PaciFire is dubstep and creepy 3D models of babies engaged in multiplayer shooter battles.
Eco is an ambitious multiplayer Minecraft-like survival game with a focus on building up player economies and civilizations that have group decisions. It was mentioned in update #17. The rest of this post will be about this project.
It launched on a Friday, but it does a better job ending on Wednesday September 9th at 9pm PDT. The Greenlight campaign launched back in June and was a success with 549 comments there when I was writing this.
The visual presentation is very good. The images are colourful. There is good use of animated GIFs. The pitch video is under 4 minutes and has pretty visuals on environments and animals to keep people interested. The rewards text is big solid chunks that take more time to skim.
What the game attempts to do is something that Minecraft modders have been trying to implement, such as player run economies and stores. There is an appeal to creating a game that seamlessly integrates what would be a lot of Minecraft mods. It is still going to have to try to present its differences from Minecraft. It isn't clear what other players will look like in-game.
I wonder if it will have to eventually change its name. There was a
Amiga game and it may be too close to
Ecco the Dolphin. Three characters is very short for a game's title which may lead to SEO problems later. There are a lot of products on Kickstarter that started with "eco".
233 backers have pledged $13,060 for an average amount of $56.05 per backer. A general rule is that the average will be within double or triple the price of the introductory tier for a copy of the game ($20 in this case).
Averaging $40 per backer would mean the campaign needs to aim for 2,500 backers to reach $100,000 funded. At $60 per backer it would be about 1,660 backers. To reach $30,000 would take 750 backers at $40 per backer or 500 backers at $60 per backer. It needs to aim for around 250 to 375 backers in its first 7 days to have good enough momentum going into the trough period. It did get covered by Eurogamer and Indie Game Magazine on its first day. There was also over 2,400 Twitter followers. Some time ago it had a good
/r/games post.
The $25 early-bird tier has 5,000 slots, the $30 tier has 2,000 slots and so on with every following tier having caps. From one perspective I would worry about a big pricing gap occurring when one of the reward tiers becomes full, but really the limits are so large that they aren't going to be easy to fill. At first glance I thought they went with a cascading type early-bird rewards which can be poor performers, but I know see it is more like they just put a cap on every reward tier after $20.
I can't really judge if a game like this is priced well at $20 to $25. There is a price jump from $65 to $125 that may need to be filled later. The $30 tier for alpha access is the most populated. Being named in the credits is at $10 and it isn't as clear as it should be with the wording that all backers at $10 or more get into the credits.
The project thumbnail shows concept art that is less pretty than an actual screenshot of the game. The logo in the top right corner is also very small.
The rewards structure has vary little variety in what it offers. It is mostly just earlier access and multiple copies until the large priced rewards. There is a t-shirt reward, but it may get complaints for being at the $135 tier. Add-ons would be the easiest way to try to enhance those existing rewards.
A CTRL+F for "Linux" came up with no mention. On Greenlight it says PC, Mac and Linux. They could be losing potential Linux backers by not being clear about supporting it.
For a minimum goal that large the project is going to need to get a lot of external press coverage in the first half. If it can't then it might not see a fast enough growth rate during the Kickstarter trough.