Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadbunny | Hacker News Reader

Eh, I chucked them $50 or whatever it was for what was clearly a 10+ year project (at the time I gave them my money). I've had fun playing the modules already released but if they never deliver a full game I can think of worse things I've spend $50 on.

I've always seen crowd funding as chucking a little money at an idea that interests you, if it works then cool, if not then it wasn't (and shouldn't ever be) an amount I'm going to lose sleep over.

As for the people spending thousands of dollars on promised future digital shiny things? I just don't understand it, why are you paying money for virtual things that don't exist yet in a game that doesn't even exist yet? But then I've never understood the (reasonably) recent trend for paying hundreds/thousands of dollars on cosmetic items for games that you're actually playing so maybe I'm missing something.

View on HN

Given the reception of No Man's Sky, I would say that the advantage of spending money on things that will remain forever in the future is that they will never disappoint you; they will remain Peter Pan objects, never to age or confront reality. You're buying an aspiration, a dream, and if you can get thousands to dream along with you, all the better. The real "game" is not some bytes in a database nor pixels in the screen, it's in the head of the players, and as such does not require physical referents to play. This makes it the ultimate postmodern game.

Who needs virtual reality when you have hyperreality?

(I could go on like this but I refer you to Baudrillard on the hyper-real and simulacra. Buying a virtual object that doesn't even have a virtual existence is clearly a stage 4 "simulacra". This comment should not be taken entirely seriously or literally, either.)

> Given the reception of No Man's Sky, I would say that the advantage of spending money on things that will remain forever in the future is that they will never disappoint you

I think it's important to add this: No Man's Sky turned out to be a great game! It just took about a year longer than expected and in the meantime Hello Games got the full fury of the internet. But they didn't stop. They buckled down and worked on it. And it turned out just fine.

Yes, I've got a good number of hours of enjoyment out of it - but only by ignoring the hype and waiting until the first Steam discount. As a Roger Dean art generator it's fantastic.

This is also why I stopped preordering games that are available from an online store. I understand the anticipation for when you can finally play a game you've been waiting on, but that experience doesn't change whether you pre-order it or not. If you simply must be separated from your money, there are places where you can put that money for the same period of time and they will pay you for it. The only difference is the story you're told about what you've just done with your money, and working with a bank isn't nearly as fun as buying a game on Steam (though the promise by the bank is approximately the same kind of game).

Kickstarter is sort of like a more up-front version of this, in that it's easier to figure out what you're actually paying for than standard pre-ordering of a product that does exist. Of course there's the default story that you're supporting the independent developers. But I haven't joined a Kickstarter without the expectation of some product at the end of it... so in these cases, I'm paying money now in an attempt to create a future where this thing that does not exist now, does actually exist.

What a time to be alive. All of my grandparents watched every dollar of their cash flows, and here I am throwing money at people I'll never meet, working with hundreds or thousands of people doing the same thing: trying to conjure up some new reality we'll experience for a very brief period of time through a 24" screen.

To me it seems quite simple: when you invest into a thing you take a risk. You are not paying to get a product, you are investing into something that could or could not work out.

E.g. I bought Risk of rain 2 in the pre release for 17€ Because I liked the first part and I thought these devs deserve to try something new. I was prepared for the worst (it is a alpha after all), but it turned out to be one of the best 17€ I ever spent on a game already.

But could I really have predicted that? No..

> You are not paying to get a product, you are investing into something that could or could not work out.

Yes, but Kickstarter's angle is that it will work out. That's the underlying assumption. People don't usually give away their money for nothing, they need some idea that they'll get something in return. I think Kickstarter is actually more harmful to the cognitive processes involved in creating these illusions, since the future product is usually fairly well-defined from the beginning... so the illusions designed to attract your money happens in the beginning, and then the developer just needs to manage the backers' expectations until the product is released. At which point everyone will be busy comparing the actual product with their expectations, and hopefully enjoying the game too, and no one is getting their money back.

I'm not saying RoR2 wasn't worth your money. That 2-for-1 deal was a good way to balance taking your money before giving you anything (I think that deal was pre-release). Early Access releases are another good balance I think (I feel the same way about Slay the Spire as you do RoR2 -- best $20 game I've ever bought and 1 year before release). But you alone didn't decide they deserve your money, they gave you the option to recognize that feeling, by sending some cash their way.

If you imagine the same thing happening in a face-to-face exchange, it's pretty weird, and that makes me feel uneasy about this whole trend. If it wouldn't happen face-to-face, but it happens when we're all forming opinions about it separately, it seems like something else is going on besides just selling video games.

Not trying to be mean here but don't you think some of these backers might have serious issues. The promise of an infinite alternate reality in space that will be everything you want it to be is alluring, especially to people who aren't having the greatest run in the real world. I think this is predatory and terrible.

I love video games, I love the escapism, I love nerd culture. People willing to pay $1000 for a virtual spaceship are people I care about, and they deserve better.

Do they? People investing money through crowdfunding are just that, investors. If you invest 50$ and get 50 hours of game play, then the investment was good, independently of whether the game was released or not. If you invest 20.000$ and no game is ever released, and you don't get a % of the sales, then it was probably a bad investment.

Being a bad investor is not an illness. Just because we don't die easily anymore does not mean that our environment isn't hostile, that natural selection does not exist.

Some people want to have fulfilling lives that make the world a better place and become doctors, and nurses, and teachers, and cops, and firefighters, ... and work long hours, with little holiday, for little pay.

Others want to enjoy their every moment on earth, learn to exploit their environment for profit, and this is how it looks like nowadays. There are always people that are smarter than you, and there are always people that aren't.

Crowdfunding is great because it gives you access to thousands of non-professional investors that have too much money and don't know what they are doing. People who want a game go and buy a game, but these people made an investment. If that's bad, it is IMO their own fault.

I wouldn't say crowdfunding is in any way a financial investment.

Investment implies monetary return. so if the thing you're investing in is financially successful, you actually make more money than you put in. that doesn't describe kickstarter/indigogo style crowdfunding.

A campaign that says "give us x money and we will give you y reward with an intended time scale of z" (which is most kickstarters) is clearly (IMO) a sale.

You are a customer, paying money for a product.

There are crowd-funded investment platforms, which have different, more stringent, requirements, but Kickstarter is not one of them.

All I would say to this is that there are plenty of very successful companies that I do not consider predatory.

A $10 ticket to Avengers:Endgame is a downright bargain, so is $15 a month for HBO.

I give $60+ dollars on the regular to companies like Rockstar and From Software with a huge smile on my face and then line up to do it again.

It is very possible to be successful and not rely on predatory practices. I think part of the problem is that as a society it is our responsibility collectively to punish the true predators. We seem to be getting worse and worse at this and the predators seem to be getting hungrier and hungrier...

You've described someone in my family exactly. I agree that it's predatory and terrible; maybe it wasn't intended to be, but perpetuating the situation doesn't seem like the right approach.

Was talking about Star Citizen on https://the-starport.net/ like almost 10 years ago.

People made many predictions back then, some said it'll never achieve that level of detailed game play while supporting multiplayer. And yet, look how far that game has went today.

Pretty impressive already if I do say so myself.

I'm looking forward to see it's completion. And even if somehow it failed, I think it's already a nice game.

Just curious - what elements of the game do you find pretty impressive and nice? There doesn't seem to be much of a game loop, or anything to do really other than some broken fetch quests. I've definitely seen a few impressive looking screenshots, but the graphics are starting to look a bit dated already. Based on some of the current bugs/issues, it seems to be missing quite a bit of core technology needed to make that promised detailed multiplayer a reality.

As somebody who didn’t back the but followed some of the dev stuff purely out of curiosity I would say it is exactly the other way around. They did a lot in the tech behind it, while a lot of the gameplay stuff started to come together just in the recent months. Purely from my limited subjective perspective I have the feeling they built a pretty solid ground for implementing content and gameplay alike

Just wondering, at what point has Star Citizen ever clearly looked like a 10+ year project? From what I can tell, according to the developers and many of the fans, Star Citizen has always been 2-3 away from release ever since it was announced. Or do you just mean that it clearly looked like a 10+ year project to you and you were otherwise okay with the developers misleading backers about the release timeline?

Isn’t the typical development time of any bigger game ~5 years? As somebody who followed the development with curiosity without backing anything, I never thought it was <5 years and given the scope I had the feeling it might be more.

But on the other hand, I don’t really get why it is so important how long it takes? As long as they get it done and as long as they can fund it who cares?

> As for the people spending thousands of dollars on promised future digital shiny things? I just don't understand it

It's all relative. I'm sure those with very little money wouldn't understand you throwing $50 at Star Citizen.

Is this true? I through a lot of the early backers had pretty big, playable sections, just not a full MMO or single player campaign yet. Is that totally not true, or is it a really limited subset of backers that can access what's been released so far?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com