Video game crowdfund bubble bursts in 2016, video game Kickstarters down in revenue by 60% - Polidicks

[URL]http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/6/14311836/crowdfunding-video-games-down-in-2016-kickstarter-fig-gambitious[/URL] Don't whine about the Polygon link, they did real reporting, they earned a click. [QUOTE]Crowdfunding revenues for video game projects appear to have fallen in 2016. The decline is especially large on Kickstarter, where the revenue earned by successful projects was down nearly 60 percent. This year was the first time since its founding in 2009 that the crowdfunding giant took in less money — roughly 5.8 percent less overall — than the year before. That makes the precipitous decline of the video game category all the more unusual.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]The biggest finding was the marked decline in the revenue earned by successful video game projects on Kickstarter. In 2015, successful video game Kickstarters earned a total of $41.5 million. In 2016 however, successful campaigns earned at most* $17.6 million. That represents a roughly 60 percent decline in revenue for the category. That 60 percent decline can be applied on a per project basis as well. There were basically the same number of successful campaigns in 2016 (388) as in 2015 (374). So a successful campaign in 2016 would have averaged $45,360, versus an average of $110,962 in 2015.[/QUOTE]

After several of the projects like Mighty No 9 and Yogventures failed in pretty much every way to fulfill what they set out with more than enough money to pull off, I don't really blame the average consumer, but it is still unfortunate. Ultimately people are now more interested in waiting for the final product to be shown before investing since it's easy to set up a solid team and not deliver, which isn't unreasonable I suppose.

No Man's Sky came out fairly late into 2016, were there any other huge flops/scams earlier in the year? Combined with No Man's Sky they likely obliterated motivation for crowdfunding.

It's about time. A cull of the shitastic projects has been a long time coming.

maybe it has something to do with how many projects just either took the money and ran, or gave off the appearance of doing so.

Hopefully the success stories of Pillars of Eternity and Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, amongst others, will at least keep the crowdfunding door open to those with the better track record. Then again, Mighty No.9...

Probably had something to do with the overflow of products that were a lesser quality ala Steam Greenlight, where everyone thought they could get away with sub-par promises, except it's come back to bite them. That being said, there's definitely a few kickstarted things I'm still looking forward to, the most notable one probably being Divinity: Original Sin 2, which so far doesn't look like it will be disappointing.

People have finally fucking learned that Kickstarting a game is not the same as preordering a game that is already in beta (as is typical with preorder reveals for big-publisher titles). The market has finally absorbed the lesson, the hard way, that crowdfunding a video game doesn't mean that it will be good, be what was promised, or be finished in a reasonably short time. A few high-profile failures to deliver, like Mighty No. 9 and Double Fine's shenanigans, haven't helped with consumer confidence.

Good, it's time to stop glamorizing crowdfunding as a legitimate form of income.

[QUOTE=GhillieBacca;51787419]Good, it's time to stop glamorizing crowdfunding as a legitimate form of income.[/QUOTE] But it is?

even aside from the obvious bust projects that have gained a lot of (deserved) negative attention there continues to be the megaproject star citizen, that rakes in money hand over fist each month with no release window, and generally still being in an alpha state with huge parts of the promised features missing. I think that despite all the good star citizen has done to legitimize crowdfunding it has been a double edged sword. The hugely protracted development timeline and explosive growth of stretch goals for the project set them up for a release that is missing features, has fuzzy scope, and continues to draw a lot of negative press due to the huge sums of money involved. I'm quite interested to see the reception to star citizen and squadron 42 as finished products assuming they ever get released, and what their legacy will end up being.

[QUOTE=GhillieBacca;51787419]Good, it's time to stop glamorizing crowdfunding as a legitimate form of income.[/QUOTE] I dunno about you, but this Shantae game sitting on my desktop is no illusion.

The thing about crowdfunding is that people get burned once on something they care about and then go full cynic. I reckon we've gotten far more successes than failures but people look at high-profile disasters more than successes and don't understand how development works and that sometimes things just go south and you aren't pre-ordering a product in the first place. A kickstarted project can go smoothly but if a single stretch goal falls through whether due to it being wishful thinking or having unexpected issues that make it impossible to be fulfilled, people will get outraged and ignore everything but that one issue and suddenly the developers are villains because [I]you fucking con artists taking my money and not giving me exactly what you promised to the letter how dare you you [B]lied to me [/B][/I]and so on.

[QUOTE=RenegadeCop;51787520]It pays to be cynical when it comes to video game development by the AAA studios. However, I think that cynicism has just carried on to small time indie projects on Kickstarter. Whether that is good or bad, I don't know.[/QUOTE] I think you should invest with reasonable skepticism and caution, and know that things might not go according to plan. You need to think to yourself "am i okay with the possibility of this turning out to be shit" and not invest if you don't think you can handle that outcome. Reasonable expectations are key, and people put too much of their hopes and dreams into projects sometimes.

On the other hand, Sunless Skies made their goal in four hours.

I think this has less to do with the market shrinking, or even with Kickstarter competitors, but more to do with early-access and subscriber-driven business models displacing the single startup crowdfund model. Steam Greenlight and Patreon have far more to do with this than Mighty No 9 or other prominent crowdfunding failures.

Good lord was yogventures a entertaining trainwreck though.

[QUOTE=DiscoInferno;51787411]Hopefully the success stories of Pillars of Eternity and Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, amongst others, will at least keep the crowdfunding door open to those with the better track record. Then again, Mighty No.9...[/QUOTE] I have a feeling that what we are witnessing is just part of an ongoing cycle, like dawn and dusk, spring and fall. Success stories crop up, and crowdfunding rises. Then large-scale failures crop up, and support for the medium falls. Potential failures don't get the chance to rise up and disappoint. Eventually, new success stories emerge, and it rises again. It is probably something that the observant will be able to chart in coming years, seeing where the medium rises and falls.

[QUOTE=Mingebox;51787538]On the other hand, Sunless Skies made their goal in four hours.[/QUOTE] That's not surprising to me. Fail better managed to hook a genuinely surprising number of whales with Fallen London, and has proven themselves to be trustworthy regardless.

[QUOTE=Lambeth;51787593]Good lord was yogventures a entertaining trainwreck though.[/QUOTE] how no one involved ever piped up and said "making a minecraft clone about minecraft youtubers is an awful idea" during the years/months leading up to the kickstarters launch is an amazing feat in itself.

As someone working on something Kickstarted I have to be glad people use it, but there's definitely some stinkers floating on there. Yogventures being the obvious nightmare.

Kick starter failures are fucking painful to see MNO9 was actual torture

Star Citizen is doing alright still. Getting a lot of flak from a single, yet very vocal person, but it's the highest grossing crowdfunded game in development.

[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;51787382]No Man's Sky came out fairly late into 2016, were there any other huge flops/scams earlier in the year? Combined with No Man's Sky they likely obliterated motivation for crowdfunding.[/QUOTE] Mighty No. 9 was delayed and delayed until June 2016 (and the Vita and 3DS ports just outright cancelled), and when it did finally come out, well, we know what happened there. I'm going to preface this reply with a discouragement against putting any money into SC unless you already wanted to prior to reading this thread. I'm here to inform, not shill. Don't mistake having a nuanced and informed opinion with screechy sperg ranting. [QUOTE=nintenman1;51787491]even aside from the obvious bust projects that have gained a lot of (deserved) negative attention there continues to be the megaproject star citizen, that rakes in money hand over fist each month with no release window, and generally still being in an alpha state with huge parts of the promised features missing. I think that despite all the good star citizen has done to legitimize crowdfunding it has been a double edged sword. The hugely protected development timeline and explosive growth of stretch goals for the project set them up for a release that is missing features, and continues to draw a lot of negative press due to the huge sums of money involved.[/QUOTE] Recently, the press has actually been fairly positive except for during the lull periods where not much is visibly going on or, of course, when the devs fuck up on something like the total mess of a holiday livestream (it genuinely looked like it was being deliberately sabotaged by whoever was on the switching board, or they were drunk or had never used video switching equipment before that day). The reason the press has slowly lurched towards the positive side is because SC has been making major advances on its goals, even if there's a long enough road still ahead. The devs have been building out the foundations for their custom modifications on CryEngine (and now Lumberyard which is a fork of CryEngine), which is a huge up-front workload that's increasingly being cleared through. - Two years ago, you could walk around your ship in your hangar, and fly in round-based dogfighting/racing gamemodes with very limited map boundaries. Star Marine was promised and had been demoed, but then everything went off the rails with outsourcer Illfonic and SM was basically scrapped and restarted, a big oops. - One year ago, space was a lot bigger, with a 1mil x 1mil x 200k km box around a gas giant with multiple space stations to take off and land at, with a handful of fairly simple missions; you could also visit a planetside location through a loading screen. Most importantly, ships now had local physics grids, or rotating local frames of reference, so walking around a ship while in flight and keeping your own subjective "up" became possible. - Now, we have server-side persistence, the Star Marine fps gamemode with significant improvements to the fps/eva experience, a number of new larger ships with fully-detailed interiors, and a bunch of groundwork for the upcoming major patch that will add procedurally-generated (but artist-sculpted) planets and moons and that advance in tech means planetary locations will be accessed seamlessly from space instead of through a menu and loading screen. There is also a lot of work being done behind the scenes that the devs are not showing, primarily with Squadron 42, and this info is held back for spoiler reasons. There was an internal build that got leaked in early 2015, and among the many things that weren't meant to be seen by the public was an entire set of about a dozen alien ships belonging to the primary antagonist faction, ranging from small fighters to capital ships in the hundreds of meters long. This was a completely unexpected find by the community but put proof to the devs' claims that they really were working on more than just what they were showing us. This is all something that's less apparent to casual observers who only peek in when their favourite gaming blog/news site runs an article on SC's latest presentation, patch, or minor fuckup that spins into a huge controversy because of the project's development time and unprecedented crowdfunded budget. It must be said that I can't fault casual observers too much because the Star Citizen project outputs tons of information every week and it is barely catalogued and practically unapproachable to the newbie/outsider. The community has had to do things like create [URL="http://www.scqa.info/"]a searchable database of "10 Questions for Chris Roberts/appropriate dev" video transcripts[/URL] because the devs don't. The monthly reports they publish are a great source for seeing how the project is doing, but they're also like 15 pages long - which is a blessing and a curse because it's nearly unprecedented levels of what would ordinarily be confidential info, but it's also a huge info dump that only the committed backer is going to regularly slog through. [B]TL;DR huge ambitious projects like SC take time, but the devs' periodic fuckups haven't helped them[/B]

Oh yeah, wasn't there that Ant game that imploded? Something about the development team blowing the budget on hookers and not actually working.

If Star Citizen actually comes out I'll buy it but not before. Not gonna buy spaceship jpegs on the hope they get in the game.

Obduction got funded, released and it was good, therefore me reason to care about Kickstarters is no longer necessary.

On one hand, Its encouraging seeing people being more careful with their money when it comes to projects like MN9 where the content in the KS is extremely vague and you cant exactly tell what the final game will be like. On the other hand, I worry for actual legitimate projects that will end up not getting funded at all because of this. I was sorta nervous about the System Shock remake because after the initial bump funds were slow for awhile.

[QUOTE=Lambeth;51787867]If Star Citizen actually comes out I'll buy it but not before. Not gonna buy spaceship jpegs on the hope they get in the game.[/QUOTE] I agree with this attitude - there's no need to buy in now unless you want the alpha experience. But the funny thing is that the ships that are in the entry-level packages (the minimum you need to buy to get access) [I]are[/I] all in the game and fully flyable. You're only buying spaceship JPEGs if you buy considerably more expensive ships, and the only reason you should do that is if you want to support the project for more than the minimum.

[QUOTE=Lambeth;51787593]Good lord was yogventures a entertaining trainwreck though.[/QUOTE] Their announcement video is pretty funny in retrospect, wish they didn't disable comments. [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIod3ZUBpys[/media]