowd funding good things that could not otherwise get funding is a great concept.
But there are some that are chomping around the edges of the system that makes potential investor/donors wary about even the good, legit projects.
Advertising while you have a KS project going on is not even particularly egregious in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not compared to some of the well-documented scams there and in other less-reputable KS look-alike sites.
But it is an odd new twist I personally have not seen before with any other KS project. And it does seem to me that it creates a narrative that brings into question the legitimacy of the "stretch goal" incentives.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
A well timed marketing push is a part of any well organized KS campaign. Ads are just a part of that.
I don't have a problem with it. Then again, I don't give donations to mid-size or bigger companies in the first place.
they are selling the idea. Its on you to decide will you buy into it or not.
Kickstarter is just a platform. Noone is forced to even give any money, you are welcome to wait unilt its finished (or busted)I will agree with you that for every legit Ks there is probably 2 BS ones. I would just rather reveal them than assume one is with no proof.
When you make your own project you make business decisions on your own.
Until the you either trust their judgement or not. And that is hugely dependant on people working on the project.....cough...Pantheon...cough
Lets be honest folks... replace the word kickstarter with the word capital investment and you pretty much have basis for any business venture. Kickstarter isn't for the poor and destitute anymore... even the guys with the deep pockets now use it. If it generates capital, they're going to use it.
The notion that these projects are being done in someone's garage are long over... you're not investing in the little guy, you just think you are. They are as much a corporate identity as the next corporate identity... only they claim they aren't. They rent office space do they not? Have a team of people working do they not? Seek out venture capital? How is this any different than any business out there... oh that's right, they're sticking it to the man...
Please...
As long as they are transparent about it....who cares?
Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity wouldnt have been made without it.
Yes they rented offices. Yes they had team of people working on it. Yes they mads a lot of cash. And? But they didnt have to budge to publishers and make the game publisher wanted. But even publishers are picking up - sword coast legends imo is direct response to success of these typo of games
BTW, ive never seen kickstarter defines itself as platform for "the poor and destitute"
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
I don't know why people give money to kickstarter projects to begin with.
Kickstarter Projects that are asking for thousands of $, no, I don't get why people give their money, go give it to a bank where you actually get interest on it and where you actually get treated with some respect.There is no oversight with Kickstarter projects, no one knows where the money goes, but I'm guessing a lot just goes into the back pockets of people and not actually to the project.
Kickstarter does not protect backers, they do not value your money, giving money to those large kickstarter projects is no different from throwing it down the drain.
None of what u advise to do instead would give me the awesome game that invokes nostalgia that i want to play. None of it has in a kickstarter or two here and there famous game industry names attached to it.
Just the release of Dreamfall, Wasteland 2, new Torment, Pillars of Eternity, Divine Divinity, Elite Dangerous(in limbo and in work the longest out of all kickstarter games), not to mention pebble watch, various powerbank kickstarters, and bringing down the price and putting 3d printing into homes is worth all the failed ones and scam ones.
None of this would be possible without kickstarter, not in this form and way and not this fast, and a very big part of all the things would have never have seen the light of day. (How much did Occulus Rift jumpstart VR tech ?)
Kickstarter is the polar opposite of throwing money down the drain, throwing money down the drain guarantees ZERO chance of your hopes, dreams, wishes, and interest getting made, kickstarters on the other hand gives you a certain chance some of it will get made, and without getting into the statistical specifics of success vs failure, anything is better than ZERO, ...
Ok, let's go with Divine Divinity since I think it will allow me to get my opinion accross more easily I think.
It's a game from developer Larian Studios. A developer that has existed for years, they have always had some success, never massive success. They always had to look for investors and publishers.
Now that there is something such as Kickstarter, they no longer have to find an investor, the users are the investors.
That means that all risks are now instead of on them, on the players. If the game failed in the past, Larian Studios was responsible for it, the bank or investor would ask for their money back with interest.
Larian studios said they would have made the game either way, but they went to Kickstarter because hey can develop a game without any financial risk whatsoever, because regardless if the game fails or not, they are in the clear. You who invested money in the Kickstarter project, are not. You gave your money away and didn't get anything in return.
Luckily Divine Divinity worked out, many Kickstarter projects do not.
Maybe money is more valuable to me than to someone else, but as a Kickstarter backer, you are on the losing end of the equation. The backer who has the money has no rights and legal means to defend their investment like a bank, and the project developer has shifted ALL risk onto you.
Whether people consider it "ethical" or not, the people who own and manage Crowfall ARE a company. As a company, it's ultimately up to them how to spend their funds, and to decide how best to make money. If that's through advertisements, it's their choice entirely.
In the future, it wouldn't surprise me if we started to see more kickstarter games advertising for more backers. I imagine it's here to stay, so might as well get used to it.
On a lighter note, Crowfall advertisements are a big improvement from League of Angels.
Shouldn't the question be extended: Is it ethical to spend money on Kickstarter while you're begging money through Kickstarter?
Kickstarter fees alone are more than 100 000$ for a project that raises as much money as Crowfall has done. Shouldn't they have spend the money on actual game development instead of Kickstarter fees?
I see an enormous difference between:
1) We have a product that we want to sell you. If you give us money today, we'll give you the product today.
2) We would like to make a product and then sell it to you. But we don't have the money to make the product. If you give us money today, we'll use it to try to make the product. And if we succeed, then we'll give you the product in a few years. Or we might fail, or give you a product totally different from what you expected.
The latter is, of course, intrinsic to Kickstarter. But in advertising Kickstarter campaigns, they've turned it into:
3) We would like to make a product and sell it to you. We have enough money to make a product, but instead of using it to make a product, we're going to advertise to try to get people to give us more money, and then try to use more money to make a better product. If we succeed, then we'll give you the product in a few years. Or we might fail, or give you a product totally different from what you expected. Or the Kickstarter campaign itself might fail, in which case, we deliver no product and are out the money that we spent on advertising.
I thought it was self-evident that (3) was ridiculous. Hence this thread, which was meant to poke fun at it. Of course, I think (2) is fairly ridiculous, too, but the number of things getting funded on Kickstarter seems to demonstrate that many people think otherwise. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that people who think (2) is perfectly reasonable think the same of (3).
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It matters tremendously how much it costs to develop good games. I want it to be cheap to develop good games of the sort I want to play. That way, more such games will be created for me to play.
When Blizzard decides to build a game, how much money do they spend on advertising trying to convince executives and investors to support their game? There is some time and resources spent on deciding whether to pursue this concept or that one, of course. But they certainly don't have Kickstarter take 5% off the top, and then spent some of what remains on posting advertisements all across the Internet to get people to invest in their game. All of that adds to the cost of developing a game.
Now, they do advertise after the game is done and they want people to buy it. But that's not at all similar to advertising a Kickstarter. If you make a game via Kickstarter, you're going to have to advertise the game again when it launches if you want to sell it to anyone.
And then there is the cost of failed attempts at creating a game. Sure, some games that a big studio worked on for a while get canceled. But the failure rate there is much lower than among those that go the Kickstarter route. And those cancellations happen for a reason; if they can tell that a game is going to be bad, stop spending money on it and pull the plug early. If a Kickstarter campaign succeeds and the game "launches" but is disastrously awful, is that really a success story?
The net result is that it costs more to develop a game via Kickstarter than via other methods, and more of the money spent on developing games via Kickstarter is going to end up being wasted. That doesn't mean that the developers of games that spend money to advertise their Kickstarter campaigns are morally evil. But at a societal level, that strikes me as rather inefficient, and not something I'd want to encourage.
Earlier in this thread, people brought up the issue of charities spending money on fundraising. Some perfectly good charities really do spend a small fraction of their revenue on fundraising. But it is undesirable for charities to spend a large fraction of their revenue on fundraising; only so much money is going to be given to charity, and that is an inefficient use of it. Groups that spend most of their money on fundraising arguably aren't really charities anymore, as they primarily serve to benefit of those who run them rather than the nominal beneficiaries.
But that's why I don't give $5 to every random charity that comes along with a slick fundraising campaign. That's an inefficient use of the money that I'll give to charity. I'd rather give the money that I'm going to give to charity in larger chunks to worthy charities disconnected from any particular fundraising campaign. If everyone did that, while still giving the same amount in total to charity, they'd be able to do more good with the money rather than having to spend substantial chunks of it on advertising.
And yes, I apply the same philosophy to Kickstarter. I'd rather my money go toward developers as a reward for having created a good game (or perhaps to their investors as profits to reward them for having invested in a good game) rather than scattering much of it across vaporware or terrible games.
The Kickstarter fees are somewhat of a moot point if the money is raised through Kickstarter in the first place.
Sure you can raise money without KS, but what will that cost you?
How much is the Kickstarter publicity worth? Lots of people browsing there. Also, "Kickstarter campaign!" is a good buzzy thing for marketing that everyone immediately understands, that's a lot of value right there.
How much do other payment solutions cost? (they usually all take percentages) How much does it cost to roll and run your own? (customer service, dealing with fraud, back fees, legal, etc.)
How many potential customers would be scared away by not using a big known site like Kickstarter? (we all have those shady/scammy wannabe-ones in the back of our heads)
Lots of questions.
nice debat indeed..
You kickstart a project so they can work on your product not for markting..
I wonder if this is even legal
You Sir/Mam make waaayyyyyy too much sense.
http://www.entropiapartners.com/?r=22415
Honestly and I say this in all seriousness and no joke.
A large part of me feels sorry for nasayers of Kickstarters and Early Access.
So many great games it has been one of the best gaming years of my life starting in 2014
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Lol. I don't even know why you keep bringing up early access in this discussion. KS and early access are not synonymous and I can easily see someone supporting one and not the other.
EA is just the new term adopted (thanks to Steam) for any form of playable alpha, beta or "soft launch," usually, but not always, for a price.
It wasn't that long ago that it was an oddity - i remember Neverwinter's prolonged "open beta" and this site's reluctance to publish a review for it because it was not officially released... meanwhile the cash shop was fully functional and we knew there would be no character wipe when it really, really launched.
That seemed like an oddity back then. Now it's the norm. People pay that money because they get to play the game in some sort of shape immediately. The developer can get the money while they keep developing and meanwhile the press takes it easier on them because, after all, the game is still "in development" (which is a funny concept with respect to MMOs since every single one of them is always in development - pre and post "launch".)
KS, is a different beast altogether. The distinction is easy: playable now / playable sometime in the future...maybe.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
devs can also get immediate feedback and start making adjustments right away.
In programming the idea is called 'Agile Programming' and I think it could work very well with dev to customer realtionships to. Target to try and have a new build for the users to play every six weeks.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
See the add for Crowfall plastered all over this site. I'm sure its being paid for and its currently just a kickstarter. So where are they getting the money to pay for all these MMORPG.COM adds to get people to fund their kickstarter ? (or to put it another way how much of their kickstarter will be going to pay their advertising debts??)
I don't think Kickstarter fees are a moot point. You yourself raise the question how much Kickstarter publicity is worth. If we are to consider how ethical it is to spend money advertising your crowdfunding project, then we must also take into account that devs don't choose Kickstarter because it's the cheapest way to make sales. They choose it because it's good for advertising.
So let me get this straight.
One charity organisation wants to build a house for orphans. They never even get close by "regular(your)" channels but then launches fundraising campaign and get needed funds. And thats BAD?
And company should use BEST tools to achieve its goals.
When Blizzard starts making games like Wasteland 2, Pillars, torment, even CF let me know.
https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/projects/77444/video-86043-h264_high.mp4
You might also want to read what Brian Fargo had to go through to actually make W2 happen.
Also when Blizzard "fails" a a game it probably costs more than year(s) worth of KS....cough....Titan...cough