- frame spending a normally trivial amount of money like the price of a drink or movie ticket as if it was the most important decision of their lives
I think this point needs to be emphasized. I paid - what? $15 - to kickstart Wasteland 2. That is a ludicrously small amount of money for a new release of a game in a market that is leaning more and more towards $60 and $70 price points for games. Not to mention the inevitable milking through ever growing day 1 DLC.
Not only is $15 pennies compared to these games but if the game truly flops it's nowhere near as bad as getting burned by buying into the day 1 hype of these AAA releases. So by supporting a kickstarter, not only am I getting a game at release at an unheard of price point but I'm also able to fund a game that I want and not one the publishers think I want.
If it disappoints then it disappoints and as a backer I'm out three boxes of cereal.
I'll Kickstart an Obsidian game just to see what kind of technical disaster they'll produce without a publisher trying to keep them honest.
I'm so glad you brought this back because I really wanted to touch on this but the thread moved away from the topic.
I can not abide these complaints about Obsidian's reputation for bugs. It drives me crazy that, as a developer, all they're known for is releasing broken games when Bethesda releases just as bug ridden messes as them but no one seems to care. Skyrim on PS3 wouldn't reportedly work after 20 hours. Yet as a company, Bethesda's reputation is never marred by these technical shortcomings.
But Obsidian? Ho boy! New Vegas was buggy but I had fewer bugs than Fallout 3 when I played through it. And Obsidian was contractually obligated to use the crappy Gamebryo engine which they didn't even make. I can only recall one crash while playing Alpha Protocol and the biggest bug in that game was an auto-save reload that cleared all the enemies in the level (which was easily fixed by just reloading the level - a pain to be sure but a technical disaster it was not). Neverwinter Nights 2 was technically solid and the biggest problem with KotOR II was that it was incomplete not that it was riddled with bugs.
I really can not understand all this vitriol that is directed at Obsidian for bugs when other major developers release just as glitchy games. It seems to me that fans just want to attack someone and since they dare not criticize the more popular studios they turn to the smaller, easier target.