Nuclear Monster

  • Katie Chironis on what the massively successful crowdfunding campaign for Koji Igarashi’s Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night means for smaller developers also using crowdfunding:

    Bloodstained isn’t a story of the little guy triumphing over big publishers, it’s the story of a campaign that had millions of dollars of funding before the Kickstarter began and the help of multiple companies handling the logistics of the campaign. They asked for $500,000 to prove a point, not fund a game. The issue is that campaigns like that cause members of the community to believe that $500,000 is all you need to create large-scale experiences.

    When you ask for half a million when you really need $5 million it becomes impossible for games with realistic budgets to survive. It’s not that people don’t understand what a game costs, it’s more that Kickstarter is actively distorting people’s understanding of a sane budget. The ecosystem is being poisoned for projects that need to raise their actual, workable budget for a game.

    There are two kinds of project operators on Kickstarter and other similar crowdfunding services.

    The first, and what I believe to be the majority of projects, is everyone who actually is in their theoretical or actual basement toiling away. It’s here that you find the projects to mock that will never successfully achieve their funding goal alongside game developers who actually need the funding in order to start and complete their project.

    The problem group is the minority. They’re so successful at crowdfunding they blow past their initial goals and quadruple them in hours. They have already started the work and have invested significant resources into producing a compelling pitch video with supporting concept art to demonstrate their potential for success. They can summon significant external financial backing at the conclusion of a crowdfunding campaign which existed only as a representative measure of the potential market to sell the finished product into. If it fails to generate enough funding or fails during production, who cares? They’ll walk away relatively unscathed and might even finish the project with the external investment they already had lined up or move on to another.

    Both kinds of crowdfunding projects have succeeded and failed beyond everyone’s wildest expectations and this has lead some people to declare crowdfunding as a whole either an enormous success or terrible failure. All of the declarations ignore the continued successes and failures of both kinds of project that occur after the declaration has been made. Even this article isn’t immune to sudden declaration syndrome. The opener is:

    We all know the Kickstarter bubble is bursting.

    The difference between Katie Chironis’ declaration and the others is that she is right. The majority of projects can’t compare with crowdfunding goals as low as Bloodstained‘s $500,000.

    Why would anyone running a project who is otherwise wealthy or has external financial backing do the right thing and set their goals appropriately when the wrong thing is working out so well for them?

    There are enough fans of Castlevania out there that the Kickstarter project for Bloodstained is at about $2.5 million. Of which Kickstarter is already set to make $125,000 at their 5% fee. The payment processor will get about the same cut of that $2.5 million if the funding level doesn’t change by the time the campaign ends.

    Why would Kickstarter’s crowdfunding change when they made $1,016,900 for hosting another project webpage, the Pebble Time, with an unrealistic goal, external funding, and an already complete project ready to go to market?

    If Kickstarter’s bubble doesn’t burst for truly independent project operators, it will be because Kickstarter changes to properly support them by focusing on those who aren’t succeeding at finding funding and shipping complete projects instead of passing the blame entirely onto project operators.

    If that happens, Kickstarter might actually earn some of their cut.

  • Tom Jubert spoiled us with his writing in The Talos Principle, FTL, and The Swapper. Everything he works on is 100% pure gold pressed latinum that might be consumed in a manner not unlike that of a starving teenger wolfing down hot pockets without regard for the ensuing restroom debacle. Each time Jubert’s blog (Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch) updates it’s a new world of excitement at what incredible game could pop out that he’s touched next. This time he’s about to talos about the upcoming expansion pack for The Talos Principle called Road to Gehenna:

    Without spoiling anything, the pitch we went with provides us huge flexibility in terms of the sort and tone of material we deliver. It gives us a world that fits within the original game’s religious and science fiction mythology, but which resolutely has its own identity. Most importantly for me, it lets us explore completely new ideas about how to interact with the game.

    There’s plenty of more Talos in the post, most exciting is that the story is just as large for the expansion as it was for the original, however he also mentions a new game coming out that he had a hand in, The Masterplan. It’s a top-down heistery already in Early Access on Steam but I will probably wait for the game to be finished on June 4th to enjoy it.

  • Bruce Horovitz:

    Domino’s regulars will be able to order by tweeting only the pizza emoji to @Dominos.

    In 2016, Domino’s regulars will be able to order lap-band surgery just by tweeting a lap-band emoji to the hospital of their choice.

  • Fascinating article from Jon Peterson goes over the history of government intervention in gaming, and how it relates to the internet we have today. Includes this on the Dungeons & Dragons scare of the 80s:

    This misunderstanding arose only five months after TSR obtained widespread notoriety in a similar confusion surrounding the disappearance of college student James Dallas Egbert III in East Lansing, Michigan. A private detective hired to find Egbert had learned that the young man played TSR’s role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons–at the time virtually unknown to mainstream America–and hypothesized that Egbert had come to believe the game was real. Famously, this led to calls for a search of the college steam tunnels, where presumably Egbert would be found wandering in a deluded stupor, questing for monsters and treasure.

    Actually, Egbert had run away to Louisiana for unrelated reasons, but a seed was then planted in the American popular imagination. Role-playing games were dangerous: they warped fragile young minds, breaking down the barriers between the real and the imaginary. The irony is that it was the authorities, not the players, who couldn’t tell a game from reality.

  • There aren’t a lot of 2D side-scrolling RPGs, I can’t think of any that aren’t from consoles like Odin Sphere on the Playstation 2 and Valkyrie Profile on the Playstation and Playstation Portable. Certainly none were cyberpunk. We’ve had a resurgence of cyberpunk gaming with the isometric Shadowrun Returns, the third-person Republique, and the first-person Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Those tough-times for cyberpunks looking for their side-scrolling fix are at an end. 

    Originally crowd-funded way back in December 2013, the side-scrolling cyberpunk RPG Dex has been released for Windows, Mac and Linux on Steam.

    Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go scroll through the listing of cyberpunk games and dreaming of a sky tuned to a dead channel.