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Comment by sami36 | Hacker News Reader

in essence, the crowd-funding model is working just fine. Game publishing will never be the same.

that really is not what I took from it. many (half?) of them are behind on their schedule. 3(?) good ones were released.

they were successful for the developers (and only those were selected).

for the funders there really is not much closure yet to say anything about the future.

Most of the other projects have been posting updates so they definitely are working on the products. Unless those devs are really in dire straits it would be kind of silly for them to abandon the games.

They already have so much time put into development and the point of a kickstarter for games is not to make a bunch of money on the kickstarter. It is to make a bunch of money on selling the game since a publisher isn't basically taking everything on the actual sales of the game. Then there is more money to be made on actually getting to own the IP because you didn't get gouged by a publisher.

If they were going to run off with the money they already should have by now. At this point it is really in their interest to finish the game.

It isn't a guarantee of course, but it seems much more likely now then it did when the games were initially funded.

Only one single game in that list actually got released and half of the rest are way overdue.

But what does it actually mean compared to other game companies? Looking at valve and blizzard, both has had a long standing style of only releasing a game once its is "done", no matter the years that has passed since the first estimated release date.

And maybe this is wrong and the future of game development will shed those tendencies. Looking historically on game development, rushing a product out of the door to meet a release date has rarely produced a good game (anyone heard of E.T?). So the question might be, what alternative do we have between rushing a product for relase date, and waiting until it is "done", which might mean fifteen years to find out that the game is rather crappy (duke nukem forever). We can also look at development processes like Debian, and compare a static release schedule with a dynamic one.

Perhaps you've heard people say "most small companies fail due to cashflow problems" - what that means is: A company can have a great half-finished project/lots of pre-orders/great sales leads/user growth and they can see a light at the end of the tunnel where they'll be profitable. But before they reach the light at the end of the tunnel they run out of cash to pay suppliers and salaries, then they're bankrupt.

Let's say a company plans to make their game in 1 year with 5 developers paid $60,000 each, so they raise $300,000. Every month of overrun costs them $25,000 in salaries, and if they don't have cash in the bank on pay day the employees don't get paid.

At Blizzard or Valve this wouldn't a problem, they've got oodles of cash in the bank. But the whole point of going to kickstarter is because you don't have oodles of cash in the bank.

waiting until it is "done", which might mean fifteen years to find out that the game is rather crappy (duke nukem forever)

DNF wasn't done. IIRC, the developer gave up, sold what they had, which was tidied up and shipped otherwise as-is. It's another example of shipping a product before it's "done". ...and sometimes an idea just doesn't work out, no matter how much effort.

Other companies don't pre-sell games or promises before the game is launched, though.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111166-10-Year-Old...

Not sure what you mean here? Pre-orders are an absolutely critical part of publishers' revenue, which is the cause of the weird structural problems around magazine reviews (where 8/10 means "below-average game").

Stock market analysts do the same thing as game critics, and never, ever give sell ratings: http://www.cnbc.com/id/42790061/Stock_Analysts_Too_Scared_of...

I'm guessing in both cases it's because the best raters get the best access from companies.

Same problem probably exists in other industries too.

pre-orders open once a game is done and way past the beta stage.

Pricing plans, gold editions/collectors editions etc are all planned for much later in the cycle - all revenue comes post/near game launch.

That is what I was aiming at, perhaps it wasn't clear in my original post, I plead sleep dep.

Thats the issue that arrives when return of investment is a copy of a game and not stock options. If one treat kickstarter as an investment, then there is not much of a difference.

Two games - Faster Than Light and Project Giana. Also I haven't seen too many project in the game industry yet which were right on time, so as long as the guys still work on it that doesn't worry me too much.

the dev cycle for a game is 12~24 months. The first Kickstarter breakthrough was Double Fine Adventure in Feb 2012. It's on track as most are per the article. It's too early to tell but I don't expect a higher failure rate than publisher backed games.I'll concede much, most creators were over-optimistic with their timelines.

Also, a lot of the ship-dates were based on the original funding goals. If you're planning to make a game with budget X, then fans throw budget 3*X at you and demand you produce something more epic in scope, it's only natural the development time becomes more epic to match.

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