Obi_Kwiet
It's Stuart, Martha Stuart
Posts: 7,943
It matters because FTL is a very simple indie games, and while well executed, it did not require a large budget.
It definitely does not. For the dev it might, but from mine, it means delivering on what is promised. What the kickstarters for major titles are asking for is still a fraction of what it takes to produce these games, and that's assuming there won't be any delays and everything goes perfectly. (hah!) Their funding goal is a conservitive esitmite of what they think they can get, not what they need to develop the game. The Kickstarter money is a good way for them to scare up more investors, and prove consumer enthusiasm, but from the customer's point of view, there is a whole lot more risk than these guys let on, especially since the only reason most of these games are on Kickstarter is that people in industry thought it was a bad investment. Even well funded devs get flack for having to compromise on features that they mentioned they were planning on in interviews, and game devs tend to avoid laying out all the cards for just that reason. Not only are these Kickstarter guys are promising the moon, they are obligated to deliver on every single stretch goal.
Kcikstarter is great for small indie projects that are well underway, and need a bit of funding to deliver some extra polish. But as far as these completely undeveloped AAA titles go, I think there are going to be a lot of pissed off, disappointed people here in a year or so. It's easy to pitch an amazing game, but it's clearly much harder to actually make it happen, even with traditional funding sources. Gamers are whiny entitled bunch at the best of times, when real money is at steak, **** will hit the fan. This "stick it to the man" attitude may be popular now, but as soon as a few high profile kickstarter developers start to slip on their promises, you can bet that kickstarter will go out of fashion pretty quick.
It's a shame too, because I really want a lot of these games that have been funded by kickstarter.