The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[matt]

I feel like if you feel you can't make ends meet, there are things you can do to try and save your company and at least get your rewards out. Perhaps they took out big loans, but the game didn't sell too terribly. According to Steam Spy, it's done similar-ish units to Neverending Nightmares. I'm not sure if they've done any bundling yet though, so maybe it's done better in terms of units sold on Steam or in terms of average purchase price (although it's base is $9.99). If they managed to burn through all of their steam profits, what were they expecting to sell? Why didn't they delay the physical rewards until after doing a discount?

Speaking of discounts, Ars Technica did a complicated analysis of the Steam sale that I didn't fully understand, but Neverending Nightmares seemed to be in the bottom section of the list that implies that it was a bad idea to discount...
Title Disc. Type 5/27 6/10 6/24 pre-sale % sale % Relative
Neverending Nightmares 50% Day 8 monster 21,824 28,625 34,918 31.2% 22.0% -9.2%
The reason the numbers worked out to be a net negative was because we did a discount right before the Steam sale to coincide with the announcement of Devastated Dreams...

Their analysis seems fatally flawed by the variance in SteamSpy numbers as well as other discounts. Their top two games lost huge number of unit sales between 5/27 and 6/10 (which is unrealistic and seems like a problem with SteamSpy's estimations) so of course the sales look like they did amazingly.

So anyway, despite what websites might say, Steam discounts can make significant money and be rather helpful, so perhaps GRIN could have benefited by putting off some expenses until they did another discount... My two cents anyway.

[LobsterSundew]

Kickstarter is starting to see a new wave of good quality campaigns. It should ramp up even more with the arrival of September.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 made a big splash.

Sedcluded has a spooky space station setting, but the pitch video didn't cover much about the gameplay.

Judgment of Rage is an oddly executed campaign from a Japanese developer.

Aquanox Deep Descent is a successor to the AquaNox.

Rogue Invader is using a monochrome 1-bit depth style like old Mac games.

It was announced Muv Luv will launch in September for an official English translation. That game franchise is a bizarre spin off of a spin off. The first game is like a standard highschool dating game, then the protagonist wakes up in an alternate reality with mecha warfare, post-apocalypse Canada and swimming pool amounts of blood. There are some music tracks I now have to go re-listen to.

There was the announcement of What We Do in The Shadows 2.

Eco is 124% fully funded with about two weeks still remaining.

[LobsterSundew]

Battle Chasers: Nightwar is currently one of the big campaigns running right now.

tiny and Tall is a hand-drawn art-style adventure game.

De Mambo is a weird but kind of awesome pitch.

Crashnauts is a 2D arena shooter.

There is the new crowdfunding platform Fig that allows some backers to contribute for equity.

It looks like the summer slump for good projects is over. Many good quality projects are launching now.

[evilkinggumby]

I backed Battle Chasers already. Likely will be it for a while.

[LobsterSundew]

12 is Better Than 6 is Hotline Miami in the wild west. It is using what I call "cascading early-bird reward tiers". The £2 early-bird tier leads into the £4 early-bird tier and then the normal £6 tier. I've yet to see cascading reward tiers work well enough to justify them. I'm watching this one closely to see if it fails.

Here are the final graphs for Eco.
http://i.imgur.com/wf4xKLL.png

Apparently there are development hell problems with Unsung Story after its $660,126 campaign.

The release of Dropsy has been a crowdfunding adventure for over 4 years. It has come a long way since that first 2011 campaign I pledged to. It's sing-a-long trailer is out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It72E3EbJNk

[evilkinggumby]

yeah there was a lot of fear for Project Phoenix like this too. luckily PP got a community manager to talk to folk and try to smooth things over.. but ultimately what has been done and what the final game will liekly be is not what a lot of the vocal backers expected. It's going to be a long bumpy road for all those folk.

[LobsterSundew]

Healing Process: Tokyo takes about 1 minute 24 seconds before the pitch video gets good. It deals with a surgeon tackling depression.

Aberford is a zombie survival game with 1950's housewives. Interesting premise, but the minimum goal is huge.

For The King is turn-based adventure with optional online co-op. It has an interesting art style.

Pixel Noir is a good looking pixel art JRPG game starring a noir detective.

NoseBound is a noir detective point and click adventure game. The art style is cinematic, but also a bit weird.

Many good quality projects have been launching this September.

[evilkinggumby]

So yeah.. The Retro VGS has hit Indiegogo...

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retro-vgs#

I've been following it a while. I'm.. not expecting it to complete it's minimum goal of $1.95M. The iniital reaction by a lot of followers when it swapped from KS to IGG was "nope" because of how IG bills first, decides later. For a large chunk of cash (dropping $299 or more for a unit) a LOT of folk aren't keen to forking over money and then seeing if it finishes or not at a later time.

Big issue i guess is KS wouldn't let them run the campaign since they don't even have a working prototype yet. IGG would.

Lot of risk on this one. I like the novelty and if it all works out it'll be interesting to see where it goes but... We saw a lot more hype on the Ouya train and that system is.. kind of.. dead as far as I know.

[LobsterSundew]

Horror game Allison Road has been getting some great press recently. It may partially fill the void that PT left.

Rabbit Run relaunched. Actually a lot of canceled projects from the past relaunched this month. Few have improved themselves.

There are a lot of new really low quality projects flooding the category.

Retro VGS currently has $65,970 pledged by 192 people. The problem I immediately see is the production and distribution of physical cartridges will eat into margins more than digital distribution. I also don't see this system benefiting from the advantages cartridges have like tiny seek times or being able to expand system capabilities. It seems to have all the downsides of cartridges. A field-programmable gate array is an interesting feature, but FPGAs can be relatively very expensive (easily beyond $20 to $100 depending on capabilities) and there is an argument for them just using more powerful hardware without a FPGA. I could not find the specs on the ARM processor the console will use which should be make-or-break information.

I still get almost daily XMBC use with my Ouya unit. I don't see much for new games featured on the main screen these days.

[evilkinggumby]

tossed money to get the basic pc digital copy for Allison Road. Looks solid, good team and pedigree, if untested in the game front. I expect it could turn out great due to being a passion project.. or totall ballz because they don't know horror well enough. Seems like they have SOME IDEA.

And yeah you bring up a good point. most of the games the Retro VGS is shooting for require very little in terms of hardware, so the benefits of cartridge loading are kind of lost. If the hardware ware lesser and the cartridge design was vital to performance, yes. But i think the biggest thing they're banking on isn't so much performance but nostalgia and a sense of ownership of games. WHich.. doesn't seem to be selling it well. I see too many nay sayers stating the cost of a system so underpowered vs buying a modern ps4/xbone is ridiculous.