Yogventures! finished up with $567k. Grim Dawn reached its goal and is now at $328k with a week left to go – they’ve added a number of stretch goals from $350k to $480k. Jane Jensen’s Moebius is up to $332k and they got publisher support for another game they wanted to do so they’ll be releasing two games (Moebius and a mystery game) this year. Republique made a surprise turn-around and just barely broke their goal a second ago with just 7 hours left to go. Oh and all of the new projects I listed last week are doing poorly – I’ll let you know if any of them turn around.

The big new Kickstarter I’m excited about this week is SpaceVentures. This is the new point & click adventure game from the creators of Space Quest, one of my favorite series growing up. It’s basically a new Space Quest game except they don’t own the license anymore. They’re up to $122k of their $500k goal with 32 days left to go. And speaking of old Sierra Online Point & Click Adventure games, the entire Quest for Glory series ( a mix of RPG and Adventure) just recently went up on Good Old Games for a mere $10 – it’s well worth your time and money if you haven’t played them.

As far as big money kickstarters go, a sequel to Carmageddon went up a few days ago and is up to $187k with a $400k goal. Never played the original so I don’t have much to say other than that I guess running over pedestrians never goes out of style.

Xenonauts is an indie take on the classic strategy game, X-Com. Looks fun and they’ve already surpassed their goal of $50k.

Legends of Eisenwald is a King’s Bounty style Strategy/RPG hybrid. The screenshots look impressive and their approach to the world (less fantasy than most games of this type) is interesting. They’ve almost reached their goal of $50k with 10 days left to go.

One development I thought was rather interesting was with a recent update on the Grim Dawn project where they added a number of Logitech-donated gaming mice as one of the reward tiers. Could this kind of small corporate sponsorship of kickstarters become a common thing in the future? Should it?

Shadowrun Returns finished up with a solid $1.836 million. Leisure Suit Larry finished with $655k. Yogventures! is up to $514k with 2 days left. Grim Dawn is almost funded with $256k ($280k goal) and 2 weeks left to go. Jane Jensen’s Moebius is up to $266k of its $300k goal with 2 weeks left. Republique is at $221k, about $100k more than they had last week, but unless something amazing happens, they’re not reaching $500k in the next week. Is snagging David Hayter and Jennifer Hale the miracle that will turn this kickstarter around? We’ll see this week.

As far as new kickstarters go, our first one for today is Cross of the Dutchman. It has an attractive 3D overhead cartoon style and appears to be an Action/RPG somewhat similar to Zelda but with larger scale battles. They’re hoping for $50k.

Next we have a revival of that old favorite, Battle Chess. For those unfamiliar with the original, it was chess but whenever someone took a piece, the pieces would come alive and attack each other in heated combat. This new version will add modern graphics as well as online match support. They’re looking for $100k.

It teaches you while you learn! This Biology game for the PC and PC w/Kinect that will feature a number of little games as you go on a journey through various cells. It looks good and it sounds like the people who are making it know what they’re doing.  They’re shooting for the relatively modest goal of $27k.

That’s it for this week’s installment of the Kickstarter Video Game Report. As we close, here’s a link to the latest Penny Arcade comic strip which is relevant to our interests here.

Let’s see how the games we were watching from last week are doing, shall we?

The Banner Saga is done and they ended up with $723k, quite a bit over their initial goal of $100k. Valdis Story just ended at $49k (goal of $8k). Shadowrun Returns is at $1.666 million ($400k goal) with a little over a day to go. Jane Jensen’s Moebius is at $238k ($300k goal) with 3 weeks left. Leisure Suit Larry remake reached its goal ($533k/$500k) with 4 days left. Yogventures! is at $396k ($250k goal) with 8 days left. Grim Dawn is at $197k ($280k goal) with 3 weeks to go. Republique got a boost after announcing PC/Mac support and is at $123k ($500k goal) with 2 weeks left – I think it’s probably too late but it’s good to see they’re not going out without a fight.

Kitaru isn’t doing so hot but it has a while left to go so they’ll probably make their $25k goal. I think the big problem with this kickstarter is that the funding goal feels completely unrealistic – they’re showing off a big fancy 3D RPG but they’re asking for a pittance. I think a lot of people see the disconnect between the budget and the screenshots and that makes them cautious. Oh and it didn’t help that the please-support-our-kickstarter video they shared tried to be funny but failed.

Class of Heroes 2 failed with less than 20% of its total goal. Much as I’d like to see a respected old RPG localizer come back into the game, I don’t think this is the way to do it. Not only did the kickstarter fail, but I think they’re going to have a hard time breaking even on their costs when the digital version of the game comes out later this year. I mean, you’ve got a very niche subgenre of games (the dungeon crawler RPG) that is a sequel to a game that did poorly (both in sales and reviews) and that’s up against a lot of fierce competition (like the Etrian Odyssey series and Legend of Grimrock) – that’s just not a recipe for success. I’m thinking maybe 10k copies sold at $20 or under; less than 2k copies sold if the game goes for $30-$40. Double or triple those values if the game comes out on the PS3 as well. I hope GaijinWorks and Monkey Paw Games have a contingency plan for if Class of Heroes 2 bombs and they’re not staking the future of their companies on it.

In other news, I thought this quote from the creator of Ben There, Dan That was interesting:

“So yeah, because someone’ll shout KICKSTARTER: I’ve said why in more detail in the upcoming issue of Continue Magazine, but (spoilers): basically as a solo dev I don’t want to toy with other peoples’ cash. If I die, or catch some horrible disease, no one else is going to make the game. That money’ll go to waste, the project will die, and angry people will probably wind up hounding my loved ones demanding their fiver back.
I’m also slightly wary of some of the alpha-funding horror stories I’ve heard: seems like people get a sense of entitlement with that kind of funding that I’m keen to avoid – I spoke to one sobbing indie dev who said he was in ‘perpetual crunch’ because being seen to take a single weekend off got him hatemail from his backers.”

That brings up a lot of interesting ideas – even if you can do a kickstarter should you? Like with the kickstarter we did for Cthulhu Saves the World, we had less than 200 backers, most of which were friends, other developers, and hardcore fans – a very supportive group. And we only received a few thousand dollars – if something had gone wrong, we probably could have figured out a way to pay everyone back. However, when you’re talking about tens of thousands of backers and hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars, that’s a big difference. With a successful kickstarter of that magnitude, that’s a lot of money to be accountable for and a lot of people who feel like you owe them. Is it worth all that stress? I’m not sure.

On a similar note to this topic, the editors of Gamasutra recently posted an article entitled Should I Do a Kickstarter Campaign. Well worth a read if you’re considering one.

If you’re a fan of the Atari 2600, this kickstarter for Star Castle is worth checking out. The original creator thought it would be impossible to port Star Castle to the 2600 but this individual has done it and it asking for money to produce more copies of the game (right now he just has the  prototype he made). It’s already surpassed its modest goal of $10k but if you want a fun little piece of gaming history or just like collecting classic games, it’s worth checking out.

Also, I wanted to throw a shout-out to one RPGMaker kickstarter – Unemployment Quest. Does it look like the most incredible RPG ever? No, not really. But I think it deserves kudos because it’s not another naive RPGMaker kickstarter that promises the stars with THE MOST AMAZING 40+ HOUR RPG OF ALL TIME despite the developer having no experience in making games. No, here we have a new developer who had an idea of how to twist the genre in an interesting way and wants to make a modest game out of it while asking for a little help so he can do a small print-run of it. Good for him.

Now I’d like to talk a little bit about stretch goals. For those unfamiliar with stretch goals, it’s basically when a kickstarter project says that they’ll add stuff to the project if they reach certain funding goals beyond their original. Personally, I think they’re a really bad idea. Yes, they’re a way to convince people to give you more money, but should you really be trying to get that much more money than your original goal? Shouldn’t your initial goal be enough to cover your expenses and allow you to create what you wanted to create in the first place? By adding stretch goals, you’re essentially saying “Feature creep, here we come!” and as anyone who has run into the problem of feature creep can tell you, it can ruin projects. Rather than do stretch goals, set reasonable goals in the first place and if you get more money than you expected, just consider it a cushion in case your expenses turn out to be more than you expected.

Now before I close this week’s article, I’d like to say something about solicitations. Namely, I don’t like them. I post news and talk about kickstarters that I think are interesting. That doesn’t mean that they’re the only kickstarters worth supporting, just that they’re the only ones I feel like writing about. If you come to me and ask “Why didn’t you write about Super Mega Happy Fun Slide – The FPS?” my answer will generally be the same – “I personally didn’t find it very interesting.” I’ve heard stories about how bigger publications are getting bombarded with requests to cover their kickstarter and I want none of that. Begging me to cover your project will get you nowhere – if you want me to cover your kickstarter, create a good kickstarter project and chances are I’ll notice it when I look for exciting new kickstarters to talk about.

Let’s look at the scoreboards!

Wasteland 2 is finished with $2.9 million dollars to their name (over $3 million if you count Paypal donations through their own site). The Banner Saga ends today in a few hours and they’re at $683k. If they reach $700k, they’ll add customizable Viking cities to the game. Valdis Story is up to $32k with a week left to go. Shadowrun isn’t doing as well as Wasteland 2 but it’s still doing very respectably with $1.28 million raised and a week left to go. Jane Jensen’s kickstarter is at just under $200k ($300k goal) so it ought to reach its funding in the next 4 weeks. Leisure Suit Larry has almost reached its funding ($430k/$500k) with a little under 2 weeks to go. Yogventures! is going strong with $333k raised ($250k goal).

On the sad side, Republique has stalled out at $77k ($500k) so it doesn’t look like that one’s happening.

The big new kickstarter I’m excited about this week is Grim Dawn. Grim Dawn is the spiritual sequel to Titan Quest, a hack & slash RPG for the PC. Titan Quest is one of my favorite games of all time and Grim Dawn looks even better so I really hope this one succeeds. They’re currently at $128k of their $280k goal.

Another kickstarter that looks interesting is Kitaru. It’s a dystopian future RPG done by a guy who is known for his CGI animation skills. Looks impressive though  it’s a bit weird that their goal is only $25k – looks much more expensive than that.

To end things off, I’d like to talk about kickstarter reward tiers. With kickstarter, you have two very different kinds of rewards – digital rewards and physical rewards. You can treat digital rewards as if you were selling someone something. For example, say you’re going to sell a game for $10 – you can have a $10 reward be that you get a copy of the game. You can do this because the cost to deliver a digital reward is next to nothing. However, with physical rewards, you really need to treat them like, well, a fundraiser. Namely, the tier that gives a physical reward should be drastically higher than the expected cost of that physical reward because you want most of the money to go towards funding your game and not to go towards creating and delivering physical rewards. Several kickstarter planners don’t think this through very well with the result that you get things like the Star Command kickstarter where they ended up spending a substantial percentage of their funding on fulfilling the various reward tiers.

So in short, be careful about your physical rewards. I’d even go so far as to say that unless you’re a bigger company like Double Fine with the framework already in place to mass produce physical products, you shouldn’t give away any physical rewards at any tier under $100. Remember that not only do you have to make whatever physical rewards you promise, you also have to ship them and that can be very expensive.

Welcome to installment 2 of my weekly Kickstarter Video Game report! First up, let’s see how the games we talked about last week have done!

Wasteland 2 is up to about $1.65 million ($900k goal) so they’ve gained about $150k in the last week. The Banner Saga is at about $320k ($100k goal) so they’ve gained around $100k – very nice. ARG Zombies is only at about $6,500 with a goal of $15k due in 2 days so it looks unlikely that they’ll make it unless they have some big surprise spenders. Americana Dawn is up to $4,600 ($2,755 goal) with about a day left. And Auditorium 2 made a surprise comeback and is just over their goal of $60k despite only being a little over half funded a week ago. Awesome!

The Vic Ireland/Monkey Paw Games kickstarter that I mentioned last week has been released and boy, is it a disappointment. There are numerous problems with this kickstarter, foremost being that there’s no way to get a cheap digital copy of the game through (you either pay $59 for a UMD version or $100 for a UMD + download). This kickstarter does so many things wrong that I went ahead and dedicated an entire article to talking about its many mistakes.  At only $38k funding after about 42 hours, it seems highly unlikely that it’ll meet its goal (in contrast, The Banner Saga passed $100k in its first 48 hours). From listening to Vic Ireland discuss all the difficulties in doing a kickstarter for an enhanced localization and box sets for a portable game system, it really makes me think that Ken Berry and Jessica Chavez at XSeed Games had the right idea when they said Kickstarter was ill suited for game localizations. Gaijinworks & Monkey Paw Games have made a few improvements to the kickstarter since launch – adding screenshots, adding a digital download of the soundtrack at $20 and a digital download of the game at $100 – so here’s hoping they keep making improvements and are able to salvage this project.

In recent news, Kickstarter released an article where they talked about how big blockbuster kickstarters like the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter have been a tremendous boon to bringing additional attention and money to other projects on the site. There’s talk of using kickstarter to license songs for the Rock Band Network and Grim Dawn, the spiritual sequel to one of my all-time favorite hack & slash RPGs, Titan Quest, will probably get a kickstarter sometime soon.

The kickstarter formerly known as the Crowdsourced Hardcore Tactical Shooter has been revamped and is now called Takedown. I thought it had some problems when it was first released but apparently the creator agreed and is seeking to fix things. It’s up to $121k with 70 hours left to go. Will it manage to make a comeback and successful raise an additional $79k to reach its goal of $200k? It will be interesting to watch.

In current kickstarters that I think look promising, there’s Valdis Story: Abyssal City. It appears to be a Castlevania-esque Action/RPG and has rather nice visuals for an indie project. It’s at $3k+ of its $8k goal and it still has 4 weeks to go so it’s looking good.

That’s it for now! See you again next week! Next week’s report will be early (probably Tuesday or Wednesday) since I’m leaving on Thursday for Boston so we can show off our upcoming game, Penny Arcade’s On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness 3, at PAX East.