Backwards Compatible
  • Home
  • Audiobooks Entertained
  • Tangents Entertained
  • Comics
  • Tech & Toys
  • Pokemon Trading Card Game Hub
  • Audiobooks
  • Games
  • TV & Film
  • Interviews
  • Books, Graphic Novels, Trades & Volume Reviews
  • News & Comment
    • Listen
    • Random Chat
  • The London Film and Comic Con Report
  • Football Inclined

Kickstarter Projects - The Games I'm Betting on

25/7/2014

 
As mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to highlight a few of the games I've backed on Kickstarter. This is not an advert, nor is it a review of each game, just a way to highlight the sort of things out there that you can find on Kickstarter. Watch this space for more updates as the games are released.

Click on each picture to view the project:

The Deer God
Terratech
Sunset
Superhot
Amplitude
Hyper Light Drifter

The Kickstarter Conundrum

22/7/2014

 
Picture
OK, let's talk about Kickstarter. There is a recent project that is currently getting a lot of the wrong sort of press. You probably know the story by now. Yogventures is a game that was being developed by Winterkewl based on the 'loveable' characters from the Yogscast. I have to be perfectly honest, being the time-starved saddo that I am, I'd never heard of Yogscast until this week, nevertheless I've learnt a lot about the Yogscast very quickly. 

Yogscast are a british duo who rose to YouTube fame with their videos of World of Warcraft and Minecraft. They became so successful (the were the first YouTube channel in the UK to reach one billion views) they formed their own YouTube network and brought in other YouTubers onto their channel. They were good at what they did, appealing to a younger audience, mainly of children under 14, and each presenter has a cutesy cartoony profile pic, in the art-style reminiscent of many a F2P mobile game. They are geared towards appealing to a younger audience of eager, naive gamers who lack the understanding of the more intricate parts of games development. 
Yogscast licenced their IP to Winterkewl. In essence this means they let Winterkewl use their likenesses, resources and assets for a percentage of the eventual profits on the game. It is still unclear how much involvement the Yogscast crew have at this point. What is clear is the partnership with Winterkewl no longer exists. The updates from both Winterkewl and Yogscast have been, ahem, fairly contentious.

It seems that the development studio wasn't really a studio in the conventional sense. The apology posted on Kickstarter by lead Developer Kris Vale shows someone who has been through a lot over the past two years, including losing his wife to divorce and almost his day job. This implies that perhaps Vale's main job isn't lead developer of Winterkewl. Oops. 

The apology also includes a breakdown of all the expenses during the two year development campaign, most of which seem fair enough. But once you start to pick apart the figures and examine the mistakes Vale made you can see that they don't entirely add up. 
Picture
Picture
Give us all your moneyz, children.
Most naively, Vale didn't spend much on contract Lawyers. One member of his team, a concept artist who created a lot of the designs featured during the Kickstarter campaign, got a better offer from Lucasarts and left with his $35,000 lump sum payment after two weeks work. Vale hadn't written in a clause outlining how an employee could legally stop working for them. This didn't sit well with the Yogscast crew, who lost faith in Vale's expertise as business manager and demanded all funds to be returned to them. Winterkewl managed to negotiate returning $150,000 back to Yogscast (more on that later) and returned to development without a main programmer. As is obvious, games development is hard enough at the best of times, the team lacking a strong programmer, limped through and eventually petered out and Yogventures was cancelled on July 17th of this year.
Yogventures has 13,647 backers who funded the project to the value of $567,665. The initial goal was $250,000. After Kickstarter and Amazon took their cut of the money raised, the development team were left with about $415,000. This is a woefully small amount (although still much bigger than their planned $250,000 budget) to work on a fairly ambitious project. Looking at the figures breakdown, Winterkewl have been left in debt to a tune of $100,000. This is not nice and shows how hard running a business can be. It also shows why the Yogscast chaps are a bit, let's say, miffed.
Watch the Yogventures Kickstarter pitch in the video above
Anyway, lets get back to the Yogscast. Where has that $150,000 they negotiated gone? It was meant to be, to quote Kris Vale, used to "exclusively to create and ship all the physical rewards". This as well as help Winterkewl find a new lead programmer. So far the backers have not received any physical rewards and, as we know, no new programmer was found. Backers won't be getting a refund, although they have been promised a game code for a game they never wanted. Hmmm. It's all a bit of a mess. Winterkewl have been very naive, Yogscast have lost a lot of money and a lot of backers have been stung. What lessons can be learnt from this?

Backing a Kickstarter - What should you do?

1) Look at the scope of the project. How ambitious are they being? For example, in terms of video games, most experienced developers would look at what sort of budget has been set in a Kickstarter and know straight away whether it was not enough (or too much!). If the money backed rockets up, what sort of stretch goals have they set?

2) Look at the milestones they are setting. Are they achievable in the time they have proposed? Do they even have milestones set? A good Kickstarter, whether it is a video game or any other project will have set themselves short term goals. Any goals beyond the original scope of the project would then be the aforementioned stretch goals.

3) If you're coming into a project halfway through, how many updates have there been to the backers? Any Kickstarter that hasn't communicated what they are doing to their backers is either wasting a valuable resource (all feedback, positive or negative is immensely valuable) or they are hiding something.

4) Look at the rewards. If the rewards show no appreciable difference whatever you donate, even up to the $10,000 tier, either the Kickstarter has not made the effort to survey their users about what they want, or they are holding back money and giving you useless crap. This is a very difficult thing to get right and some completely honest Kickstarters are getting it horribly wrong. The rewards can make or break a kickstarter campaign. Nevertheless, look at the maximum you are willing to pay and see if the reward is something you would buy from Amazon or the high street (remember that?) for a similar amount. A good Kickstarter will always offer very good value for money as they are rewarding you for being the first to support them. 

5) Think with your head, not your heart. Some campaigns seem very intoxicating, especially if it is part of a world you love so much. This may have been why Yogscast were so successful; they had a lot of very young and impetuous fans who were keen to see a cool product they really wanted. Seriously, if there was a Kickstarter for Half Life 3 - can you imagine how much it would raise? Jesus. The best thing to do is wait. Give yourself some time to think about it, if the timing works for you, leave until just before payday when you may have a few pennies left in the bank, or go for the smallest, least risky tier. 

6) Look at how much they have already raised. If there is one hour to go, and the project has only got 1% of their goal - how likely is that the project will succeed? This is, of course, low risk, as your money won't be charged if the project is unsuccessful, but seriously, you've got better things to do. On the subject of being charged, remember that you will need to hold funds back to allow for any projects you've backed. This is for two reasons. Firstly, you don't want to find yourself suddenly overdrawn or lacking in funds after backing your oh, so compelling 'Deluxe Pringles Stacker presentation case' project 30 days ago and completely forgetting that money will be zinged out of your account as soon as it hits its target. Secondly, because of the first point, quite a lot of Kickstarters have issues with backers failing to pay. This is extremely frustrating, but also damaging the likelihood of a project being successful and affecting the status of other backers.


I hope this is useful. Kickstarter is still in its infancy and will continue to have problems like this. As the saying goes, 'Caveat Emptor'  - let the buyer beware. Keep an eye out for a future post where I will outline some of the projects I have already backed. 
Picture
Remember this guy?
    Picture

    Jon Evans

    Lots of guff by me about vidyagames, books, comic, TV, and films. All opinions are my own. 

    Archives

    May 2015
    October 2014
    July 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

About Us

Paul Fiander
If you're human please use the contacts on the left.
Picture