Rampant Games - On Unfinished Games

[Couchpotato]

The Rampant Coyote's latest post gives his opinion on a few games that will remain unfinished, and uses a few cancelled kickstarter games as an example.

I keep grumbling (I try to think positive and to avoid grumbling too much) about people being willing to pay more for a promise of a game than an actual, completed game. I’ve suspected that as we had some high-profile failures in Early Access and crowdfunding games, that this might be tempered somewhat.

We’ve had a couple more major failures this week, but my desire to say, “I told you so!” is itself tempered by the fact that I’m a fan of both creators. This is the sort of thing that can ruin reputations and cause damage to careers.

More information.

 

[rjshae]

Crowdsourcing is a type of entrepreneurial investment, which itself is a form of risky gambling with potentially high payoff. (In our case, the payoff is a type of game that we particularly want to play.) Investors just need to keep that in mind. Carpe vinum.

 

[rune_74]

I think people are willing to accept the risks of a kickstarter.

However, and early access game on steam should never run the risk of not being finished. I don't believe that is the outlet for completely funding your game.

If you don't know what I am talking about look up spacebase df-9 by double fine...they were in alpha and now are going directly to version 1.0....cutting a bunch of features and washing their hands of it.

 

[Couchpotato]

Double Fine should be ashamed of themselves for the way Spacebase DF-9 was released as they promised a different game, and in the end didn't deliver.

A Steam community announcement has word from Double Fine on plans to release version 1.0 of Spacebase DF-9 next month, which will conclude the early access stage for this sci-fi strategy game (thanks Joao). They thank their early access customers for the support, but some of those customers are expressing dissatisfaction with how the finished game will not match up with the promises the developer originally made. They support this case by way of a cached version of Double Fine's development roadmap to show how drastically it differs from their current roadmap. Double Fine has enjoyed a positive relationship with the community, and even that is playing into this, as users are pointing to a another cache of a post by Double Fine that they've since deleted from this thread on their forums where the developer staked their reputation on following through on the early access game, saying: "Double Fine is not a random fly-by-night indie dev and we are not going to silently pull the plug on Spacebase or any other in-development project. Doing so would be disastrous for our reputation and it would kill us emotionally." A new update they posted yesterday paints a different picture of their commitment to the game

The quote is taken from Bluesnews.

 

[ChienAboyeur]

The OP assumes that the perceived failures shall bring a change.
It is unlikely. Crowdfunding comes with a high ideological luggage weight that carry little concern to gaming.
In the next release of figures by KS, video games project funding successes rate might come lower than it was.
More likely because of the recent KS change in policy that opened up the door to the offer of pc video games funded on a basis of $750~1000. That kind of offer has swallowed and does not seem to perform that well for some reasons.

Crowdsourcing is a type of entrepreneurial investment, which itself is a form of risky gambling with potentially high payoff. (In our case, the payoff is a type of game that we particularly want to play.) Investors just need to keep that in mind. Carpe vinum.

The only crowdfunded project that comes as an investment that I know of is Train Fever. The main consequence was that the game was price 10 more than what it should have been to make up for the dividends the developpers must pay to their investors.
All the other crowdfunded projects I participated in are spending.