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[RukusProvider]

I found it to be quite tacky.

2mil is likely a very small percentage of the full development and advertising budget.

I also don't appreciate the lack of transparency with Sonys actual involvement, the reasoning for the 2mil, outlined timeframe and budget projections.

As far as I see it the community got played and is happy to be preyed upon.

 

[test_account]

I found it to be quite tacky.

2mil is likely a very small percentage of the full development and advertising budget.

I also don't appreciate the lack of transparency with Sonys actual involvement, the reasoning for the 2mil, outlined timeframe and budget projections.

As far as I see it the community got played and is happy to be preyed upon.

Do we have any info regarding budget for other games that had a kickstarter campaign in comparison? It would be interesting to know. To me, "a very small percentage" is something like 3-5%. If we say 10%, that would be a budget of 20 million. If the game has a big budget (15 - 20+ million dollars), i can see why people feel its tacky to ask for 2 million, no doubt. However, i cant really see that someone is willing to spend around 18 million dollars, but have a tipping point of 2 million dollars extra (those needed through Kickstarter). The money getting in from the Kickstarter campaign isnt basically free money either because people are buying stuff that has value. The higher tiers probably have a pretty big overhead though, but the majority of backers are in the range between $29 and $100.

I agree that it would be nice to know more about who is the publisher and all that. We get to know who the publisher is sooner or later, at least when the game is released. How are people being preyed upon though? People who want to back this now are basically buying the game early. I cant see how this Kickstarter campaign is affecting the user in any way to be honest, especially concider that it was funded that quick (so there is no risk of the game not being made now). I think Y2Kev is pretty spont with the reason why its beeing seen as something negative:

Because on the surface (and even under the surface to some degree) it looks like risk transfer from a corporation to consumers. I'm not entirely sure that's something I don't want though, at least for games like this.

I'm a core gamer and by and large the games I want to play will not meet publisher return hurdles. They would be better off putting their money elsewhere and I get that. I'd never pay to finance assassin's creed and god knows we can't given the scale of required investment. But if someone put up a legend of mystical ninja goemon kickstarter tomorrow and asked me to share the risk with 40,000 other people I would do it...the derived utility is so high.

 

[jcjimher]

I found it to be quite tacky.

2mil is likely a very small percentage of the full development and advertising budget.

I also don't appreciate the lack of transparency with Sonys actual involvement, the reasoning for the 2mil, outlined timeframe and budget projections.

As far as I see it the community got played and is happy to be preyed upon.

I understand your reasoning, but as long as publishers and developers fulfill their part of the deal I see no problem. If Shenmue 3 comes out, even if it is mainly funded by Sony or other investor, backers will get their game and their special items.

Of course if this becomes a trend and Kickstarters begin to surface for many other projects, the probability of any of them failing increases. And a big-profile failure would mean doom for this model.

But until that happens I have no qualms against it. And I would even go as far as saying that, globally, the benefits may outreach the harm...

(By the way, it might be off topic, but I'm sure some rich gamer would be willing to pay 10.000$ for, say it, MGSV if that means getting a dinner party with Hideo Kojima. And that's another good aspect of Kickstarter too IMO)

 

[Littlefang]

I found it to be quite tacky.

2mil is likely a very small percentage of the full development and advertising budget.

I also don't appreciate the lack of transparency with Sonys actual involvement, the reasoning for the 2mil, outlined timeframe and budget projections.

As far as I see it the community got played and is happy to be preyed upon.

I totally agree with this. I am fine with the kickstarter, but I think that they should outright say that they're pretty much just checking to see how much interest there is in the game. They're being unnecessarily obtuse about why there needs to be a kickstarter at all. I think the kickstarter should say we need to reach x goal in order for Sony to fund the rest of the game or whatever the case actually is. Obviously other people can do whatever the hell they want to do with their own money, but I'd rather not see publishers using kickstarters to gauge whether they should fund a game or not.

 

[hawk2025]

I believe Y2Kev said it looks like risk transfer from the companies to the customers.

That's exactly what it is.


And I'm absolutely, 100% ok with that.

 

[PensivePen]

I don't really see a problem with it, it's obvious by the very low goal that somebody is putting a lot more money into this aside from just how much the kickstarter makes. You can't make a game like that on 2 million alone. It's giving all those die hard fans who claim "I would happily pay $500 for Shenmue 3!" a chance to put up or shut up, and gauges interest while ensuring an obviously risky project will at least have some small measure of financial security going in.

Some people in here have said that it seems scummy somehow to gauge interest in this way. I don't really think so at all, my only wish it that they would be completely transparent as to who was providing addiitonal funding to the project, and how much.

 

[RukusProvider]

I totally agree with this. I am fine with the kickstarter, but I think that they should outright say that they're pretty much just checking to see how much interest there is in the game. They're being unnecessarily obtuse about why there needs to be a kickstarter at all. I think the kickstarter should say we need to reach x goal in order for Sony to fund the rest of the game or whatever the case actually is. Obviously other people can do whatever the hell they want to do with their own money, but I'd rather not see publishers using kickstarters to gauge whether they should fund a game or not.

It's a great way for publishers to offload an element of risk and cost.

As a shareholder, I'd love for this to become commonplace.

 

[charlequin]

The crux is that they are going to get more than that, they are going to squeeze out as much as they can with this move. Their overall budget will not move, they are simply getting someone else to pay for part of it ahead of time. Even if they only exceed 2$ mil by a dollar, that one less dollar for them to spend.

No publisher in the world would make that deal. This is like how people were suggesting that with Bloodstained the publisher would pull back their own funds in proportion to the success of the Kickstarter. How exactly does a publisher benefit from a relationship where their share of the sales of a game goes down in direct proportion to how successful the pitch is? Then they're stuck funding the whole thing when it marginally clears the goal but shut out of the picture when it massively overperforms. That type of arrangement is not how you mitigate risk.

Of course if this becomes a trend and Kickstarters begin to surface for many other projects, the probability of any of them failing increases. And a big-profile failure would mean doom for this model.

This is a big part of why, while tacky, I don't really have a fundamental problem with this. There is a very limited number of games that qualify as all-time most-wanted lost games, with larger-than-life reputations and legions of fans waiting to put down huge amounts of money to bring them back. At this point the low-hanging fruit is almost all picked from Western gaming, and we'll probably see all the most obvious ideas from Japan get picked up soon. When someone's reach exceeds their grasp and they try to do this for some mediocre or unbeloved franchise, it'll blow up, probably scare off publishers from trying anything similarly scammy, and leave us back where we are now. This is pretty much the same process we saw with video game kickstarters in the first place -- a ton of really bad me-too pitches failed in the period after DFA, and it led to a winnowing out of particularly egregious campaigns.

 

[TheDarkKnight774]

Next year its Silent Hills turn!

 

[hawk2025]

I found it to be quite tacky.

2mil is likely a very small percentage of the full development and advertising budget.

I also don't appreciate the lack of transparency with Sonys actual involvement, the reasoning for the 2mil, outlined timeframe and budget projections.

As far as I see it the community got played and is happy to be preyed upon.

If someone is happy with something, they are, by definition, not being preyed upon.

 

[Nafai1123]

Oh yay, another thread for people to express their "concern"

 

[Y2Kev]

No publisher in the world would make that deal. This is like how people were suggesting that with Bloodstained the publisher would pull back their own funds in proportion to the success of the Kickstarter. How exactly does a publisher benefit from a relationship where their share of the sales of a game goes down in direct proportion to how successful the pitch is? Then they're stuck funding the whole thing when it marginally clears the goal but shut out of the picture when it massively overperforms. That type of arrangement is not how you mitigate risk.

To wit, this is called wrong-way risk. The risk you are taking is adversely correlated with the performance of the borrower/obligor/recipient/etc.

People are being really irrational about how risk works.