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Spiky Ooze posted:Behold the truth developers. We're really nerds willing to spend all our money on consumer stuff, if you're worthy of our nitpicky lofty standards of said consumer stuff. The actual truth is either you develop a cult following among nitpicky nerds with lofty standards, or you make a Farmville that appeals to millions of people with low standards.
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Feb 9, 2012 23:24
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This makes me so happy. Tim Schafer is my hero.
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Feb 9, 2012 23:29
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emoticon posted:The actual truth is either you develop a cult following among nitpicky nerds with lofty standards, or you make a Farmville that appeals to millions of people with low standards. I don't think it needs to be a cult following necessarily. Valve is still very much in favor with the gaming masses and Blizzard is (mostly) looked upon favorably. I would say as long as the company puts out a quality product and doesn't screw the customer, they generally are viewed favorably. Funny thing is that Blizzard is really trying hard to fail at the latter, so we'll see how long they remain in favorably light.
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Feb 9, 2012 23:32
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evilmiera posted:I think the people who impress me the most are the guys pitching in 250 dollars or more. Then again, that's what I accidentally put into one of the latest steam sales/giftmas-sprees. Think about it. You're a rich nerd. You weren't born into money, you earned your riches by being clever. You probably own the internet or something. You don't care what other people think about you, because you're either socially inept or you hate everyone or you just don't care. You buy your big house, then you buy a fancy car, then you buy a computer that would make the gods tremble. Then you pay some clever craftsmen to put a bunch of secret passages in your house. Then you turn one of your rooms into a ball pit. For the rest of your life you have no idea what to spend your money on, there is literally nowhere to go up in your life from here. Then the guy who made a bunch of games you loved as a child says "I might make another Grim Fandango game or something I guess, I don't know, can I have fifteen bucks" so you throw five thousand bucks at him without flinching. I don't know, I like to imagine that there are a lot of rich nerds.
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Feb 9, 2012 23:39
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$250 isn't much if you're young, single, and have a decent job. Most of your money is pretty much disposable income at that point.
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Feb 9, 2012 23:48
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02-6611-0142-1 posted:Think about it. You're a rich nerd. You weren't born into money, you earned your riches by being clever. You probably own the internet or something. You don't care what other people think about you, because you're either socially inept or you hate everyone or you just don't care. You buy your big house, then you buy a fancy car, then you buy a computer that would make the gods tremble. Then you pay some clever craftsmen to put a bunch of secret passages in your house. Then you turn one of your rooms into a ball pit. For the rest of your life you have no idea what to spend your money on, there is literally nowhere to go up in your life from here. Then the guy who made a bunch of games you loved as a child says "I might make another Grim Fandango game or something I guess, I don't know, can I have fifteen bucks" so you throw five thousand bucks at him without flinching. Well, I know what I'm doing, if I win the Powerball jackpot. edit: https://twitter.com/#!/TimOfLegend/status/167742806696271873 You know what must be done. smashpro1 fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Feb 9, 2012 |
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Feb 9, 2012 23:49
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From Schafer's Twitter:quote:$955k! Guys, I'll make you a deal. If we hit $980k I'll add RTS elements to the game! And if we hit $1M, I'll take them back out! ^^^^ Curse your edit!
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Feb 9, 2012 23:55
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I don't think it needs to be a cult following necessarily. I'm not trying to threadshit, but do you really think a sequel to Psychonauts has any fate other than "Cult Following Among Nerds"? I can appreciate and enjoy what's been done here, but I advise caution when trying to extrapolate it into thinking there's some massive untapped market going on; a market that developers and publishers have ignored all these years. Games (and genres, if we're including Adventure Games) dying out isn't because of publishers being risk-adverse. Publishers are risk-adverse because they can look at the numbers and understand that said games/genres are inherently more risky. The best and worst thing to do to a person is give them what they want. What if, kickstarter aside, TS's new games reinforce the reason(s) why publishers are so nervous about them?
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Feb 9, 2012 23:57
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smashpro1 posted:edit: https://twitter.com/#!/TimOfLegend/status/167742806696271873 Oh Tim 
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Feb 9, 2012 23:58
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theblackw0lf posted:Chris Avellone just said he'd be down for a Kickstarter campaign to do an old school isometric RPG That's exactly what I was thinking of when I said I'd be interested in funding other niche genre games. I didn't guess it might actually be done by former Black Isle employees though, wow.
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Feb 9, 2012 23:59
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MisterBibs posted:I'm not trying to threadshit, but do you really think a sequel to Psychonauts has any fate other than "Cult Following Among Nerds"? Isn't the whole point of Kickstarter to be able to avoid those risks (By making people "buy" the game before it's even made, instead of making it and then hoping people will buy it)?
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Feb 9, 2012 23:59
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Only tangentially related, but have there been any cases on Kickstarter yet where someone's got a whole load of funding for their project then just completely squandered the lot of it?
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Feb 10, 2012 00:06
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This is absolutely amazing. I've heard of little indie developers raising some change on Kickstarter to fund their smaller games. But this is Tim loving Schafer. And he wants to make an adventure game? Just take my money Tim. Just take it. And I'm kind of excited about where this can go. This campaign has more than a month left on it. I'm wondering if they're gonna cap it off, or if Tim is going to use the extra money to involve more of the development staff at Double Fine, to make the game absolutely fantastic. Either way, I'm excited. I'm not even that good at adventure games, but drat it, this is too awesome to ignore. It makes me wonder...Beyond Good and Evil 2? Please?
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Feb 10, 2012 00:18
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RTS elements are officially in! LET'S GET EM OUT OF THERE.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:19
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Webasaur posted:It makes me wonder...Beyond Good and Evil 2? Please? It's been announced for a while, but probably not going to come out until the next console generation.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:20
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Elman posted:Isn't the whole point of Kickstarter to be able to avoid those risks (By making people "buy" the game before it's even made, instead of making it and then hoping people will buy it)? Yes, which is why it's perfect for niche projects with cult followings. If your audience is very small, you can get them to pay you to make the kind of game they like and you won't have to do marketing. But as MisterBibs said, it's not proof of an untapped market or vindication that nerds were right all along about mainstream games. If anything, it provides big publishers with hard numbers about the size of a potential market. They can go, "okay, Tim Shafer got 30,000 donors on his project, so we can expect a similar number of sales if we fund an adventure game"
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Feb 10, 2012 00:20
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Elman posted:Isn't the whole point of Kickstarter to be able to avoid those risks (By making people "buy" the game before it's even made, instead of making it and then hoping people will buy it)? Yes and no. You're correct in that this Kickstarter does lessen the risk of developing a high-risk game. As you said, they already have your money for it. There's a significant interest in this game by this developer. That's cool. But I think Tim's comment that the Kickstarter "proves that there is still a large demand out there" is extremely presumptuous. A million dollars in donations is great, but it's one data point. There's a ton of data points that show otherwise, and those data points will still make publishers wary of funding games like it. This is doubly true if the Donated Money For Game : Profts From Game is kinda poor. Let's say this thing tops out at, arbitrarily, 2.5 million bucks. The game comes out, and the net profit is 3.5 million. Publishers will look at that and say "We made 1.4 million for every million that was donated. We make 4 million for every 1 million we spend on other games." I guess what I'm trying to say is that one extremely successful Kickstarter does not a Shift In Industry make, and that implying otherwise seems like a recipe for disappointment. It would be like cheering on the more-true-to-the-source X-COM game, only to find that the Untrue Shooter X-COM was the one everyone played and will likely get a sequel.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:20
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Webasaur posted:It makes me wonder...Beyond Good and Evil 2? Please? You realize that game is already in development, right? I think there was some quote about it being deep into development but targeted for the next generation of consoles and thus still a ways off from release.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:22
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thefncrow posted:You realize that game is already in development, right? I think there was some quote about it being deep into development but targeted for the next generation of consoles and thus still a ways off from release. Like, at least 18 months away.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:27
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MisterBibs posted:This is doubly true if the Donated Money For Game : Profts From Game is kinda poor. Let's say this thing tops out at, arbitrarily, 2.5 million bucks. The game comes out, and the net profit is 3.5 million. Publishers will look at that and say "We made 1.4 million for every million that was donated. We make 4 million for every 1 million we spend on other games." But are those 1.4 million additional profit from an untapped market, or will those 1.4 million migrate into the 4 million because "buying the other games is better than having no games at all".
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Feb 10, 2012 00:27
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Someone earlier in this thread talked about a kickstarter to get Jane Jensen to make GK4. Well, it's not a GK game but that basically already happened. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/postudios/cognition-an-erica-reed-thriller
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Feb 10, 2012 00:28
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I would be curious to see how something like this would do without Tim Schafer behind it. He's got a fairly dedicated following who thinks that, at least for Psychonauts, he got kind of unfairly screwed. The only other company I can think of with that particular mix of rabid loyalty and a general feeling of "they got screwed, imagine what they could have made" is Obsidian. Of course, if there was a strong-but-forgotten brand behind it, I bet you could pull it off. I wonder how many of those there are not in the hands of a big company unlikely to benefit from Kickstarts.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:28
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MisterBibs posted:I guess what I'm trying to say is that one extremely successful Kickstarter does not a Shift In Industry make, and that implying otherwise seems like a recipe for disappointment. It would be like cheering on the more-true-to-the-source X-COM game, only to find that the Untrue Shooter X-COM was the one everyone played and will likely get a sequel. Right, the only thing this changes is that games that wouldn't get made otherwise are now able to, as long as the scope is within reason. Now that the scope of this game can take on greater assets like full VO and the like, the production process will get even more interesting, but it's still not on the level of your Mass Effects or CoD's, and probably not even on the level of Trenched as of yet.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:28
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ImpAtom posted:I would be curious to see how something like this would do without Tim Schafer behind it. If it was a no-name indie developer, you'd probably have to demonstrate that you have X amount of the work completed already and need Y dollars because of Z. (See: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1319847883/stardrive-a-4x-action-strategy-game-for-the-pc )
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Feb 10, 2012 00:34
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MisterBibs posted:But I think Tim's comment that the Kickstarter "proves that there is still a large demand out there" is extremely presumptuous. A million dollars in donations is great, but it's one data point. There's a ton of data points that show otherwise, and those data points will still make publishers wary of funding games like it. This is an extremely juvenile market/industry in the first place and recent transitions into smaller/download/independent games even more so. The idea that there's enough relevant data to come even close to accurately reflecting interest is questionable. They probably approached MS/Sony about trying to fund this for their services. What the christ data do they have? Could they have? Barely 5 years worth, all tainted by the incredibly shallow depth of their marketplace. I'm sure they spend tons of money on "research", but the likelihood is that's just a feedback loop reflecting established methods of development.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:37
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This is all kinds of awesome. I've enjoyed all of Schafer's games so far.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:37
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GhostDog posted:But are those 1.4 million additional profit from an untapped market, or will those 1.4 million migrate into the 4 million because "buying the other games is better than having no games at all". It's not going to change the system other than (hopefully) encouraging other video game veterans to try to fund their niche game ideas through crowdsourcing. Just look at today's Activision earnings call. Look at those numbers. A million dollars from 25,000 people is nothing.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:37
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$4,000 away from a million.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:37
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I was thinking the game had more backers then it really has. I was ready to say "If this keeps up who will buy the game when it is released" Check the website, oh only 25k backers, still plenty of people left to buy it then when it comes out. But think about almost 1 mill and only 26k people are backing it. That is amazing the amount of money people are dropping on this. and to think there are those jerks that pay .01 for the HIB....
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Feb 10, 2012 00:38
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I really wish I could be in the Double Fine offices right now. They are about to get so shitfaced.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:40
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I'm having a hard time imagining a million dollar adventure game that has no publisher input and makes pure profit from the moment it is released.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:40
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How to Earn a Million Dollars in a Day by T. Schafer. Step 1) Be Tim Schafer. I think everyone  ing broke Kickstarter. It's chugging and throwing up errors for me.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:43
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This better be the best point and click adventure game ever made.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:43
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And the page get 404'd as soon as it was gonna hit 1,000,000!
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Feb 10, 2012 00:43
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Well, looks like we've just past the million mark. Holy gently caress. I find it rather ironic that as we got closer and closer to the million mark, it took longer and longer to reload the page to see the new numbers. Seems a LOT of people wanted to see that number go to 1 million... Let's just hope that Tim Schaefer and Ron Gilbert really can make some real magic with that million in up-front capital! We've got high hopes for 'em! Also ought to be interesting to see that whole documentary series...
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Feb 10, 2012 00:44
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And then the servers melted..
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Feb 10, 2012 00:46
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Kickstarter just announced it on Twitter. They did it! https://twitter.com/kickstarter
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Feb 10, 2012 00:46
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 What's that?! Over $1mil in less than 24 hours??! sweet sweet money. delicious money. all over my balls and hairy rear end in a top hatloving HELL edit: aww they lost the million dollar race to an iphone dock lol sockpuppetclock fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Feb 10, 2012 |
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Feb 10, 2012 00:47
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Is all of the money getting invested into the project? For 15 bucks, you get the game which translates to basically a "lost sale" for all the alpha funders. How does that work?
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Feb 10, 2012 00:49
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sockpuppetclock posted:Why isn't there a green You're a Baker stamp in your screenshot, mister?
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Feb 10, 2012 00:50
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