For every good kickstarter story there has been 2 disappointing / bad story.
After Spacebase and Broken Age, not so sure about thatHey, if Double Fine tries to kickstart Psychonauts 2, then you would see numbers spike.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/tXYljBZ4Zq2B5Gq6ES-7Cew/htmlview
There's also a second tab that lists a few of the successful sub-$75k Kickstarter successes there, although it states that an unquantifiable "most" projects at that level fail, which in addition to being unspecific and without citation, doesn't seem true.
in a way Ouya was the beginning and the end of it all
Yep, I agree. I think this both an effect of competition from Early Access and the amount of money being pledged normalizing now that there aren't tons of big name devs putting up projects like during the initial rush.As the article mentions, the rise of Early Access on Steam has siphoned off a lot of the projects and money that would have went to kickstarter. I think that would have been a good section to highlight in the OP. Combine that with last year having a ton of big name projects and this year is seeing a lot of disposable income go to the new consoles, I think this is not surprising at all.
I don't think crowdfunding overall has dropped off much.
The funding and articles surrounding the Ouya is still a mystery to me. I simply can't understand what the appeal of that device was supposed to be. It was the talk of the industry when it was being funded and then just seemed to drop off the planet.
Talking about failures, what happened to River City Ransom: Underground, is that still coming? Seems like forever since it was backed.
They're still updating somewhat regularly and in development, it looks decent, but they've definitely burned through the original money and they've posted the typical "development is hard", "they made mistakes" platitudes and it's going to miss the deadline badly. They brought in a fixer specifically to get their shit together. I don't see it in imminent danger of failure, but it's clearly a project that got in over its head.
The funding and articles surrounding the Ouya is still a mystery to me. I simply can't understand what the appeal of that device was supposed to be. It was the talk of the industry when it was being funded and then just seemed to drop off the planet.
One project (a video game, natch), ended up being a scam by some Occupy Wall Street kid that used the money to buy a house for him and eight of his friends to live in.
Edit: Rereading your post, I see yours were board games, which make up about half of my pledged projects.
I always roll my eyes at these "Secret of Mana-inspired 16-bit jRPG return to the glory days!" projects. To my knowledge, I don't know of a single one that has both succeeded and been good. It's just too much work; anything short of a million dollars probably wouldn't cover it.
I wanted to respond to clarify the purpose of the second tab--I made this list; it's true that I list successes but then claim "most fail". I came to this conclusion by looking at the updates for a variety of low-pledge KSes and based on my own experience backing lower-end titles. What I've typically found is that very low value KSes do not appear to provide deliverables or reasonable updates; for example, check the successfully funded sub-$1000 KS projects and look at the updates. Typically you will find that they either do not update, update but don't really get anywhere, etc. Now I don't necessarily think this is a problem because I think at that level there are a lot of friends and family donations. Like when a kid starts a "Help me buy a minecraft server" KS and gets 2 $100 donations, it's hard to imagine those people want accountability.
But to name a few lower-profile projects I backed that I would consider failures:
Poker Smash - Funded a PC port and Steam release. PC port was made and released privately, not publicly. Game was Greenlit for Steam but no followup. I don't really blame the guy, he got a grand total of $8000 and I'm sure he's not going to spend 10 years supporting his clients. So, again, partially fulfilled but disappointing that he couldn't do more.
I don't mention this to shit on small devs, I think you can tell I'm sympathetic, but my purpose in assembling the list was the following:
- First, evaluate the success rate of high profile (>75k) kickstarters: Results: Most >75k kickstarters are successful or on track to be successful. Side note: Most of them miss their release targets, so don't back if you need to get the game delivered on time.
- Second, note that there were a number of lower profile kickstarters which led to great games
- Third, incidentally observe that lower profile kickstarters fail or fail to maintain adequate communication on a much more frequent basis and that if the aggregate fundraising amount can't afford to employ the people full time, your ability to get progress and accountability will be comparatively limited. There was no citation because it was an off-the-cuff observation based on personal experience and a brief investigation into this stuff while in the course of trying to make the points that I felt were more important to make. I'm open to challenge if someone would like to put in a more thorough assessment of low-profile KSes, but personally assembling the >75k part was already an enormous amount of wasted time for something I was basically doing out of idle personal interest.
(I plan on continuing to update the >75k list pretty frequently)
This weekend is gonna be an interesting testing ground for Hyper Light Drifter!
The bubble exploded once a Sony owned IP, developed by a company that gets regular work with the likes of Microsoft, EA and Disney, was funded via Kickstarter.
I mean, where does it go from there?
I think its more of a lack of decent projects coming out combined that people backed projects (me included) that just had a couple of artwork pictures and nothing else. I would't do that now and usually want to see a demo or something before backing.
I am extremely satisfied so far with all my kickstarted projects. I have backed a dozen or so and most of them exceeded my expectations. The only one still on the fence is dead state but we ll see how it goes. i haven't touched the new beta since i played the "demo".
Just this year i got a new tex murphy (fantastic game), divnity original sin (Fantastic game), wasteland 2 (so far fantastic game ), there is torment coming by the end of the year hell i even liked Moebius.
I also have been playing arena commander (star citizen module) on and off for the last three months.
Next year i have torment coming and stasis (which looked so very good).
If more decent projects appear i would be glad to back them since for me at least kickstarter has been a game changer.
There was definitely a spike last year with high profile projects, with high profile developers that had an umbrella effect on other projects. The model works and remains viable. That's what matters in the end. Developers if they chose so, have a funding model that enables them to bypass publisher vetoing process and go directly to their customers with creative freedom only limited by the total budget.
Rule #1: Only kickstart games by reputable developers who have worked in the industry before. I've only kickstarted Grim Dawn, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity and Mighty No. 9, specifically because they are from devs who I can trust.
Rule #2: Do not kickstart "debut" games by unknown developers.
There haven't been any Star Citizen's this year, so it's not really surprising...
Funding for Star Citizen keeps rolling in -- the game just hit the $55 million mark... Less than a year ago, the game had raised only $26 million.
The creativity of many things in this world are limited by their budget more so than anything else. The thing is with Kickstarter, 500k-1mil is pretty generous for most games and that's hardly enough to make even low-budget games that publishers can push out.
The overall kickstarter figure is even more striking when you realize that Star Citizen was this year's Star Citizen!
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/226871/Star_Citizen_hits_55_million_and_280_devs_as_funding_rolls_on.php
So Star Citizen raised $29 million more this year, which is $2 million more than the rest of gaming kickstarters this year combined.
That kinda blows my mind.
I only ever backed Mighty No. 9 and Amplitude. Guess I'm part of the problem...
thankfully.
this is exploitation at its finest. get money from someone else, bear no risk, no roi for those who put in cash, take all the profits, all while having the monthly income to survive and feed yourself and no deadlines.
Americana Dawn - Project was for a freeware game, so I knew when I was getting into it that it wouldn't be a big deal if they didn't deliver. I was funding to support the dev rather than to get something of value. Dev ran out of money, rebooted project, team disbanded, new team members. They're still chugging away and supposedly I'll eventually get a copy of the game when it does release, but this is a failure.
There's a few reasons for this. One is high profile flops likes Yogventures and Clang, while last year saw a number of known brands and developers flooding the crowdfunding site.
Super Retro Squad.Huh. Which one is this?
I've been very happy with Kickstarter board game projects. Like I mentioned, I have one that is painfully late (Alien Frontiers 4th Edition + Promo), but I kind of don't care since I know it's actually still a thing.I think we've gotten 100% delivery on board game pledges, although the quality of game design I've gotten from videogame projects is definitely significantly higher overall.