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Comment by newsgremlin | Hacker News Reader

It's really frustrating because there are multiple great games that have come out of kickstarter like hollow knight and hyper light drifter, but many people getting burned by undelivered promises has halved the amount of money being donated to video game related kickstarters between 2014 and 2016 [1]. There's a lot of potential and there is a lot to lose if indie game companies do not get the opportunity and resources to make great games that are competing against an oversaturated and established and continual growing industry that is focused on micro-transactions and further monetization of in-game content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding_in_video_games#Re...

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The funniest example of a game from Kickstarter would be Elite: Dangerous - a spacesim by a well-known author without most of the features Roberts tries to deliver.

What makes it the funniest example?

Because Elite delivers on a lot of the promises of Star Citizen, and it’s a mature, actively supported game with a dedicated player base that you can buy today. The fact that you can’t walk around with your avatar actually makes the game more immersive; though you can deploy a rover on rocky planets without an atmosphere. It’s lacking a lot of non-gameplay features, but the space flight and combat systems are tight — the physics are accurate if you accept the existence of “frame shift drives”.

I find any time you can walk around in an open world game, it ends up becoming an MMORPG. Elite very much does not feel like an MMO. You really only encounter other players around major trading hubs and combat zones inside the bubble, and even then not many due to the way they shard the instancing. Space is empty and unforgiving.

as soon as VR headset resolution gets a little better (and we have GPUs that can drive that higher res well), I might start spending a DANGEROUS amount of time in Elite.

It's already incredible with the HTC Vive, and you definitely get used to how it looks, but the resolution just isn't quite there (e.g. its especially noticeable if you are trying to railgun someone from a significant distance)

It’s pretty boss on a Vive Pro. You’re right, the extra resolution and screen refresh really help.

Not sure what the other commenter was referring to, but to me it's amusing because Elite: Dangerous is a (somewhat) similar game that followed the opposite path of Star Citizen: They started with an MVP, got that to market and have been gradually expanding on it over time.

How's that different from Star Citizen? They're also doing that.

The biggest difference is Elite is a released and playable game, and Star Citizen is currently a series of tech demos and promises.

It's currently a series of playable modules, not tech demos.

Out of MVP, they have none of those 3, it seems.

Even the most diehard Star Citizen supporters will readily admit that there is no game right now. Tech demo is the best way to describe it, as ssully already said.

They just had the better approach: Fully releasing a game with a minimal but high quality feature set that gets extended over time.

It is a great game for some people. If you want to try the first generations of VR, I think this game is the reference for that.

They didn't have the marketing of Star Citizen, but were better in everything else they did.

Could you send me a link to a video of anything like Elite: Dangerous gameplay from Star Citizen?

In addition to your point, I think another big factor is the rise of early access games. Before Kickstarter got big in 2012/2013, there wasn't an easy way to do crowd funding or early access (now supported on Steam, Xbox, Epics game store, etc). The only real option was rolling your own solution like games like Minecraft or Spy Party did.

Indeed, early access games have a similar problem where certain developers get a lot of initial capital for an incomplete game and then slow down the development process for one reason or another, sometimes even completely abandoning the state of the game at a point that is no where near the vision they pitched to players. It's understandably getting harder for people to put trust into up-and-coming projects.

> many people getting burned by undelivered promises has halved the amount of money being donated to video game related kickstarters between 2014 and 2016

I think you might have misread that wikipedia page... it says “In March 2014, Kickstarter announced it had achieved over $1 billion in pledges, with more than $215 million of that dedicated for video gaming and tabletop gaming projects.[23] By mid-2016, Kickstarter reported over $186 million in video game-related pledges with over $500 million for all game-related projects.”

[Edit: my reading in the following paragraph is wrong too, see my reply below. Kickstarter funding for games increased. It did not decline.] Between 2014 and 2016, video game donations dropped by around 14%, while total Kickstarter projects dropped by 50%. Video games vastly outperformed other categories on Kickstarter. That tends to indicate Kickstarter lost popularity in general while video games did not. It would be wrong to not assume that some of Kickstarter’s decline came from competition ramping up, like IndieGogo, RocketHub, FundRazr, Fundable, Pozible, etc., etc.. You’d need to look at aggregate contributions to figure out whether crowdfunding for games is actually in decline.

> there is a lot to lose if indie game companies do not get the opportunity and resources to make great games

We don’t have any strong evidence that indie game funding is even in decline. Kickstarter contributions are rather far from representing the available “opportunity” for indie games. Since crowd funding wasn’t a thing 10 years ago, indie opportunities are still way ahead of where they were in the very recent past.

That said, why isn’t having some competition for funds a good thing? It’s not like every indie game ever made is amazing. All the crazy amount of funding available today is definitely attracting more people in search of dollars, people who wouldn’t normally make games, and aren’t committed to making high quality games. The funding for games is a big part of the reason the market feels over saturated.

Wait, I misread that wikipedia paragraph too.

Look closer. It’s saying $215 million for all games in 2014, both video games and table games.

Then $500 million in 2016 for both categories, with video games alone being $186M.

This is saying that video game funding grew massively -- more that 2x -- in those two years. Neither category declined, and it’s not comparing total contributions.

*more:

Looking at https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

Games today are $1B in crowd funding. Games are the top category on Kickstarter. Games project success rates are 6th out of the 15 major categories. More games have raised over $1M on Kickstarter than any other category.

The more I look, the more it's clear that funding on Kickstarter and in general for indie games has never been bigger or brighter than it is today.

I heard from a friend of mine who's into board game that the same is happening with Cool Mini or Not, hogging the KS space for board games with huge goals and expensive figurines and leaving little breathable space for other companies or people trying to get their games on the market or even just being visible.

CMN is using KS to bootstrap their products to the detriment of other smaller dev who can't even test the water and see if the product could be made.

I just wanted to add Thimbleweed Park to your list of KickStarter gaming success stories.

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