@Dr-Quick said in Funding:
@deusex2 said in Funding:
1)No immedient gain. Even if I'm getting the most expensive pledge there is, fact of a matter is devs can promise anything and everything in the future(stars and planets, included), but right ..
Hi ya, been following for around a year, just picked up my pledge pack and read this last comment (er now the last before the last) before me.
As a long time backer of many game products (and just about every other product) I felt the need to walk through these because it's 3am and I haven't kicked anything else in the teeth today, yet.
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This is both a common thing with crowd funding and any/all in progress products, if you were pledging for a condo in a new development you would be waiting for it to be built, again without any reward ahead of time (except maybe the use of the development facilities eyeballs the forums) this is no different.
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in early to mid development this is common, I imagine both alpha 2 or/and the beta rounds will include longer up time as they start to stress test in truth, but funny enough technology has advanced to the point where you can perform a virtual stress test, so alpha rounds of testing are more about player ui/ux experience and over all impressions to calibrate with. A mountain of data can cause these to be lost so I can see why you wouldn't run it for more than a week, then give yourself the next month and change to comb through the results.
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Small team (labor makes up the largest portion of red in the ledger) with attainable goals, and additional investors always comprise the background of a project, investors bring more than just money to the table if they have experience and contacts in marketing, publishing, or just business savvy. I was talking to a friend about the amazing legal sense the site has, the terms of service and use policy are some of the best I have ever seen laid out, especially for a smaller scope project, I would imagine that this is either some solid paid legal assistance, ordered thinking, suggestions from the background investor/s, or just a combination of the 3. All and all, you will also need to check out the news articles on Spacial OS, the Fractured team will be taking advantage (they have said) of the 100% discounted server hosting for the game used as an incentive for adopting Spatial OS, server fees are no joke, and so if those were the funding goals (pre-announcement from the Spatial team), then I'm sure they have quite a bit more wiggle room with their funds now.
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I'm just going to start with a shrug here, you are stating your personal feelings and not your analysis, ew. Additionally your number 4 conflicts with your number 3, are they asking for too little money while having attainable goals, how fishy.
When I see a list of features for expansion like this, and that's the key word, expansion, I assume that when they say "expanded character creation" they mean "options that we wouldn't have added to the game for character creation because it would have doubled/tripled our art costs for what we had budgeted for character creation". When I see "Fishing" and "Animal Taming" I think, oh good, they will have additional elements to the economy and the possibility for game play expansion through "finding things". UO (Ultima Online for you wee pups out there) had a fishing system that all at once both rewarded new players with a salable good, and veteran players with treasure maps, and sea monsters to fight, a chest full of booty is not as boring as you would imagine. Additionally everyone I've talked to has been excited about the animal taming, the animals can cast spells and help you in combat, they can be animals that you added the game with the higher limited pledge packs, who have you been talking to about this (maybe you should get out more)?
- There is less to show that would be salable (see your own comment 1 and 2), without their unique features and races implemented they are missing vital "this sets us apart from other isometrics" power, from a purely sadistic standpoint I enjoy your long post being about "why don't they put an emphasis in advertising to sell more of their things I am not more impressed by", this seems like an uncomfortable position for you.
All and all, I enjoy reading posts like these on backed projects, how about we flip the script and ask ourselves:
"Do we feel like these goals do not match the funding and team size?"
"Would we be more or less ornery if we saw the monies by the principle non crowd funding investors added to the funding goals?"
Would that make sense to most people visually without adding a milestone feature creep item as we are over 180k euro now, if this number is double or even 3-5 times that then what would the reaction be when the milestone is "this game gets made.", I think this falls into the category as underwhelming, so in my review it would be bad form to add it to the crowdfunded goals no matter the perceptible increase, this way they can say "Look we made this game with Only XXX,XXX thousand Euros crowdfunded." and stay impressive.
- This is a common issue, but with how many crowdfunded MMOs out there, one has to be more appealing for the customer, as well as offering something unique in the long run. Because what are the odds of person throwing money on a project that gives nothing right away, when there's another project that immedietely grants access to alpha server, even if it's basically a walking simulator server? At least it's something, you know.
2)Doesn't changes the fact that if person can't take advantage of reward he doesn't feels rewarded, and as such doesn't feels it's worth investing his money. And yes, I say "reward," because I'm fully aware all these tests and phases mostly serve as rewards for backers.
3)Do you see average person reading legal agreement and saying,"hey, this is a well made legal agreement, this makes me confident investing my money into this project?" As for the rest of your point-all of them are the exact small details average person isn't bothering with. And that's the reason why it's there.
If you ask me-the more resources for the dev team, the better for the development of the game, but average person can look at it and think he's being ripped off because devs are asking for a small amount of money that's impossiblr to make a game with, and because the game already has investors.
4)It, actually, does not contradicts it, in the slightest. You're right when you're saying that's just my feeling-all my points are, but then again-I find it hard to believe many people are excited over fishing, in a video game. Real life fishing isn't anything to be excited about and virtual one, definitely, excites nobody.
Which was why I've said that the stretch goals weren't cool enough to draw in more pledges. Obviously, coolness is a subjective matter, and I'm sure this game gathered all virtual fishing junkies of the world, but really-how many more would be there, had goals were a bit more flashier or cooler than that?
5)This isn't about me not being comphortable with anything-the devs already have my money. My point is that nobody talks about this game and, for now, there's nothing even to talk about.
This game is out of sight and out of kind, which means no pledges.
First of all, thank you for your support! Let me address some of your issues:
We've run the first Alpha test 8 months after the end of our Kickstarter campaign. The build lacked a lot of features, but it was already a game, featuring a 60km2 continent, combat, PvE, crafting, land claiming, building. It was not an arena to test combat or a miniature garden to test gathering/crafting or stuff like that. Servers were stable and there were no game-breaking bugs, too. We might have 1/10 of the funding of some of our competitors, and therefore a much smaller team, but we're delivering!