The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

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LobsterSundew
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by LobsterSundew »

Harmonix has launched a project to produce a successor on PS3/PS4 for their PS2 game Amplitude. There isn't support for PC, so it will be interesting to see if they can get enough backers.
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matt
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by matt »

I suspect that is because Sony owns the IP for the game since Frequency and Amplitude were published by SCEA. Especially since Harmonix was a new studio at that point, I doubt they were able to get ownership of the IP in their contract.

Interestingly, Frequency and Amplitude both featured licensed music, but Harmonix is going to compose all the music for the new Amplitude in house. That keeps licensing costs down, but that was a big complaint with Retro/Grade. I wonder if others will think similarly.

The real question in my mind is where were these 3,283 backers when we launched Retro/Grade!??! :-(
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
ranger_lennier
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by ranger_lennier »

I backed Mark of the Old Ones after Matt mentioned it in his Kickstarter update. I was the 667th backer, so I'm afraid it's my fault it no longer bears the mark of the beast.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/11 ... -adventure
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gagaplex
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by gagaplex »

Here's one that I backed, is long over, but came to fruition now (I recently received my copy in the mail):
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64 ... -a-reality
When I was suffering through my worst depressive episodes my cat is the one who got me through them. When a lot of my friends were going through hard times as well I started drawing silly cats to make them smile and it just spiraled out of control from there. Now whenever I see someone I know who is sad or struggling I take out my tiny cat paintings and flip through them until they smile again.
It's not a horror game or a game in general, but I liked the idea (and the goal was actually very low), so I was glad to back it; plus, this is a Kickstarter thread, right, not just Kickstarters for video games?
The small book I got has some really cute cartoons in it. Since I was never the biggest animal lover, but my mom loves cats (and had several in the past), I figure she'll get it for Mother's Day. :-)
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matt
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by matt »

Unfortunately, I seem to have a mail thief (they stole a bunch of packages from Amazon), and they seem to have stolen my copy of Cat Therapy. :( What a sad world we live in! :-/
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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LobsterSundew
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by LobsterSundew »

SUPERHOT is an impressive campaign. It is a first-person shooter with a bullet-time mechanic with time moving when the player character moves.

2D pixel art fans should look at Kingdom and Witchmarsh.

Phil Tippett's Kickstarter campaign for the 2nd part of his disturbing stop-motion film MAD GOD was funded 3 days ago with exactly 900 backers. Part 1 was good.
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LobsterSundew
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by LobsterSundew »

The Kicktraq page for Amplitude shows a large amount in pledges from a relatively small amount of backers is helping it get close enough to its goal. 10,982 backers are currently pledging $705,790 for an average of $64.27 per backer. The comments section has a lot of people upgrading their pledges.

Horror game Relive rebooted.

Caffeine is another horror game with a demo available. The start of the pitch video is slow and maybe should have started around the 1 minute 50 seconds mark. There was a previous campaign with.

SumoBoy is an ambitious project with a very slow start.

Beast's Fury is a 2D animated fighting game. Backing for a demo is okay, but it would be nice to have some way for people to get the full game or a discount if it ever gets made. The finished rough animations for the suit wearing shark character show potential.
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matt
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by matt »

Amplitude was a weird one and definitely seems like it only succeeded because of huge donations from Harmonix fans. Ted Price from Insomniac pledged $7,500 and told all Insomniac fans to check it out. I was amazed that the average was so high. Did you happen to do any graphs or images for that campaign? I suspect a small group of large contributors really carried them over the finish line.

One of the interesting things about Amplitude is that basically the press was calling it troubled/unlikely a week ago, which I think is usually a fulfilling prophesy, but they managed to shake that.

I backed Caffeine personally, but I don't think I'm going to mention it in my updates just because the video and the kickstarter page is very lacking in terms of explaining what the game is like. I played a recent Unreal 4 demo, and it ran at about 5 frames a second on my Geforce 550 GTX (which isn't terrible!) and I think I got stuck or there wasn't any scares or anything interesting other than really pretty environments and a little bit of first person platforming (which I personally loathe). Still, it seems like it has potential.
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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LobsterSundew
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by LobsterSundew »

matt wrote:Amplitude was a weird one and definitely seems like it only succeeded because of huge donations from Harmonix fans. Ted Price from Insomniac pledged $7,500 and told all Insomniac fans to check it out. I was amazed that the average was so high. Did you happen to do any graphs or images for that campaign? I suspect a small group of large contributors really carried them over the finish line.
A massive 21.93% of the funding is unallocated from a tiny pool of equal to or less than 256 backers. Removing the unallocated leaves just $659,016 from 13,856 backers (85.03% of the $775,000 minimum goal).

I've previously talked about Amplitude's average on the Delving Into Kickstarter thread. I don't have the growth data for the campaign, but below is a link to a more old-fashion graph.
http://imgur.com/IUSMpAS

I don't recall ever seeing such a large unallocated amount. Significant unallocated amounts can be bad news for a project due to the two main reasons below.

First, some of the unallocated amounts for campaigns arise from international backers pledging extra for shipping. Large unallocated amounts can be a problem because while the extra added for shipping does raise the counter for the total amount pledged, since that amount immediately gets allocated to the cost of shipping it doesn't really add anything to the amount of funds a developer has left over to actually make the game. The result is thinking one has more development funds than they actually have. Other normal sources of unallocated can be people just dropping by with a $1 pledge when there is no $1 reward tier.

Second, is large unallocated amounts indicate something happening behind the scenes with devs (Or people associated with them) pledging large amounts to their own campaign to inflate the numbers so that regular backers continue to pledge to it. When I do have full tracking I sometimes see these unallocated pledges appear in the first 48 hours and then disappear after the campaign get over 100% because then the person inflating the campaign doesn't inefficiently lose some money that is already their own to the processing fees. If the campaign doesn't reach 100% then the project creator doesn't have much monetary incentive to pull the unallocated pledges as no fund transfers occur. In an even more worrying scenario, that has happened before, a project creator may decide to take on debt to be able to pledge the missing amount so they can get to 100% and take the partial amount raised by backers. That leaves even less of a development budget. In Amplitude's case it looks like it is not a scam and they were fortunate enough to have connections with people who could make such large pledges.
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matt
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Re: The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

Post by matt »

Thank you so much for the write up and the graphs! That is super interesting. I guess they had some friends with a lot of disposable income that really wanted to see the game happen!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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