"Kickstarter appeals are 'incredibly destructive'"

Molyneux's opinion on it..
http://www.develop-online.net/news/molyneux-kickstarter-appeals-are-incredibly-destructive/0200776


Happy Holidays

 

Between this ...

... and this ...

... I don't know what the feedback was specifically about, but if people were promised one thing and instead of spending time on that you spent time implementing micro-transactions to get more money out of them... I can understand why they might complain about it. I'm not saying they shouldn't have done it, but I am saying I can understand both sides of that coin.

I'm glad to see veterans saying stuff like this. It makes a lot of sense to me, and it surprises me that more people - especially veterans - don't see it this way. Even veteran developers often don't know what a game is going to be like until relatively far into development. It needs to be far enough that you can try it out with players, get feedback, and change things - and until you do that you don't know what you're going to have to change.

So you've got two alternatives. Either make sure your promises cover the fact that you're still heavily exploring the available design space or, alternatively, validate your design and your vision before pitching the project. I think that the mistake here might be that people are getting market validation mixed up with design validation - just because people will throw money at you for something doesn't mean the design behind it will work. You need to validate both your design and your market, separately.

The big question is, which one do you do first?

 

They are risky, what I'd do is make the game and have the kick starter pay for marketing so you have an ROI and a solid analysis of your game.

 

I wonder why was his game on Kickstater to begin with if funding was such a non-issue.

As if those backers developed that perception in a vacuum and not based on what he actually said in his Kickstarter pitch.

It seems to me that the issue with Mr. Molyneux is that he's unable to understand that, to quote one wise sage, words matter.

 

But that's exactly his point. He had to say something to pitch the game. Typically he'd be pitching it to a publisher, who'd understand (and hopefully support the fact) that the game would change and evolve. With Kickstarter you pitch directly to your audience, which colours their perceptions.

I kind of disagree with one of the paragraphs in that article about saying whatever you have to say to win the deal, though. If using Kickstarter to validate a market, then having to over-pitch to win the deal kind of implies that the original pitch wasn't good enough, ie: fails the validity test.

 

He made people think that he is doing another Populous game, instead he made a pay-2-win game for smartphones and facebook which is not a good game overall, now he thinks that this is fault of crowdfunding :]

 

What he said about using Kickstarter towards the end of the project makes a lot of sense to me. It's where you know where the project is heading and whether there's enough interest in it to give it more polishing.

Knowing the internet I'd imagine there's still the risk of people complaining: "The game is already finished - why do they need out money?" The internet has become a very negative place.

Though - on the other side. Especially Molyneux - as brilliant as he is - has been known to imagine games big in the beginning and delivering roughly half of it. This has already been the case with Black & White when the reviews in the gaming magazines widely complained about how the game could not deliver what was promised. (Yes - we read printed magazines, when I was young ).

As angrypenguin said: I can understand both sides of that coin.

 

I'm sure a publisher would have been as dissatisfied with the final product as the backers were if he promised them a Populous v2.0 and instead gave them an F2P mobile game. The game didn't evolve at all. It mutated.

Or, better put:

QFA.