Now, now. You're not American or British, so you can't do a Kickstarter.
I don't hate it for the same reasons as you, but I also dislike it.
Seems like a sly way to get people to pay more for a product than they normally would. Also if no traditional investors would back a product, why would the backing of a few hardcore fans paying through their noses make the product any more likely to succeed? Beats me. Seems like a dumb idea.
I suppose I'm interested in seeing how Pathfinder online turns out (if ever released). I didn't back it, but I might buy it if it looks good at release date. By all means if this game is wildly successful I might reconsider my opinion on kickstarter as a concept.
BTW. I'm not american either, but that has nothing to do with my views.
(I just realized I might be taking this post more seriously than what was intended by the op....)
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I don't hate it for the same reasons as you, but I also dislike it.
Seems like a sly way to get people to pay more for a product than they normally would. Also if no traditional investors would back a product, why would the backing of a few hardcore fans paying through their noses make the product any more likely to succeed? Beats me. Seems like a dumb idea.
I suppose I'm interested in seeing how Pathfinder online turns out (if ever released). I didn't back it, but I might buy it if it looks good at release date. By all means if this game is wildly successful I might reconsider my opinion on kickstarter as a concept.
BTW. I'm not american either, but that has nothing to do with my views.
(I just realized I might be taking this post more seriously than what was intended by the op....)
But how do I get my giant floating hologram head over the city with which I may address the Public?
"People of Earth! I have swept away the old order and minced them in a really big blender..." cut to blender.
I don't hate it for the same reasons as you, but I also dislike it.
Seems like a sly way to get people to pay more for a product than they normally would. Also if no traditional investors would back a product, why would the backing of a few hardcore fans paying through their noses make the product any more likely to succeed? Beats me. Seems like a dumb idea.
I suppose I'm interested in seeing how Pathfinder online turns out (if ever released). I didn't back it, but I might buy it if it looks good at release date. By all means if this game is wildly successful I might reconsider my opinion on kickstarter as a concept.
BTW. I'm not american either, but that has nothing to do with my views.
(I just realized I might be taking this post more seriously than what was intended by the op....)
No doubt I'm taking it too seriously too, but when you say people are "paying more than they normally would", I think that's the great strength. It's not sly or sneaky, in my view, since its explicit. The people running a kickstarter generally say you can buy the product for forty bucks (or whatever), but if its worth more to you you can chip in a few hundred.
Using traditional production/funding methods, some products just won't get made. By using crowd funding, those who want to pay more than most can do so and thus something happens which wouldn't otherwise. It's great strength is not about improving the likelihood of success for some given project that was going ahead anyhow - it's about producing something which won't happen otherwise.
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Kickstarter has it's strengths, for sure, but I think the public sometimes goes over the top with it. Some people come asking for, say, 10k, and end up with sometimes as much as a million dollars, just because many people want to show support. That's people being silly and allowing the western consumer focused society to cloud their judgment.
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Using traditional production/funding methods, some products just won't get made. By using crowd funding, those who want to pay more than most can do so and thus something happens which wouldn't otherwise. It's great strength is not about improving the likelihood of success for some given project that was going ahead anyhow - it's about producing something which won't happen otherwise.
It would be awesome if they opened Kickstarter to other projects...like build the tallest building in the world in the Bronx(reward being a share of ownership for every hundred dollars contributed).
Kickstarter has it's strengths, for sure, but I think the public sometimes goes over the top with it. Some people come asking for, say, 10k, and end up with sometimes as much as a million dollars, just because many people want to show support. That's people being silly and allowing the western consumer focused society to cloud their judgment.
I don't see that as any individual as being silly - it just sounds like a super popular project. If its well run, the extra capital will go to expanding the project in awesome directions (a la the reaper kickstarter, for example).
I've spent many thousand dollars on kickstarters. Some of them have been disappointing, but none of them are irrational rushes of blood. I'm just willing to pay more than most for some out of the ordinary products and kickstarter (or open design's patronage model or some other crowd funding option) allows that to happen.
Seems like a sly way to get people to pay more for a product than they normally would. Also if no traditional investors would back a product, why would the backing of a few hardcore fans paying through their noses make the product any more likely to succeed? Beats me. Seems like a dumb idea.
Speaking for the computer game model, 'traditional investors' in that case are publishers, and publishers are mind-numbingly conservative. This is why you get a CALL OF DUTY game released every November like clockwork, because Activision are too terrified of failure to try to create an original franchise instead. And to be fair, the cost/profit ratio in games publishing has become truly moronic. Even massive companies like EA and Activision would get into serious difficulties if they had say 6-7 really big games that were flops in a row. The big companies put tens (or now even hundreds) of millions of dollars and multiple years of development into titles, requiring almost every game that comes out to sell 2-3 million copies in the first month minimum to be profitable. This has resulted in publishers putting all of their money into the biggest titles, and complete ignoring the midlist, which has vanished.
The biggest Kickstarter games - DOUBLE FINE ADVENTURE, WASTELAND 2, PROJECT: ETERNITY, STAR CITIZEN and now TORMENT - are games that would have fallen into that midlist catagory. Games that are relatively cheap but still potentially excellent, taking a year or so and maybe a few million dollars to make, and could be profitable on more modest sales of say half a million (PLANESCAPE: TORMENT, for example, cost a few million and took about two years to develop from first concept to release, sold about 600,000 copies in its first year and was judged reasonably successful). Publishers are, simply put, not interested in this. They'd need dozens and dozens of developers making such games so that, cumulatively, they'd be worthwhile for them. Of course, this is exactly what they used to do ten years back, which is why back then we had a thriving games industry of dozens of great studios. Now we have very few, and a studio can go bust if it has just one single flop (as Gas Powered Games just barely managed to avoid). It's an unsustainable model.
In this case, Obsidian suggested to Atari that they make an ICEWIND DALE III. It would be 2D and use an updated version of the Infinity Engine. It would be relatively cheap, costing only a few million. It would probably sell very well (the first two games have shifted several million copies between them, comparing favourably even to BALDUR'S GATE's sales). Atari were not even remotely interested. PROJECT: ETERNITY is basically Obsidian saying "No, this works." But they needed people to back it, meaning Kickstarter was their only option.
If these games are successful, then I think we can expect to see the big publishers testing the waters with a few midlist, mid-budgeted games of their own to see how it goes. But the other factor, beyond the cost/benefit ratio, is control. Many studios are fed up of creating licences and franchises, only for them to be snapped up by the publishers, possibly to be given to other, weaker studios later on. Obsidian, on the other hand, can do what the hell they like with PROJECT ETERNITY as they own it themselves.
Crowdsourcing is a fantastic way to get niche projects funded. As Werthead alluded to above, most traditional investors are conservative. By blowing the doors off the traditional funding model the actual consumers are getting to choose what is popular. Thus we remove another 'gatekeeper' from obstructing us. Why should some boardroom of middle-aged accountants decide what game/project is worth funding?
If an idea is floated and doesn't get funded, then that is good information as well. Better to find out that Super Vinchenzo Racers isn't popular BEFORE a crapload of money and time is sunk into it.
Nowadays the crowd sourcing paradigm is moving beyond Kickstarter and Indigogo. There is one where you can donate to science called PetriDish, several where you can microfund charitible projects like GoFundMe, even places like Kiva where you can invest small amounts with entrepaneurs around the globe and help them realize their dreams.
I am personally very excited about this shift in how money is distributed. It takes the funding power away from the corporate gatekeepers and puts it into the hands of the consumer, where it truly belongs. It allows niche projects that no one thought would fly to take off. It is not a 'preorder' as some would put it, it is a way to actively participate in the act of creation by giving your money and saying, "yes, I believe in this project and I want to donate to help make it better.". Plus, the projects often reward your trust with extra goodies unavailable to those who wait to buy the finished product.
I am Danish, and I have no technical problems signing up for Kickstarters. But I don't know if that was becaues, I already had an Amazon US account.
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I'm pretty sure folks in the UK can create Kickstarter projects ...
Otherwise that last project I kicked in on that was calling for pledges in £ had something funky going on. ;)
As to Kickstarter in general, it really is a great way for niche projects to find funding. Sometimes you do pay more than what the retail price would be for the end result would be, other times not so much (the Reaper KS ended up at less than $0.50 per mini ... which is freakin' unbelievable considering some of the sculpts and sizes of the minis in the Vampire package). The key thing, as others have said, is that crowd sourcing in general allows the consumer to decide what comes to market instead of the who apparently think they know the general public's mind and preferences.
One thing to point out from an above post, Kiva isn't really crowd sourcing, it is a means to get microloans to folks for whom they would be life changing. They have also been around since 2005 (KS launched in 2009), so it is not a result of, but rather a precursor to, Kickstarter if one wants to view it that way.
Hmmm... now if only the White House Petition site would do the same, if only to block yellowdingo's inane petitions :)
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What does this even mean?Now, now. You're not American or British, so you can't do a Kickstarter.Yeah but nobody cares about Britain. They jumped ship on commonwealth membership only to suddenly realize they didn't want to be in a European Commonwealth Either.
Doubtlessly, a few shots of methanol will clarify this.
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What does this even mean?Now, now. You're not American or British, so you can't do a Kickstarter.Yeah but nobody cares about Britain. They jumped ship on commonwealth membership only to suddenly realize they didn't want to be in a European Commonwealth Either.
Why in the name of all that is in existence do people still expect YD's posts to make any vague form of sense?
Why in that same name do people still post in his threads instead of just hiding them?
Yes, I am aware of the irony of me saying that in his thread but it's been a long day ;)
Kickstarter should be reserved for small businesses and start-ups. I made the poor assumption it was when I backed the first couple projects I did. Then Reaper - a company I usually like - showed up - an established company that ought to already have managed itself well enough to have the funds to expand.
They glutted the market with their Bones nonsense, and the result was a backlash from their now-swollen backers, against anything Kickstarter. Worthy start-ups got told off on the Reaper forums by jackasses who now turned against the Kickstarter process because they had been fattened to the point of idiocy by Reaper's abhorrent and frankly gross misuse of Kickstarter.
Of course, Kickstarter loves the revenue and fame generated by such things, so they'd never do anything really effective to stop big companies from abusing the process and squashing the little guys. It's really just a big joke.
I'm waiting for GW to show up on there. I think that might wake people up to how wrongheaded Kickstarter has become. But, of course, they would be too paranoid to show any works-in-progress for fear of having their IP stolen, so nevermind.
I can see the emotion, but really struggle to understand the logic there.
What exactly did they do wrong? Offer people the opportunity to collectively amass millions of dollars and thus produce a whole bunch of dirt cheap miniatures? How is that a bad thing?
(Granted, I do wonder whether they've damaged their own business going forward by oversupplying a niche market, but that's clearly their risk to take - it's hardly an ethical question.)
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See, for a KS that offers an actual product, like most RPG Kickstarters, I can understand where the extra money beyond the original goal goes...production of more of the actual product.
But for a project where the "product" is something like a bunch of videos that don't seem to have any higher production values than previous NON crowd-sourced videos had, I do wonder that more people don't call it out as something of a scam. And yes, I'm talking about the Women vs Tropes videos in particular (although some others could easily qualify, including Piazo's first Kickstarter...eh, excuse me, "GoblinWorks"').
Kickstarter should be reserved for small businesses and start-ups.
A similar question has arisen recently about video games. Richard Garriott is using Kickstarter to fund a new ULTIMA game (well, almost, in a non-copyright-infringing way) and that has really annoyed some people, as Garriott is personally very wealthy, wealthy enough to - literally - go into space and there's pictures of his massive house on various websites. The feeling is he could have splashed out by himself for the new game rather than going to KS.
Where to draw the line is an interesting question. Chris Roberts, for example, also appears to be well off (not by Garriott's standards but still). He worked in Hollywood for a while, which was quite lucrative. However, the difference appears to be that Roberts hasn't flaunted his personal situation and his game - STAR CITIZEN - is a hugely more expensive project which he has raised a lot of funding for through his own means and private investment, going to KS only to help round off the budget. Plus it also helps that his pitch was awesome, whilst Garriott's was...not.
In the case of companies, it seems to help that there's been some transparency. Obsidian were criticised as they are a relatively well-known games developer, but they've gone public with their financial situation and it is surprisingly close to the edge. Their last big success was FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS, which sold 5 million copies in its first month on sale. However, all of the developer money went to Bethesda, with Obsidian only ever getting a flat fee for actually making the game and its DLCs (and I'd be surprised if that fee had been for more than 12-18 months of the company's operation, meaning it's long gone by now). Roberts, Obsidian and Double Fine (who were nearly ruined when BRUTAL LEGEND 2 was cancelled) have showed exactly why they need to go to KS, whilst Garriott has not, at least to many fans' satisfaction.
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(Granted, I do wonder whether they've damaged their own business going forward by oversupplying a niche market, but that's clearly their risk to take - it's hardly an ethical question.)
Is it really oversupplying? They had less than 18000 backers, and I would think the minis market was larger than that.
See, for a KS that offers an actual product, like most RPG Kickstarters, I can understand where the extra money beyond the original goal goes...production of more of the actual product.
But for a project where the "product" is something like a bunch of videos that don't seem to have any higher production values than previous NON crowd-sourced videos had, I do wonder that more people don't call it out as something of a scam. And yes, I'm talking about the Women vs Tropes videos in particular (although some others could easily qualify, including Piazo's first Kickstarter...eh, excuse me, "GoblinWorks"').
The reason I dont see it as a scam (or sneaky/sly/etcetera) is that it's all explicit. They tell you what you're getting for your money, what is the minimum amount they need to get it off the ground and how many people are backing and even (roughly) how much the other backers are putting in. They even let you pull out at no cost if it turns into something you're not comfortable with.
.Sure they may be making a truckload of money if their project is wildly successful, but I dont see it as a scam unless they post pictures of prepainted minis but describe them as unpainted in the fine print (or something similarly dishonest).
We're all grownups and should be allowed to spend our money as we want, in my opinion. Provided people are clear about what they're giving me and how much they're charging me, I dont see any ethical problem. The alternative almost feels like denying me some opportunities "for my own good".
(Granted, I do wonder whether they've damaged their own business going forward by oversupplying a niche market, but that's clearly their risk to take - it's hardly an ethical question.)Is it really oversupplying? They had less than 18000 backers, and I would think the minis market was larger than that.
I wasnt referring to the minis market overall. What I meant is that 18000 people have just bought a truckload of reaper minis (what a hundred or more? Two hundred?) at bargain prices. When reaper now produce some new product I wonder whether a significant proportion of their market are going to be comparing the new sculpts' $3 pricetag with the $0.50 they paid a few months ago.
.I dont pretend any special insight into the mini business. It's not something I would even call an opinion - merely a wondering.
My other pet peeve about Kickstarters is that they often give massively unrealistic estimated delivery dates, that only grow more ridiculous as more add-ons and stretch goals are piled ontop of the original concept. (Which I just commented on in the Atchung! Cthulhu thread.)
Yeah - the Appendix N adventures DCC kickstarter has been pretty irritating in that way. I dont mind waiting a year at the end of a kickstarter, but I do object to monthly "updates" explaining why they're not giving me what they said they would last month. >(
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The Achtung! Cthulhu KS is gonna be ridiculous with delays, given that they've expanded it to include about a half-dozen more sourcebooks and over 600 pages worth of adventure (with the strong possibility of adding another sourcebook and another 128 pages of adventure before it ends)...all with a due date of August 2013. Call me a pessimist if you want, but I don't think there even the remotest chance in hell of that delivery estimate being met.
Personaly I like kickstarters...I see it as a way for groups that are out a 'certain demographic' be kept relvelant with in their fields of interest. It gives the minority to have a say.
I have though only ever backed two kickstarter programs. 1) From Palladium...2) being a friend's module.
Now funnily enough the reason my friends module went into a kickstarter is because the company he writes for wanted to survey the people who contribuited to the kickstarter to see if paying for a license is worth the money they pay for it. Makes sense to me as people willing to invest would probably have more at stake.
Also seeing it from my friend's side of it...it is kinda of exciting watching rather you get funded or not.
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Using traditional production/funding methods, some products just won't get made. By using crowd funding, those who want to pay more than most can do so and thus something happens which wouldn't otherwise. It's great strength is not about improving the likelihood of success for some given project that was going ahead anyhow - it's about producing something which won't happen otherwise.It would be awesome if they opened Kickstarter to other projects...like build the tallest building in the world in the Bronx(reward being a share of ownership for every hundred dollars contributed).
Have you even been to the Bronx?
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Have you even been to the Bronx?Using traditional production/funding methods, some products just won't get made. By using crowd funding, those who want to pay more than most can do so and thus something happens which wouldn't otherwise. It's great strength is not about improving the likelihood of success for some given project that was going ahead anyhow - it's about producing something which won't happen otherwise.It would be awesome if they opened Kickstarter to other projects...like build the tallest building in the world in the Bronx(reward being a share of ownership for every hundred dollars contributed).
Not in the last century...
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Not in the last century...Have you even been to the Bronx?Using traditional production/funding methods, some products just won't get made. By using crowd funding, those who want to pay more than most can do so and thus something happens which wouldn't otherwise. It's great strength is not about improving the likelihood of success for some given project that was going ahead anyhow - it's about producing something which won't happen otherwise.It would be awesome if they opened Kickstarter to other projects...like build the tallest building in the world in the Bronx(reward being a share of ownership for every hundred dollars contributed).
Well, that would be step 1 for your research.
Seems like a sly way to get people to pay more for a product than they normally would.
I think you missed the Reaper kickstarter. Serious miniature painters who have participated in that thing have saved huge amounts of money. Now that I'm seeing just how much of a discount we got I'm wishing I had put MORE money in so I could have gotten more minis!
Best Example: If I had put in $25 more I could have gotten a giant undead dragon miniature. It looks like the retail price will be $75.
I like KS as a crowd funding tool. I'm not happy about it being used as a marketing tool. The overuse as a marketing system turns it into something of a fad that is more likely to die out and leave those who actually need crowd funding without an audience.