Cinemaware don't give a f$%k about you!!

[commodorejohn]

I really don't get kickstarters.
If you believe in your product, then go ahead a make it. I guess you would only ask for a kickstart, if you feel your product sucks.

Problem is, making a product takes a lot of money, and it's not always possible to convince venture capitalists or publishers that the demand is there (especially in industries like videogaming, where there is basically a massive orthodoxy centered around copying whatever the perceived strengths of the last big success were and adjusting them to fit whatever you think the gamer demographic is like.) Kickstarter is, ideally, a way for the people that actually want a product to directly fund the project so that it doesn't have to rely on the established industry model.

Shadowrun Returns or Wasteland 2, for example, are titles that would never have gotten off the ground in the mainstream gaming industry, because they have comparatively niche audiences and don't fit the bigger-louder-flashier "every title must top the last title in terms of spectacle" model that industry is stuck in. (Take, for example, the last Shadowrun outing, on the XBox 360, which was hammered into a bog-standard arena shooter that had little in common with the cyberpunk-fantasy RPG mold the setting originated as - even though prior action-RPG entries on the early-'90s console are well-regarded classics. Nothing must deviate from the Sacred Template.)

But the demand is there, from the players who remember the classic games with fondness and want to see a new game that plays to the strengths of the original while doing new stuff that the technology of the time couldn't handle. The mainstream gaming industry simply will not give that to them, but Kickstarter gave them a chance to make it happen themselves, cutting out the broken, unresponsive middle-man altogether. The response was so great that both projects saw their target exceeded by a factor of three to almost five, and they are now in production. That's what Kickstarter offers.

[commodorejohn]

They are making software, the only investment is time.

Time is money. If you want to develop a software project full-time, your bills have to be paid from somewhere.

If you can't convince a business angel, venture capitalists or the bank that you have a good product, then maybe you just don't have a good product.

And, what, those are the Sacred Repositories of Cash that are the only true souce for funding? The fact that these projects made their goals (and again, sometimes many times more than their goals) is all the evidence needed that there is demand for these products. If traditional funding sources can't or won't see that demand, maybe it's just that traditional funding sources have become broken.

[commodorejohn]

Work on your business plan if you can't get investors to see the same ligth as you do.

What would you change? You're making a game, that you want to be made a specific way. If your intended audience wants it to be made the same way you want to make it, and your potential investors don't think that it should be made that way, what do you do? Change it to suit the investors and you alienate the audience (again: Shadowrun 360.) Keep it the way you and your audience want it, and you don't get funded. That's a broken model. Demand is there, and there can be a supply to meet it, but blind investor orthodoxy is getting in the way. VCs and publishers aren't somehow automatically "right" just because they have the money.

I remain completely baffled by this idea you have that people providing their own funding for a project for which they are the demand is somehow wrong just because it doesn't go through the Proper Channels. Hell, that's the oldest funding model there is for art. Classical composers and artists had patrons that funded their creations because they wanted them, not because they wanted something they could sell to someone else. Why is it suddenly wrong all of a sudden?

And by the way, it is possible to develop software in your spare time.

It certainly is, but maybe not every Wasteland fan wants to wait the decade it would take for the producers to come up with the caliber of product that they are, right now, in the process of creating, if they had to do it on their downtime.

[commodorejohn]

Well I would say that 50k proves there is no market for it. So my point is valid, their idea sucked.

The Cinemaware project? Could be. Certainly if not even the base wants it that badly, you might make that argument. But I don't see how that's relevant to the question of whether Kickstarter as a whole has merit.

I never said that providing your own funding is wrong, you need to read exactly what I write not what you think I write.
If you have a great idea, then fine go ahead, but if every normal investor, including the bank says no, then maybe your idea isnt that great.
You know lots of these investors have experience with telling good ideas from bad ideas.

If the project gets as much support, direct from the people who actually want it, as the Shadowrun or Wasteland projects did, then I would submit that it doesn't matter a tinker's damn whether the sources that rejected it have experience or not. Experience does not make you automatically right, and if they look at a need that is crying out to be filled and decide it's not worth their time to fill it, they're stupid, and it's their loss when a service like Kickstarter moves in to do the job they aren't doing.

[commodorejohn]

But they don't.

I beg your pardon? Wasteland 2 ended with $2,933,252 out of its $900k goal - nearly three times what they asked for. Shadowrun Returns, though its actual dollar amount was lower ($1,836,447 out of their $400k goal,) made nearly five times what they needed. We can go back and forth with this "nuh-uh!" "uh-huh!" game all day, but those are the facts. Not only do those extra funds demonstrate just how much demand there is for these games (and if you want more proof, consider the number of backers: 61,290 and 36,276, respectively,) they also fund the addition of extra features, more content, and multiplatform release to the project.

That's demand that was going unfilled. Both of these teams tried to shop the idea around to traditional funding sources (publishers and VCs) before they turned to Kickstarter. Both were rejected. Those tens of thousands of people who wanted these games might never have gotten them if those were the only sources for funding; luckily, Kickstarter gave them the opportunity to make it happen themselves, when the traditional structures failed to fill that need.