Kickstarter Complaining Thread

[Bojay1997]

This. You guys complaining that it's messed up for a company to go on Kickstarter (in the RCR thread, not here) don't seem to understand the realities of business. Being a business doesn't automatically mean you have a war chest full of money to fund games with. A company like Wayforward has the new Shantae on Kickstarter because there is no other way to fund full production on a legit Shantae game; they should know, they've been trying to SINCE THE GAMECUBE DAYS to find the money to make it, and no publisher wants to take that risk (and, I assume, they haven't been able to save up enough money to do it on their own). Video games are REALLY EXPENSIVE to make, and if you don't have a hit on your hands, they can lose you a lot of money.

The beauty of Kickstarter is that you can bring risky games that would otherwise not exist to life because the investors you attract are more interested in playing your game than they are in making money off of it. For the first time ever you can get paid to make a game that makes $0 in profit, and that's amazing.

I would argue that the team behind RCR doesn't understand the realities of business either. Just because something is funded through crowdfunding isn't an excuse to conduct yourself in a less than professional or transparent manner. In fact, crowdfunding is premised on more transparency and better communication than traditional businesses because you are seeking money from the general public and those financiers are not entitled to compensation beyond delivery of the product promised.

You also seem to have ignored the fact that Warforward has actually released several games in the Shantae series in the past few years and has another one coming out shortly on the Nintendo eShop and they only chose to use Kickstarter because they wanted to give it a shot. They had the financial means and the publisher lined up had they wanted to simply take the traditional publishing route but they decided that crowdfunding would be an interesting experiment.

Kickstarter may be amazing for video games. The unfortunate part is that nobody has really delivered an amazing Kickstarter video game yet, so we don't know if it's really amazing or not. I have backed over 40 successful video game projects at this point through Kickstarter and other than Leisure Suit Larry and a few other beta versions of other games, there haven't been many major releases yet despite it going on 18 months since some of these things funded. In the meantime, I don't think there's anything wrong at all with being skeptical of crowdfunding as a viable means of financing video game development nor being skeptical of specific projects and the teams behind them.