Cliffski's Blog - The kickstarter reality.
But this is not *the* new publishing model, far from it. RPS noted that the developers ‘don’t have a publisher breathing down their necks’. Really? Maybe they have 10,000 publishers now, impatient, possibly wanting contradictory stuff (almost definitely…in fact), and not restrained by the politeness of scheduled milestone meetings behind closed doors. I hope it goes well, but it could get messy.
Plus the developer is boxed into a corner, they know exactly what they have to do with that money. This is not always a good thing. I ship maybe half the games I start. Gratuitous Tank Battles was not the game I intended to make. I intended to make a life-sim game, then abandoned it to make an RTS, then it morphed into GTB.
Dev wrote on Feb 13, 2012, 15:50:Beamer wrote on Feb 13, 2012, 15:46:
I'm saying this is an anomaly, that Kickstarter will probably be totally saturated with shit projects due to this, and that $60k is essentially the upper limit anyone that didn't make a Monkey Island game has been reaching and that I see that unlikely to change. This is more than enough for many projects.
But that's the beauty of the system. People can set whatever funding minimum they want and if its not reached, no one gets charged. There's really very little risk to backers. So no harm if it suddenly gets a bunch of big budget kick starters. If they all indeed do fail, then that will be noticed too and in a few months it should settle back down. And who knows, maybe one or a few will succeed.