Jake

Idle Thumbs 211: Spector's Oil

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Jake and Chris (I think) made reference to recent discussion of distorted expectations about what games cost and how long they take to make, and the idea that this could hurt Kickstarter campaigns because backers will think devs are lazy and greedy if they ask for the time and money it actually takes to make a game.

 

I think it's a mistake to assume that the handful of whiners who make these kinds of critical comments about Kickstarter campaigns are representative of the population of Kickstarter backers and potential backers.  Almost by definition, people who make comments aren't representative of the vast majority of people who don't.

 

I don't have any actual data, but I would guess the vast majority of backers decide to fund a game based on one criteria:  Do I want this game?   I'd guess there is a smaller group that also have a second criteria: Do I think this team can & will deliver?  And that's about it.  I'd be very surprised if there were more than a tiny handful of people who would refuse to fund a game they wanted by a team they thought could deliver just because they thought the team was asking for too much and being "too greedy."  On the contrary, I think most people are happy when a team they like making a product they want is successful and raises lots of money.

 

When a Kickstarter fails, I think it's overwhelmingly because there weren't enough people who wanted the game and heard about the Kickstarter.  Maybe in a minority of cases, it fails because a lot of people didn't believe the team could deliver what they were promising.   So, making a game people want, getting the word out, and, to a lesser extent, convincing people you can deliver.  Making sure you don't look greedy by asking for the amount of money you really need?  I don't think that's an important consideration at all, no matter what the trolls are whining about.

The kinds of people who comment on things like this make up a much higher percentage of the Kickstarter-funding audience, especially the people who will fund the Kickstarters that aren't the biggest ones around, than they do of the gaming population as a whole. They are also more likely to be the kinds of people who will not just silently back the campaign, but also evangelize on its behalf.

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talk on games as distractors to pass time is interesting!

 

I watch a handful of japanese artists stream, and when they take breaks they play phone games. The games (almost uniformly) have the barest hint of strategy/interactivity, but share a common theme of being - essentially - souped up progress quest with a thick coating of feedback. My thoughts on them were pretty cynical at first, but I eventually came to the realization that they were actually just playing the 2015 version of solitaire. Now I don't know what to think. The games do have an awful lot of behavioral hooks (daily login rewards, timed events, etc), but I get the impression that these people don't engage with more traditional video games at all, and rather then pushing more meaningful game experiences out of their lives phone games are supplanting time spent watching cat videos or something.

 

edit; but whats most bizarre is when you start thinking of more traditional games to contrast them with, and you realize how absurd it is. 99% of video games are already designed to be fun time wasters

Edited by voxn

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The kinds of people who comment on things like this make up a much higher percentage of the Kickstarter-funding audience, especially the people who will fund the Kickstarters that aren't the biggest ones around, than they do of the gaming population as a whole. They are also more likely to be the kinds of people who will not just silently back the campaign, but also evangelize on its behalf.

 

But a successful Kickstarter usually has thousands of backers.  Unless you have hundreds of different people all complaining about the game taking too long or the devs asking for too much money there's no reason to think a significant number of backers or potential backers care about those things.  And even if you did get so many people complaining that it was equivalent to 10 or 20 percent of your backers or potential backers, even then I'd be really hesitant to assume those people's complaints are representative of the 80-90% who aren't complaining.

 

People seem to assume there's a strong correlation between positive/negative chatter on the internet and the success of a game.  I'm sure they're not totally unrelated, but my guess is that if we could really look at the numbers, the correlation is not as strong as we think.  And because of things like the availability bias, our perception of the "consensus" of the chatter about a particular game might not even be an accurate view of what people are saying, never mind the views of the majority who aren't saying anything.

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Also, did someone say Heretic/Hexen (a few days ago)?!?

 

MY SERVANTS CAN SMELL YOUR BLOOD, HUMAN

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Heretic II was weird. Free-roaming third-person action stuff hadn't really been codified at that point, so it was one of those deals that handled like a first-person game, but with the camera awkwardly pulled back.* Rune (made by the same core team of people I think) had the same thing going on. Of course, both were made with FPS engines (Quake 2 and Unreal, respectively).

 

I was more of a Hexen II guy. Fun multiplayer!

 

 

*see also: MDK, Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.², Alice, Oni (which I remember having so many control options that it seemed like they hadn't come up with an optimal system) and many others. They were interesting times. At least all of these were pretty manageable, unlike clumsier experiments like Fade to Black. There are so many cool ideas in that one, but it just isn't playable.

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Haha, I don't think what that song is about necessarily applies to the Witcher.

 

t's more that it popped into my head during the Witcher's on First routine because of a few of the lyrics:

 

But I'm wishy washy

Or wishy wishy

I just wish someone would watch me when I get too witchy now

...

We were hot girls

But we had a query

If which marries witch which witch am I

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But a successful Kickstarter usually has thousands of backers.  Unless you have hundreds of different people all complaining about the game taking too long or the devs asking for too much money there's no reason to think a significant number of backers or potential backers care about those things.  And even if you did get so many people complaining that it was equivalent to 10 or 20 percent of your backers or potential backers, even then I'd be really hesitant to assume those people's complaints are representative of the 80-90% who aren't complaining.

 

People seem to assume there's a strong correlation between positive/negative chatter on the internet and the success of a game.  I'm sure they're not totally unrelated, but my guess is that if we could really look at the numbers, the correlation is not as strong as we think.  And because of things like the availability bias, our perception of the "consensus" of the chatter about a particular game might not even be an accurate view of what people are saying, never mind the views of the majority who aren't saying anything.

 

the problem is even if the whiners are a minority, if they are the most vocal part of a fanbase the developers are going to have a problem on their hands because that can spill out onto social media, and eventually the press and then it becomes part of the narrative about a game even if it is inaccurate.

 

Like, I understand your point that this sort of issue could be mitigated, but if you're a developer why would you do that as opposed to simply avoid taking that risk? From a developer's point of view I don't see any reason to prioritize openness over basic risk management.

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pxK349h.jpg

 

Can't make out the text at the bottom, but it looks appropriately sexist.

 

That's it! That's the one. I'm clearly still angry, 17 years later.

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the problem is even if the whiners are a minority, if they are the most vocal part of a fanbase the developers are going to have a problem on their hands because that can spill out onto social media, and eventually the press and then it becomes part of the narrative about a game even if it is inaccurate.

 

I'm actually questioning the assumption that "the narrative about a game" in the game media has as much of an impact on sales as everyone assumes.  There are some cases where word-of-mouth seems to have made a big difference in the success of a game, but I'm not sure that's typical, particularly if we're talking about these kinds of really inside-baseball feuds about how much money a developer asked for on Kickstarter. 

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I'm actually questioning the assumption that "the narrative about a game" in the game media has as much of an impact on sales as everyone assumes.  There are some cases where word-of-mouth seems to have made a big difference in the success of a game, but I'm not sure that's typical, particularly if we're talking about these kinds of really inside-baseball feuds about how much money a developer asked for on Kickstarter.

I think you're taking this in a different place than intended. If, through repeated exposure to Kickstarters, people get a certain uninformed idea about what it costs to make a game and about what a reasonable offering for a given pledge is, they will (and, I think, do) start assuming those figures are representative of something. Why wouldn't they? There is a huge population of people who back numerous games on Kickstarter. There are games that break through that and reach a huge new audience, but those are rarer than they used to be. But there are a lot of people who are serial Kickstarter backers, who start to develop a kneejerk idea of game budgets and appropriate funding targets that they form based on simple repetition. This is self-reinforcing. It doesn't require those people to be huge trolls. I'm not really talking about word of mouth driving game sales in general.

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If this is fair in this point in the conversation -- I've been a part of many kickstarters, few of them for games, and every kickstarter has had an early response to people who have been really upset about them paying out something. Even when I just kickstarted a book that was about an island off Hong Kong, it was there.

I think with Kickstarter, there's some hypercapitalist subset of backers that expect an immediate payout. You can look at the history of John Campbell of Pictures of Sad Children for a worst case scenario thing, but even with assuming most of them getting better respondents, I think kickstarter backers tend to have a VERY abusive channel.

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I think you're taking this in a different place than intended. If, through repeated exposure to Kickstarters, people get a certain uninformed idea about what it costs to make a game and about what a reasonable offering for a given pledge is, they will (and, I think, do) start assuming those figures are representative of something. Why wouldn't they? There is a huge population of people who back numerous games on Kickstarter. There are games that break through that and reach a huge new audience, but those are rarer than they used to be. But there are a lot of people who are serial Kickstarter backers, who start to develop a kneejerk idea of game budgets and appropriate funding targets that they form based on simple repetition. This is self-reinforcing. It doesn't require those people to be huge trolls. I'm not really talking about word of mouth driving game sales in general.

 

I'm having trouble finding Kickstarter statistics by year.  From their website, between 2009-2012 (what they called "The Year of the Game") games had raised a total of about $54M with seven games raising over $1M.  As of today, games have raised a total of $310M with 42 raising over $1M.

Now maybe you're right and most of this growth was earlier (say 2013-2014) and game Kickstarters have already peaked, but I can't find any evidence of that.  On the contrary, there are currently two live game Kickstarters that have raised over $1M and total dollars raised by live Kickstarter campaigns is about $10.5M (based on previous trends, about 10% of that will be toward unsuccessful campaigns, so call it $9M raised in just the past month or so).  

Kickstarter doesn't break out backer statistics by genre, but they say that 30% of backers are repeat backers and 60% of money raised comes from repeat backers.  So you're right that repeat backers are a significant part of Kickstarter funding.

I sampled 20 current game Kickstarters and found that the ratio of # of comments to # of backers was pretty consistently about 15%.  So even if we make the ridiculous assumption that people only ever make one comment, that's 85% of your backers who aren't leaving comments.  More realisticaly, commenters are probably less than 10% of backers.  

With the repeat backer statistics in mind, we might assume that commenters give more money than average.  Repeat backers are twice as important as their numbers (30% give 60%), so if commenters are maybe three times(?) as imporant as non-commenters, they might represent 30% of your total funding.

The real question is whether the concerns raised by commenters are shared by non-commenters. To me, the presumption would be no, unless there is evidence otherwise.  Even commenters aren't uniformly concerned about the minutia of game budgets, so I think it's a real stretch to think that these kinds of discussions play a significant role in whether a game gets funded.  

I maintain that it seems much more reasonable to assume that the majority of Kickstarter funding comes from people who only care about whether a game looks interesting enough that they want to drop $10-20 to pre-order it, that a significant minority might pay attention to concerns about whether they believe developers can actually deliver what they promise, and that the people who scruitinize game budgets and complain about devs being "too greedy" are an insignificant minority who can be safely ignored.

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A lot of today's purchases are by driven by prices that obscure the true cost of the product. That's been true for decades, but it seems to be getting worse with the rise of the app economy. I can see how low-balling game budgets on Kickstarter might be a response to that reality and also something that's contributing to it. It's hard to get people to accept and pay for the true cost of creative products. That's why the Internet scoffs at paying $20 for a game or why the idea of paying for any written content you read on the Internet is so objectionable to a lot of people because too often "it's on the Internet" = "it should be free." I don't know what the Kickstarter solution is except maybe for games studios to either be incredibly transparent with their budgets or not share their budgets at all. It seems strange private companies would be obligated to share their financials in order to assuage a group of people who are mad that creative products cost money, but it's equally strange that someone would see $500,000 and except that as a regional budget for a game that staffs more than 2 or 3 people.

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But the only place that really shakes out is in the Kickstarter reward tiers.  To most backers, a $2 million Kickstarter that promises you a cool game if you pledge $20 is no different from a $20,000 Kickstarter that promises you a cool game if you pledge $20.  The iPhone App store economics only kick in if the Kickstarter offering a copy of the game if you pledge $20 has to compete with Kickstarters offering equivalent games to backers pledging $1.

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i guess I think differently than a lot of people out there, because when I see a Kickstarter with a small budget, I think "they're not possibly going to be able to deliver with only that much cash, I'm not risking it."

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Regarding film announcements vs. game announcements: I think a lot of that is actually down to how films are usually financed and produced vs the completely different model that the game industry typically uses.

 

Everything about film is done on a per-project basis. A script might be going around Hollywood for years, gets touched by various different writers, and has different directors attached at one point or another. It's not always one financier (e.g. a "publisher") but multiple financiers that have to get behind it. When it's finally put into production, the whole team is assembled from scratch based on who's available. 

 

In that kind of ecosystem it makes sense to be totally open about what's in various stages of (pre)production. I suppose Hollywood could operate under some kind of hugely elaborate NDA system, but practically speaking people just need to be able to read Variety and find out what's cooking in different places. That's how these ad hoc collaborations can form more easily, it facilitates financing and dealmaking, casting calls can be made, etc. etc.

 

In the game industry the team is usually already assembled. There's no pressing need to make details of a planned project public, as the team that's going to make it is already there, and no one outside the publisher or developer really has any need to know about it yet. Better keep a lid on it and use the announcement much later purely for marketing purposes.

 

At least, this is what I'm guessing these different approaches to project announcements come from.  

 

As a side note, it's true that with films you might know of a project's existence waaaaaay in advance of it actually releasing. The example was mentioned of the new Mad Max having been in various stages of development for like 10 years. But that's usually all you really know... maybe the title, maybe the main guy who is working on it, but rarely any assets or any significant details. The actual marketing ramp up for films actually seems to be *shorter* to me than in games. Often it's 1 teaser trailer for a film and then a whole lot of silence, followed by the actual trailer and a frenzied 3-6 month marketing push. For some movies I guess there's now the 'Comic Con reveal', but this feels like a relatively newer thing.

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