[1] Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Pillars of Eternity, Antharion, Balrum, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Balrum, RimWorld, Lords of Xulima, Blackguards, Shadowrun: Hongkong
edit: And 100% sucess rate with tabletop/card games
it's dev is still ongoing.
And I say that as a person with a few ships awaiting release, too. While I really want my Carrack, it's far more important that they make it good. The estimated release times have moved back a few time, but that's the expense of great work in the rest of the game. Backers seem to largely accept this as the cost of buying into an in-progress development: priorities must be fluid, and we have to make do.
The trick to Kickstarter is to only invest what you can lose (like anything!) and then be patient. Starcitizen is stupendously ambitious, and is going to cost a fortune to develop. They successfully made the transistion to being nearly self-sustained, basically using Kickstarter to kickstart their development process.
I don't understand where the community gets all that positive vibes from but I've lost it and yes....I invested too.
[0] https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/for...
> Please note: Even though we call it the ‘Live’ service, it’s still very much in the Alpha stage of development, and there are tons of features and optimizations to be added. Players on the ‘Live’ service are very much testers, too!
We are talking about 130 million dollar. A hill of mismanagement, ideas stacked on ideas and Spawn offs to keep the hype running. I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are talking about. This game is the peek of that new Alpha Game wave that is flooding steam for example. It's like now everybody wants to be like SZ. Greenlight some rough concepts, ???, profit/cancel.
This game is a terrible example for others.
And expectations are everything. I had endless hours of fun with Privateer as a kid, and had a blast with Freelancer when I was older. That covers a large chunk of my life, so my patience is tempered, a bit. Eve fills the niche while I wait, and I'm very excited to see my old memories come back in HD in a new universe. What's another 5 years out of 25? (And I'm serious - I had fun with Privateer, and in retrospect it was kinda terrible! Pushing past the uncanny valley of VR sim is effort worth waiting for!)
Honestly? Expectations are screwy. Eve has a sophisticated character creation system, and it's essentially to take a 200x200 pixel picture. Just fantastic, and almost as useless. But it really makes the game feel bigger and more real. Eve's taken more than 15 years to get to where it is, and that's sort of where I hold my standard. Time ain't the barrier to me.
What we have with SC now is the shattered result of all those terrible management decisions and a CEO who does not take the critics serious (probably also because of this one popular "critics" criticism). I'm not sure if anything good can grow from this but I'm pretty sure some huge changes in management could help out here to at least get a clear and realistic target.
They owe it to the backers even if the loudest of them don't care. This is a project which will be an example for others. Future will show what kind of example...
My point is that lateness isn't the sin people make it out to be. A well polished and expansive game can come late, and so long as the medium still does it justice it'll be great. All the gnashing of teeth and whining will be forgotten as people play fun. Setting expectations for deliverables is far better than expectation for delivery times, since you can miss deadlines while still delivering (leaving you with a lose-win pattern). And it's better to set expectations realistically rather than disappoint, because then at best you can deliver disappointment on time. SC has some damn good pedigree, so I think it's easy to believe they'll deliver on quality and expectation, and that overrides everything else.
I was thrilled about NMS (and had a blast with it), and I think it panned a bit because it rushed. There was some noise that warped expectations, and yet the game became just what it set out to be. Further updeates made it even more fun to play, and to quote Day9 "I will play the shit out of No Man's Sky 2." Heck, we even have celebrated failures like VoxelQuest, which is one of my favorite KickStarter epics. Obduction was just what I expected from Cyan. And I'm honestly kinda excited to see if Hiveswap manages to deliver despite hype. Broken Age was a bit bizzare, since it actually probably would have been better if it stopped in the middle (but still a lot of fun). We live in such a golden age of choice it's possible that Dual Universe will be good!
Imagine having NMS, SC, and DU all with their own take on a large persistent universe - pick the style you like! I'll happily wait years to see that, and we can usually play them before they're done, which takes the sting out of waiting I think.
i suppose this correlates with the major emotional investment.
I prefer to back those even if they fail than back mainstream succesful projects that would have been made anyway.
I've never backed anything on Kickstarter. But if everything you have backed has delivered something to you, it sounds like you've chosen projects very well!
I don't have any special insight but I get the feeling that this is how very many game development investments pan out. Generally I think it's safe to say that commercial software projects are hyped and oversold.
It becomes most galling with games because they are software that people WANT to engage with, rather than being forced to.