Yeah, it seems like a win-win situation in general. As a developer, you're testing to see if there's a market, involving that market AND raising funding. Players get to participate in the creation process and get unique rewards for their early-adoptership.

I'll be curious how many people whare your view. Thanks for your take, Heavenfall!

http://www.kickstarter.com/

Effectively it's a way to crowdsource funding for some kind of project. If enough people kick in some cash, the project gets funded and can go ahead.

I like the basic concept, no doubt, but I don't like the business angle.  For instance, let's say I pony up 20% of the requested development cost.  My return is nothing outside of having participated in steering the ship a wee bit.  Now if a project was fully funding by individuals, I'd expect some sort of return.  So if there was some sort of profit sharing available to the individuals putting up, then I think that's great.  Everyone is a winner if the game does well.  Anyway, I do think its cool that you get something from the project based on how much you committed, but I'd much rather have a cut of the money, tbh. 

edit - if the project doesn't get fully funded - do you get your money back? 

Thanks everyone for your thoughts!

If not enough people pledge enough in the allotted time, the funding fails and no money exchanges hands (pledgers don't get screwed, and project creators aren't stuck trying to make a project with X$ when they really needed Y$ to do it justice).

A lot of musicians and film makers seem to be using it.

And I see Kickstarter really being for little indie teams, no so much for bigger/established dev teams. If you've put a game on store shelves, you should have an idea for how the market works...it's the smaller guys that may have a 'big idea' that, it turns out, is a total dud. Throwing the idea out for crowd-funding help out in multiple ways - though I can appreciate the fear that people put dough into something that some indie devs totally bail on, leaving sponsors screwed.

Lots of good points, thanks!

To me it's like commissioning art.

Some of the most famous paintings from the renaissance were commissioned works. On the other hand, a ton of forgettable art was bought and paid for before it even entered the artist's mind.

I like to think that the best games come straight from the heart to begin with, with little to no interference by publishers, fans or other sources of influence. As the game gets along, those groups all get their chance....but not from inception.

So to me it's kind of a risky gamble for the climate of game development. When players are literally paying your bills before you've made a game, they own you, and your game. You can choose to disobey them....but not if you want them to continue supporting you. I believe deeply in creative freedom, and I think nothing gets in the way of creative freedom more than when you have to do fundraising just to get started, and you're beholden to someone else before you've done anything. I don't see that as a good climate for game development. I know this is how it works in the AAA market....and that might explain why we're all so sick of the caliber of many AAA games.

Of course, being broke gets in the way of creative freedom too....but when I look at the # of indie projects that started and finished purely out of love, and went on to great success, it makes me question what kind of game someone needs to make that requires fundraising. If an indie dev on a random game forum posed that kind of offer, I'd laugh and not respond. The risk of failure to me only gets greater the bigger the project gets and the larger their financial requirements are.

So in the end, I'm not comfortable with it. I pay developers for things they've done, not things they want to do. Toady One and Dwarf Fortress are the exception, but only because Toady has clearly demonstrated he can do it, and has put out a wealth of stuff for free. Paying him is a guaranteed promise that he'll continue to develop the good things he's already created. He's got a model I can get behind: I"m going to do this whether I get paid or not. Paying me will help me do it more instead of getting a real job. You wanna pay me? God bless you. You don't? Enjoy your download anyways." That's a situation where I'm comfortable putting money into someone's coffers. "I need to make X to fund my game or it tanks and never releases" is not a model that works for me, even if I get my money back. I'm tying up my money ahead of the fact contingent on someone else succeeding and everyone else paying. It just sounds like a cluster fuck. 

I don't have money to throw at people in the hopes they might put out a game I enjoy. I'm glad if this works for someone out there, but it's a model I'd hate to see take over. As gamers we should pay for what we're getting, not for for what we hope to get. We're already doing that today half the time when we buy, after we slice through all the hype, half-truths and exaggerations that come straight from developers and publishers. I don't follow the logic that since a lot of AAA games are crap investments when you buy them, we should just put our money up front first as though that will ensure we get the game we want. That makes no sense to me at all.

So yeah. It sounds like hedge fund investing, only I'm doing it with my money, my fun and my dreams. And when you offer to cut players in on the profits to entice them, it beings to sound like a pyramid scheme.

I was thinking that too. Artists who have to sell their work to somebody make very different art then the guy with a government grant who gets paid no matter what nonsense they slap together.

Which we're all familiar with that in game development and game purchasing, for sure.

But when you've set up those expectations by asking for people's money, it takes on an entirely different tone and meaning.

And then you have the eccentric millionaire problem: Let's say you're making an RTS or TBS, a very standard one. People pay in, they want their units and what not....but then some guy comes in, dumps some serious cash into your project and says "I want [system totally unrelated to RTS and TBS gaming] in your game. And I've paid to have that expectation fulfilled."

What then? Cave to the wishes of your biggest supporter? Calmly explained to them that any requests paid for still have to respect your development wishes? Rethink your design to accommodate someone else's model? Do the same thing on case-by-case basis with anyone that chips in?

Creative freedom is the freedom to say "no" more than it is the freedom to say "yes", to me. And it feels like one of the first things lost with this model, and is at odds with how the model runs best (saying "yes" as much as you can to generate more investment.)

The way I see this model working best is with indie developers who don't have serious salary requirements and teams. The kind of team that still has 9 - 5's to make their house payments. Because they can always keep working with zero investment, if they started for love and not money. Once you have a budget and people rely on those donations to live....you get forced into making ugly choices, and saying yes even if you don't want to.

I do see this working in some ways for smaller teams. You have your donation link up there and you say "Anyone that donates any amount is buying a full copy of the game when it's released." You don't rely on their donations, but you are fueled by them. Once the game reaches completion, you say "Very soon we will be taking down the donation link. Any donation made up to that point still gets you the full game. Once the donation link goes down, the game is purchasable at its market price." People look at what you've got so far, you get a nice revenue bump just before the link goes down, and then you move on to a standard release model."

I know this doesn't work for the scope of a lot of games people want to make...but these days the stuff a small competent team can produce in anonymity is just looking better and better, and more interesting, than these multi-million dollar games with high price tags. I already support a few games like this, Dwarf Fortress being one.

In a perfect world, this model would be almost a charitable thing done by gamers, where we give to video games purely so they can grow. But gamers are inherently self-centered I think, to a degree. We're interested in our experience, our fun, our group's fun, our communities' fun. Our interest in gaming is selfish because it's entertainment more than art (despite the fact the US government officially recognizes games as art.) So grappling with what gamers want vs. what you want vs. the fact development relies on support just leaves me with cold feet on this one. At a rate of $1, I'm not that bothered. That's charity, and $1 x 30,000 is still $30,000. But much beyond that and it turns into gambling from my perspective. 

The thing is, time can be a really big deal.

I look at the game "The Opera", originally a mod for the original Half Life engine, but it was going to be redone as it's own full game. The group doing this had to keep delaying their work, mostly because they had to work real jobs. Then it snowballed.. they delayed long enough that the Unreal Engine started coming out in full force.. so the question was if they moved to a different engine (effectively working from scratch again). Then Half Life 2 was announced that it was coming out (with it's own engine).
The delays caused the game to never really get started, and eventually fall off the face of the earth. I've never seen a game that could match it since, kind of like a Master of Magic of FPS games.

A number of Thief games (Nightfall? I believe there was another one too) had similar problems.

Had someone said right at the beginning "Here's a bunch of money, so you don't have to worry about losing your house. Now make the game, but with my changes", do you take the money and cave in, or do you risk having your game never see the light of day? The decision is just as hard at the beginning as it is half-way through.

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on what they did with their own personal capital. Either way, for true believers, it's devastating, trashes their opinion of anything those devs might try in the future and might undermine their confidence in trusting other devs with their money, pre-release.

I'd argue even if you put out an incomplete game, selling it for $1 means someone bored enough will spend on it. It won't earn you profit, but it can reduce your losses. Which is why so many incomplete games are pushed out the door. When you're all in already, you don't just pick up and leave your work behind. You put out what you can, and make back what you can.

If a game is your baby, then whenever you sit down to play a build that you go "man, I had fun/worked my imagination/proved I can code what I envision."

If a game is more of a profit engine, I guess it'd be at the point some of your testers say "You know, I think I'd pay for this." I stress testers because, if you don't have a gut feeling on when it's ready, you need a 3rd parties' opinion.

I'm not sure this is so much of a problem. As gamers if you've got our interest, we'll pay if there's more around the bend, generally speaking. I also believe its within a developer's right to selectively withhold content for exactly this reason. You need a demo at that point though to earn some consumer confidence that you're not totally stringing them along. And I draw a distinction between that, and what major developers are doing now (Konami and RE5, others) which is the same general concept, but double-billing people for it.

I hate to keep bringing up DF, but, if Tarn every decided that he'd arbitrarily hit the 1.0 version of Dwarf Fortress and now was asking $20 for his life's work....I'd be the first to pay him. His work is so endearing because it's more than a job to him, it's an exploration of coding and ideas and fantasies, and that's all clearly visible in how he works and talks about his game. That's a decade-long commitment to gaming and a vision. In this day and age when devs make a game and then shutter or break up, that's the kind of proof of concept I can believe in because the concept is independent in some aspects from the business reality. I want to support developers that are in it because they can't help but create.

Here's another Tale of Interest!, about a little dev house named Introversion Software. You may have played their awesome little hacking game called Uplink. Read through their blog, the parts not about their new game Subversion (although I highly recommend checking that out and the dev logs). Particularly the one titled "Coming Clean." It's a tale of struggle and woe, but also success and rebirth. These guys are also in it for the long haul and you can see it in their ideas and their execution, and hear it in their talk about their work. That's the level of commitment that gets me reaching for my wallet.

The product of many lower end games on Steam, which are perfectly fine in their own right, not so much.

Really? So all this talk of bonuses for sponsors, profit sharing, all that's directed at secretive millionaire investors? I think you're reading a different topic than I am, because this one most definitely talks about turning players into potential investors, and most post besides your's talk about that.

Those million dollar investors who troll off topic forums? I think the point is to get everyone's money, including player money, to start a project. Otherwise the Kickstarter program is no different than going door to door to people with big wallets asking them to become investors. And it ends up with the same issues: your game is backed by handful of people who now are effectively your publishers.

There are plenty of indie games out there that prove this statement false, Minecraft and DF being only two of them. And when we talk "development costs", there's a big difference between a team of 4 guys who started a project out of interest, and a team of 30 people with artists, PR guys, multiple coders and big britches to pay for, who need paychecks to keep working.