Jon Shafer's "At the Gates": a kickstarter game

[MJW (ya that one)]

I just don't understand why people would give Trip money after he failed to finish Civ5 (I can track down the posts in the Civ5 thread if someone calls BS on that). That was much more favorable situation to him. Of course, "miracles" can happen if you make a committed to change but that usually doesn't happen. There's a >50% of failure and that's good enough to not give someone your money.

You can check out the main GalCiv3 thread to see why I don't hold that saga against him.

As far as Trip selling his car and such that's actually okay: I'd go farther than Sirian and say that it's all over for him as a game developer if he doesn't finish. If Trip really wants to work on games he has to go for it. Not going for it would be like kicking a field goal late in the 4th while being down by 4.

[Bacchus]

Sorry, not buying. This generalization has been proven wrong in some cases.

Two games that I've really enjoyed -- Banished, and Stardew Valley -- were both one-person projects, start to finish. Banished was truly one person, and Stardew Valley was 98% one person with a few contracted bits.

In the case of Banished, an artist with prior experience decided to take the plunge in to the design and coding side, and pulled off a very solid title in an underserved sub-genre.

The guy who made Stardew Valley was partially supported by his girlfriend, and he is now a multi-millionaire. And it took him five years to finish his game.

The difference between these guys and Jon Shafer is broken promises and timelines. They didn't solicit public funding, and they released their game -- and profited from their good work and good ideas. For every story like these two, there are tons of failures, but that happens across the spectrum on business startups. One has to wear a lot of hats to make any small business succeed.

Jon was in position to make this work. He just-- hasn't. I don't know that the final jury is out yet on this project of his, even, but it could be. Certainly there are plenty of bad signals, and more accumulating, but to dismiss out of hand the notion that games can be made by one person is simply false. It can, and has, been done -- and my two examples are not the only ones. We're in the midst of a reformation to the games industry, with electronic distribution opening up connections between niche games and niche markets that has enabled a much wider selection of games to be published successfully than in prior decades.


- Sirian

To be clear, I am not saying solo projects can't succeed, I'm saying no-one in their right mind should fund one and expect a result.

[Hail]

That's why you back kickstarter projects which have a team behind them, not just a guy and some mates. Diversity of skills and outlook, plus sanity checks, plus ability to carry on should something happen, as it inevitably does. Mostly sanity checks though, as any PhD student will confirm, truly solo long-term projects take you to crazy town mentally.

Sorry, not buying. This generalization has been proven wrong in some cases.

Eador: Genesis was a one-man project. btw, highly recommended if you enjoy(ed) HoMM3.

In most cases I'm frustrated at the claim that people "ran out of money" for IP work. They didn't really "run out," they took the money and then didn't do the promised work. If my employer hires me to work on a project on a contract basis, paying up front, and I either do no work or I do half of it and then decide I wasn't paid enough and bail the money didn't run out, I was just a bastard.

they took the money and did not deliver.

I just don't understand why people would give Trip money after he failed to finish Civ5 (I can track down the posts in the Civ5 thread if someone calls BS on that). That was much more favorable situation to him. Of course, "miracles" can happen if you make a committed to change but that usually doesn't happen. There's a >50% of failure and that's good enough to not give someone your money.

You can check out the main GalCiv3 thread to see why I don't hold that saga against him.

As far as Trip selling his car and such that's actually okay: I'd go farther than Sirian and say that it's all over for him as a game developer if he doesn't finish. If Trip really wants to work on games he has to go for it. Not going for it would be like kicking a field goal late in the 4th while being down by 4.

"failed to finish"? I call bs on that.

Trip left civ5 unfinished and Trip left "the Final Frontier" civ4 mod unfinished. I think that Trip was encouraged to leave by Firaxis after civ5's user rating plummeted.

but with At the Gates, Trip did not have to finish. he could have put some polish on his "fully-playable prototype" and put it out in the Early Access steam thing, but he chose the greedy route of selling the game on his site. some kickstarter titles go that route as it formally fulfills their kickstarter promise of "releasing something". typically such games stay in EA for years (e.g. forever).

Trip can partially rehabilitate himself by stating that "since he failed to deliver and spent community's money doing so, all the work (art, code, sounds, design docs, etc.) belongs to the community and I will upload it all the data to git under a MIT license."


P.S. is frogboy still "fixing" GC3?

[naufragar]

That's why you back kickstarter projects which have a team behind them, not just a guy and some mates. Diversity of skills and outlook, plus sanity checks, plus ability to carry on should something happen, as it inevitably does. Mostly sanity checks though, as any PhD student will confirm, truly solo long-term projects take you to crazy town mentally.

Sorry, not buying. This generalization has been proven wrong in some cases.

Eador: Genesis was a one-man project. btw, highly recommended if you enjoy(ed) HoMM3.

And that's my reminder to reinstall Eador: Genesis. Wonderful, wonderful game.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I just don't understand why people would give Trip money after he failed to finish Civ5 (I can track down the posts in the Civ5 thread if someone calls BS on that). That was much more favorable situation to him. Of course, "miracles" can happen if you make a committed to change but that usually doesn't happen. There's a >50% of failure and that's good enough to not give someone your money.

You can check out the main GalCiv3 thread to see why I don't hold that saga against him.

As far as Trip selling his car and such that's actually okay: I'd go farther than Sirian and say that it's all over for him as a game developer if he doesn't finish. If Trip really wants to work on games he has to go for it. Not going for it would be like kicking a field goal late in the 4th while being down by 4.

"failed to finish"? I call bs on that.

Trip left civ5 unfinished and Trip left "the Final Frontier" civ4 mod unfinished. I think that Trip was encouraged to leave by Firaxis after civ5's user rating plummeted.

but with At the Gates, Trip did not have to finish. he could have put some polish on his "fully-playable prototype" and put it out in the Early Access steam thing, but he chose the greedy route of selling the game on his site. some kickstarter titles go that route as it formally fulfills their kickstarter promise of "releasing something". typically such games stay in EA for years (e.g. forever).

Trip can partially rehabilitate himself by stating that "since he failed to deliver and spent community's money doing so, all the work (art, code, sounds, design docs, etc.) belongs to the community and I will upload it all the data to git under a MIT license."


P.S. is frogboy still "fixing" GC3?

I see what you mean by "left unfinished" instead of "failed to finish" but that doesn't matter for my point.

I don't understand how people could give money Trip so I don't feel anything about them losing money and getting nothing.

Some GalCiv3 EXP pack came out less then a year (edit: actually it's over a little over a year) a go so there must still be patches.

[Bacchus]

Asked Kay Fedewa on twitter about At The Gates, but seems she'd rather not talk about the topic.

[antisocialmunky]

Yeah, the whole promised X monies to do Y job only makes logical sense assuming slavery is legal because at the end of the day, if you have to pay a developer and then run out of money, you have no way of forcing a developer to work for you.

And I'll just go ahead and disagree with your appraisal of crowdfunding, Sunrise. Crowdfunding is just a new business model where you are able to get real feedback faster and cheaper with a lower initial investment.

A properly run campaign with the proper amount of lead time (3 months or so) and an adequate budget of a few thousand dollars gives you a lot of advantages over traditional business development:
1) You mitigate the risk of failing after you've already invested tons of money into a product because you can gauge the market interest at an early stage
2) You can prove that an audience exists for you product
3) You can build a community very quickly
4) You can get a decent capital injection to float on if you idea is good

For consumers you get one major advantage in non-equity crowdfunding
1) You can get niche products made because you can prove that you are part of an audience

And most of the cons are the same as traditional business models mostly revolving around mismanagement, delays, inability to estimate what you can do, incompetence etc. Normal stuff that sinks businesses. There are some new cons, mainly:
1) Consumers get screwed because businesses fail before they get to market
2) Consumers are exposed to business growing pains such as delays due to bad estimations, feature creep, or not enough money

So you can think of it as mostly a net positive for business owners and a wash for consumers. Businesses can bring products to market cheaper, have better data for making decisions, find new audiences that no one knew existed/were large enough etc. Consumers can help bring products to market that no one would have made before because no one knew there was an audience for it at the risk of losing their money. So as a consumer you really have to weigh how much you want a thing that would otherwise not exist vs how much money you could lose on getting a thing that would otherwise not exist.

I'm also fairly confident that the whole crowdfunding situation will get better over time and the risk will go down in the coming years. People like my company have literally been writing the book on how to do campaigns over the last few years. No one had any idea why they were succeeding and failing over the last few years because no resources existed.

[haphazard1]

The consumer does face much higher risk than with a "normal" business and product, in that they may not get anything at all for their money. As long as people keep this clearly in mind with Kickstarters, and do not put in money they can not afford to see vanish into vapor, then they might be able to help bring niche products to market that otherwise they could never get at all.

But for a lot of people, that extra risk makes Kickstarters not worth it.

[DaveV]

The problem is that Kickstarter essentially casts the general public into the role of venture capitalist. Venture capitalists do a lot of research into a company before they plow money into it, and they still expect to lose their investment most of the time. Consequentially, they expect substantial returns on the rare occasion when the company does succeed. In the case of Kickstarter, the returns are mostly emotional: I backed a product I believed in, and they succeeded because of my support (or failed despite my support). It's up to the individual whether that's enough of a payback.

[haphazard1]

Venture capitalists also have a lot of legal protections, in that they generally end up with an equity stake in the companies they back. That gives them a number of legal rights. Kickstarter is basically consumers handing over their money for a promise.

Hmmm, kickstarter projects are like politicians...and pay off about as often.