Project Eternity – Just under $4 million (more with Paypal added in). Finished.
Sealark, an Oceanic Adventure Game – $59k. Finished.
Blackspace – $134k ($350k goal). Failed.
An Old-School RPG (Now entitled Shaker) – $255k. 16 days left.
FFVI OC Remix Soundtrack – $127k. 6 days left.
Doug TenNapal Sketchbook – $94k. 2 days left.
Songmasters, the Music Wars – $9k ($20k goal). 44 days left.
Mindblown Life – $48k ($60k goal). 13 days left.
Dysis – $16k. 15 days left.
Project Eternity finished successfully with around $4 million total making it the highest funded video game project (software) of all-time on kickstarter. The previous record was held by Double Fine Adventure Game which had $3.3 million.
Bad news for previously funded project, Haunts: The Manse Macabre. They’re out of money, they don’t have a programmer, and they have no idea when the project will be finished. The project creator has been very upfront about what’s happening and has even offered to give refunds to anyone who asks for one (although i don’t know how he’ll manage that if they’re out of money) but this just goes to show that donations can be risky things and should be treated as well, donations, and not preorders in most cases.
Remember last week how I said that Star Citizen was going to be crowdfunded but not on kickstarter. Apparently, they changed their mind and it’s now on kickstarter in addition to their own crowdfunding site. The kickstarter has raised $174k so far (goal $500k) and according to their personal site, they’ve raised over $1 million.
Distance – A Next Generation Racer is the next project by the developers of Nitronic Rush, a Digipen student project that got a lot of buzz for its unique approach to futuristic racing. Distance sounds like Nitronic Rush on steroids – a “survival racing game” where you race, fly, jump, change gravity and otherwise be awesome as you travel through dangerous environments. They’re up to $24k with a goal of $125k and a deadline in 28 days.
Second Quest isn’t a video game but I’ll make an exception for it since it’s inspired by a video game (Zelda) and one of the people involved has worked in the video game industry (the background artist for Braid). Second Quest is a standalone 50-page visual novella where a young woman explores the past and discovers it doesn’t match up with the legends she’s heard. It’s up to $17k with a goal of $50k and a deadline in 27 days.
That’s it for this week’s installment! Oh and my goal to start writing daily Monday through Friday has been a success this week! Daily website traffic has nearly doubled since I started doing this. Daily content = more traffic, who would have known? Answer: everyone.
I am glad you reminded me of that Sketchbook. I was debating on donating when it first went up and figured I would wait and think about it. Suffice it to say, I forgot about it. Just did the signed copy donation. I love art books.
Funny that you mention “buyer’s remorse,” Michael. I had one such instance. I backed “Unemployment Quest,” and when I eventually got to play it, I was very disappointed. Now, I knew it was going to be a RPG Maker game, but that wasn’t a problem. I’ve played many games made with RPG Maker and enjoyed several of them. This game that I backed, however, was of the lowest quality. I made a game myself that was so much better just by collecting scripts and art from around the internet (most of which allow commercial usage with a simple credit listing).
I was very sad I spent ten dollars on a game that probably took someone a month or two to make. I spent eight months on mine and I wouldn’t expect someone to pay ten bucks to play it.
But, I’ve backed several other Kickstarters, so it hasn’t curbed my enthusiasm yet.
Just to clarify since I left a sentence half-finished: Project Giana’s Sneak Peak was really awesome and is absolutely worth the money and you should buy it.
There have been failures before in other categories, Kickstarter even needed to make the “Kickstarter is not a store” posting to clarify. But yeah, I’m not that happy with some of the ways rewards a done, it feels too much like an episode of Oprah: “And you get Linux! And OS X! And T-Shirts! More free stuff for everyone!”. I think that there is a high chance that one of the big projects will successfully make their game but the game… well, sucks. Mediocre games are the norm in the normal world, and even through the rose tinted glasses of being a Kickstarter backer, there is a high chance that someone will get their glorious 100$ Collector’s Edition of a game that will get a 58 Metacritic score and that would’ve been better with some more polish and less fluff.
Especially the many promises of “Of course we do Linux! And iOS! And Android! And OUYA!” from inexperienced developers are somewhat alarming, because with my experience working in the industry my question becomes: “And who is doing the Tech Support for all these Platforms?”.
I don’t think anything is really bad here though. Kickstarter was small and unknown in 2011, with >$10k projects being exceptional. Then during 2012 it exploded to the point $100k seems really low, and once people got a few disappointments under their belt it will eventually normalize.
I backed 121 projects, and received about 40-50 of them so far. There was 1 scam (I lost $5 on an iPad stylus), 2 somewhat underwhelming but still acceptable products, and everything else was really, really good and exceeded expectations.
Of these fulfilled requests, the only video game so far was Project Giana, and the Sneak Peek version they sent out was awesome – not exactly “Game of the Year” material. Now, I paid $100 for it including some bonus stuff. Do I regret it? Absolutely not, but for the price of one $15 Giana, I could have gotten 2 XComs.
I wonder if buyer’s remorse will happen for people?
Glad you brought up Haunt. I’ve been reading about that this morning. I have a feeling it will be the first of many. I’ve been wary of Kickstarter in general, but I’ve got a gut feeling that there will be a rash of smaller projects that fail, and may really ultimately hurt the indie devs trying to get funding through kickstarter as others become wary as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a year’s time, kickstarter will only be good for larger companies and projects like Project Eternity.
I’m not trying to be doom and gloom here, but what I’ve noticed about this trend is that gamers are seeing Kickstarter as a “cheap” pre-order service, smaller devs seem to have a larger scope than the funds they request warrant, and larger companies seem to be seeing this as a glorified 50-different “Collector’s Editions” pre-sale service, at largely inflated prices.
Hopefully I’m wrong.