I want it to be worthwhile – if you have a decent pitch already that you’ve been being turned down by all the usual people for because it’s 2024 – to throw it up on kickstarter or whatever else as a last ditch “give us money and maybe this can happen, otherwise it won’t”
The conventional wisdom for the last few years in games seems to have been that that’s all just totally over unless your thing is really tiny, and then not worth it because everyone’s so entitled and abusive over rewards and timeframes and all that bullshit. I hate that application of toxic investor-style thinking to what is not, in any meaningful sense, an investment. If you throw money in for someone to be able to try something that’s supposed to be you doing a good thing, not trying to buy something.
I always hated the way crowdfunding and subscription patronage, cool ideas under the circumstances, instantly became corrupted with more actively-capitalist bullshit like rewards and tiers and exclusive backers-only inside scoops. I just would want to put a thing up like “this is what it is, if you wish it would happen put some money in, maybe it will” and the only reward is like, a copy of the game if it gets done. Anything else to me feels like the opposite of the point
Of course that probably takes the chances of me and anything I’d want to do getting any traction from one percent down to minus one thousand percent, but I dunno, I’d like to think there are people like me who are actively turned off by the “Crowdfunding Campaign” part of crowdfunding. I only ever chuck money in for shit that isn’t trying to reward me
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
Kickstarter really really should have gotten out in front of that gamer ass assumption, that this was simply a new exciting type of Shopping Experience (with all the abusive customer mentality that came with it), as soon as it became apparent, like back in 2013-14, but it took them many years to even add that little “btw you are not buying a product, you are funding something that may or may not ever happen” note, far too little too late. how many peoples’ lives were made worse by that failure.
I think about this a lot! Kickstarter seemed to absolutely fill up with games made by inexperienced devs promising well outside their capabilities and budget and for me at least has really made me much more sceptical of anything that crops up there.
I’m unlikely to throw money at anything unless the dev has form or experience. But even then, it’s possible to get something that falls short of what’s promised.
on a personal level I think I’d really struggle with crowdfunding- my gut feeling is that the bulk of ‘purchases’ you’d get of the game would be from the said kickstarter, and then you already have the money, so what’s the motivation to do more than the bare minimum, or even finish?
Not saying that the majority of failed projects that are kickstarter funded are scams, or even that any are! it’s just that game dev is really hard and humans are falliable, occasionally lazy and if you’re inexperienced, then really, really, bad at planning a project of this scale.
But yeah, I’d say about 75% or more of the kickstarters I’ve funded ever really reached completion. That, and the fact things like heating bills and housing costs have basically tripled since kickstarter was the hot new shit, I’d be very hesitant to fund anything, knowing that it’s very likely I’d never see that money again.
so uh.. that’s my results from a survey of sample size one I guess.
My personal kickstarter feeling is actually I wouod way rather just give money to people to make the thing they want. The past few things I backed I picked a pretty low tier and then raised my contribution because I don’t want all that extra stuff, I want the thing to get made.
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