Quite frankly, I'm appalled this is being defended so much. Just to be clear,
I have never played one of these games, and won't be interested in picking this one up.
I see a couple of arguments being used here, for this approach:
- This game wouldn't happen unless it was for the Kickstarter.
Well, that's not true. That's Sonys choice to partly fund the game if Kickstarter succeeds. Why wouldn't they just open an early pre-order system through PSN and include a cheaper price and say so much % of this pre-order will go to development. Then you'd get your goodies, your cheaper price. They'd also probably get more money over time.
- This means dead franchises can come back with kickstarters
Oh come on, if a new game under an old IP can raise 3 million in days then it's not dead is it. They obviously knew interest was apparent to even consider this approach.
- Sony aren't getting any money from this
What a load of shit, they have to spend money to distribute and publish this game. They need to see returns. I wouldn't be surprised if this kickstarter was for publishing costs and if they were met, then they fund development costs.
- They don't know about the market
This is the icing on the cake. How do all those multi-million business' cope now gauging their market without kickstarters? Poor, poor excuse. Take risks, you obviously know there's interest to even get up on a world stage and announce this.
For Sony, to get up on a world stage and announce a kickstarter for a game is
arrogant and an appalling way of going about a IP revival. What impression does this give to other teams who want to do a similar thing? They'll be thinking "
Oh, we'll have to raise X amount of money before Sony will give me anything."
Like I said in a point above, this should of been announced with an early-preorder scheme where money from the pre-order gets subsidized into development costs. Multi-million dollar companies should not be using Kickstarter.