not sure Elite or Star Citizen can be counted as MMOs but if i remember they succeeded on Kickstarter and Elite is out and it seems like a good game so if Star Citizen succeeds that is good enough for me.(seems SC's real growth was outside of Kickstarter though not sure). hope Camelot unchained turns out to be good also.
it seems Kickstarter's peak was 2013 so as long as we don't see the results of games like Camelot Unchained i doubt we can call it "failure". Singleplayer-wise so far i am very happy with what we got. Divinity Original Sin, Shadowrun Dragonfall, The Banner Saga, Dreamfall Chapters, Wasteland 2 comes to mind.(obviously the amount of singleplayer games are gonna be more and they come out faster)
also i saw two Visual Novel kickstarter campaign as well and was happy that they got supported fast. hope for more.
my top MMOs: UO,DAOC,WoW,GW2
most of my posts are just my opinions they are not facts,it is the same for you too.
I think when kickstarter first got popular there was a lot of MMOS that got funded on there.. but of course they are still in development so people have started to think they got scammed or whatever..
People dont realise games and especially mmorpgs take a very long time to make and usually an indie company looking for funding are just at the start of development. I think this might be an issue as well because they have very little to show at this point and I think thats a factor in why recent ones are failing.. An indie company needs to be able to show a working prototype before people are willing to part with cash these days and i think thats fair enough.
Also of course not all game ideas put forward on Kickstarter are any good so thats also why some fail.
Kickstarter and other crowd funding has been the best thing to happen to PC gaming for a very long time.. The best games I have played this year have been funded via kickstarter or other crowd funding.. I am pretty sure this will be the same in 2015 as well.
Most MMO's fail. Sad but true fact. They may continue on for awhile, but never meet the return on investment that was initially projected. When massive but poorly run companies like EA can't get Star Wars right, what chance does a kickstarter financed game have?
Well, though I'm not a fan of SWTOR, by all accounts, it's doing well. Even having gone F2P, the point is... it's online, people are playing, the game is still being developed and people are enjoying it. It wasn't the world-changing success that just about everyone was insisting it would be at launch (no surprise there). I still remember writers on this site, among others, each having a turn worshiping at the Altar of SWTOR with near religious fervor, writing gushing love letters to it, acting like hysterical fans at an Elvis or Beatles concert. It was kind of unsettling to watch it unfold, honestly; to see people acting like that over something that hadn't released yet.
Point is... There's no *way* the actual SWTOR could have ever met the level of hype built up around the mythical SWTOR those people had constructed in their heads. Bioware/EA didn't help matters by continuously feeding the flames and throwing out so much hyperbole of their own.
If there was ever a textbook case of too much hype actually hurting a game... SWTOR is my #1 candidate.
Still, the point is... it recovered and is doing well now. At the end of the day, that's all that matters - the game has an active playerbase, spending enough money to allow development and support to continue.
SWTOR is a successful game. Not WoW-like successful. But successful.
What I've seen in many Kickstarter failures is really just a matter of the campaign being poorly run. I'll use Project Gorgon as one example. Awesome concept, great project being developed by a couple industry vets with a very clear vision of what a MMO can be and, it seems, the skills and dedication to pull it off - or at least git it out the door.
PG's KS campaigns - both of them - were awful. Just awful. They barely even showed up. I think their second campaign had like 7 updates over the course of its month, and the lead dev was calling it a failure a week before the campaign ended. I mean, way to shoot yourself in the foot. If there was a textbook example of what not to do during a KS campaign (or any kind of project, really)... that is certainly it.
It looks like PG is getting more recognition now, but that's only because some of its stronger fans are doing the legwork and spreading the hype; some are really going overboard with it.
"If you build it, they will come" might have worked for Kevin Costner. It doesn't work in the real world. In the real world, you gotta make sure "they" know about it in the first place... often and consistently. Many KSs fail because they don't do this.
Or, they show up with too little to show. There are industry veterans whose names are on major projects who fail to do this.
I remember a project called 'Shaker' being started by Tom Hall and Brenda Brathwaite (now Brenda Romero - and shame on you if you don't know who they are ). The concept looked amazing, and I have no doubt they could have pulled it off. An old-school RPG that hit all the right buttons, and at the right time. Other old-school RPGs were being funded as well, yet their project failed. Why? They didn't run a good enough campaign. They weren't prepared enough, didn't have enough to show, and weren't "there" enough. And so it failed. Though, I believe Brenda is working on making Shaker into a table-top game, so that's cool. I'll definitely check it out.
Same with Pantheon. Despite having the ever-controversial McQuaid at the helm, the game had enough people excited and could have raised a lot more money than it did, if they'd had a better showing. They were very present in the media, with interviews and articles popping up seemingly everywhere. I think in Pantheon's case, they just didn't have enough to show or talk about. The ideas were kind of coming together as the campaign progressed, and I think that's what ultimately hamstrung their chances. They certainly had a much better showing than Project Gorgon... yet they still failed.
On the other hand, you have Camelot Unchained... a MMO focused entirely on RvR PvP. It did awesome and met its funding. Why? Because Mark Jacobs and co did a great job of running their KS campaign. Mark Jacobs was consistent and frequent in his updates - and always passionate and clear on the goals and concepts they were developing. They had plenty to show, plenty to talk about, and they were very active during the campaign.
I think by now, it should be a given that if you're going to run a KS campaign and have any hope of being funded, you need to study the successful ones and emulate what they did. If I were to launch a KS campaign, that is precisely what I'd do. I'd be gathering info and getting everything in order, with daily updates outlined, etc... long before the KS even started.
A KS for a MMO can be successful.. if it's done well, and if the developers are prepared for the long-haul when they launch it.
Why do they fail? Because the genre is going backwards. Every year we get the same repetitive content over and over again. Games like Minecraft/DayZ/Rust actually do what MMORPGs promise(d). They offer freedom.
They fail because MMORPGers, generally, are a cynical self loathing bunch who are full of emotional baggage and fashionable received wisdom that dictates how they see the genre.
Much easier to whinge on a forum that something isn't being made 100% specifically to their individual taste then to actively support something close in an effort to show that there is actually a market for the type of game they want to see.
It's easier to play WoW, bitch that everything is like WoW, while acting outraged that the next game is like WoW. It requires no risk or investment while they wait for someone else to come along and save them. And they get to bitch. A lot.
Why do they fail? Because the genre is going backwards. Every year we get the same repetitive content over and over again. Games like Minecraft/DayZ/Rust actually do what MMORPGs promise(d). They offer freedom.
Rust? Get serious, rust is not a game, its a bunch of wireframes thrown together. How can you seriously put rust and minecraft in the same box? If you leave out rust your statement acctually makes sense and will be in the spirit of this discussion. Imho.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
Indie developers, especially MMO developers, turn to Kickstarter because venture capital has pegged game development as a bad investment for the precise reason given in the article. Very few are successful. Funding a game is akin to buying a lottery ticket. If you were an investor would you have picked Goat Simulator as the game to back out of the hundreds to choose from?
When Curt Schilling went to fund his game development company with the plan of developing an MMO he could not find even a single backer in Boston, where there are more than 200 venture capital firms and where he had near god status because of his pivotal role in ending the Curse of the Babe. Even when he put up essentially the entire fortune he had accumulated playing baseball, no one would back him. So he had to make a deal with the devil and take a development loan from the State of Rhode Island and move his company there. The consequent failure of his company and his personal bankruptcy as a result merely added to the reluctance of traditional financing to invest in games.
Personally i think CURRENTLY Kickstarter MMO's fail because quite a few people have invested in MMO projects and are now waiting (2-4 years, starting in 2012ish) for these projects to launch. Most of these people are not willing to fund another project before those they supported before have launched. Lets call it Kickstarter fatigue has others had said. So any independenant dev starting his MMO project NOW may have a terminal case of bad timing.
Some people have spoken about Star Citizen being an anomaly. I concur. Keep in mind that out of roughly 69 M$ raised only the first few million (something between 2 and 4 million) came from Kickstarter (rest from CIG internal crowdfunding before and after Kickstarter announcement). The question was asked - how long will development take for SC. Take a look here: http://starcitizen.wikia.com/wiki/Anticipated_Release_Schedule for an estimate. Another question was asked - will they keep raising money until launch. Answer according to current information: yes. What will they do with the money ? Primarily develop the Persistent Universe and run the servers. It is a game without monthly subscription, so the cash for keeping the gaming running post launch has to be generated now (all money collected until launch will not be used as profit but for game development and keeping the servers running for a few years). All this information is available for everyone on the CIG homepage.
If this kind of Star Citizen style crowdfunding works out and the game is a success, i expect more projects of this kind in the future. And not only "indie" size but also big AAA projects.
it takes an established game company years to produce a good quality mmo at launch. How long do you think it would take an indie developer that doesnt even have the money to produce the game to make the same quality game. I think people perception of how much time a game takes to develop espically mmo's is skewed.
it takes an established game company years to produce a good quality mmo at launch. How long do you think it would take an indie developer that doesnt even have the money to produce the game to make the same quality game. I think people perception of how much time a game takes to develop espically mmo's is skewed.
Most established games companies can't produce a good quality mmo at launch either
It wasn’t long ago that the fired coders’ catch phrase was, “I’ll make a better game than this POS , and you will all be working for me.” A great game can’t be made in three months. And that’s the longest a coder can go before they must start to beg for work again.
Whats the greatest hurdle faced by independents today? Fear of being pirated, hacked, and DDOS attacked. All rolled up in the fear of making no money. Ask a coder, “what percentage of the gaming public wants to steal your game?” Most would answer 80%, some have said 100%. I think its only 60%, but only 5% will enjoy it and pay for it.
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Comments
not sure Elite or Star Citizen can be counted as MMOs but if i remember they succeeded on Kickstarter and Elite is out and it seems like a good game so if Star Citizen succeeds that is good enough for me.(seems SC's real growth was outside of Kickstarter though not sure). hope Camelot unchained turns out to be good also.
it seems Kickstarter's peak was 2013 so as long as we don't see the results of games like Camelot Unchained i doubt we can call it "failure". Singleplayer-wise so far i am very happy with what we got. Divinity Original Sin, Shadowrun Dragonfall, The Banner Saga, Dreamfall Chapters, Wasteland 2 comes to mind.(obviously the amount of singleplayer games are gonna be more and they come out faster)
also i saw two Visual Novel kickstarter campaign as well and was happy that they got supported fast. hope for more.
my top MMOs: UO,DAOC,WoW,GW2
most of my posts are just my opinions they are not facts,it is the same for you too.
I think when kickstarter first got popular there was a lot of MMOS that got funded on there.. but of course they are still in development so people have started to think they got scammed or whatever..
People dont realise games and especially mmorpgs take a very long time to make and usually an indie company looking for funding are just at the start of development. I think this might be an issue as well because they have very little to show at this point and I think thats a factor in why recent ones are failing.. An indie company needs to be able to show a working prototype before people are willing to part with cash these days and i think thats fair enough.
Also of course not all game ideas put forward on Kickstarter are any good so thats also why some fail.
Kickstarter and other crowd funding has been the best thing to happen to PC gaming for a very long time.. The best games I have played this year have been funded via kickstarter or other crowd funding.. I am pretty sure this will be the same in 2015 as well.
Well, though I'm not a fan of SWTOR, by all accounts, it's doing well. Even having gone F2P, the point is... it's online, people are playing, the game is still being developed and people are enjoying it. It wasn't the world-changing success that just about everyone was insisting it would be at launch (no surprise there). I still remember writers on this site, among others, each having a turn worshiping at the Altar of SWTOR with near religious fervor, writing gushing love letters to it, acting like hysterical fans at an Elvis or Beatles concert. It was kind of unsettling to watch it unfold, honestly; to see people acting like that over something that hadn't released yet.
Point is... There's no *way* the actual SWTOR could have ever met the level of hype built up around the mythical SWTOR those people had constructed in their heads. Bioware/EA didn't help matters by continuously feeding the flames and throwing out so much hyperbole of their own.
If there was ever a textbook case of too much hype actually hurting a game... SWTOR is my #1 candidate.
Still, the point is... it recovered and is doing well now. At the end of the day, that's all that matters - the game has an active playerbase, spending enough money to allow development and support to continue.
SWTOR is a successful game. Not WoW-like successful. But successful.
What I've seen in many Kickstarter failures is really just a matter of the campaign being poorly run. I'll use Project Gorgon as one example. Awesome concept, great project being developed by a couple industry vets with a very clear vision of what a MMO can be and, it seems, the skills and dedication to pull it off - or at least git it out the door.
PG's KS campaigns - both of them - were awful. Just awful. They barely even showed up. I think their second campaign had like 7 updates over the course of its month, and the lead dev was calling it a failure a week before the campaign ended. I mean, way to shoot yourself in the foot. If there was a textbook example of what not to do during a KS campaign (or any kind of project, really)... that is certainly it.
It looks like PG is getting more recognition now, but that's only because some of its stronger fans are doing the legwork and spreading the hype; some are really going overboard with it.
"If you build it, they will come" might have worked for Kevin Costner. It doesn't work in the real world. In the real world, you gotta make sure "they" know about it in the first place... often and consistently. Many KSs fail because they don't do this.
Or, they show up with too little to show. There are industry veterans whose names are on major projects who fail to do this.
I remember a project called 'Shaker' being started by Tom Hall and Brenda Brathwaite (now Brenda Romero - and shame on you if you don't know who they are
). The concept looked amazing, and I have no doubt they could have pulled it off. An old-school RPG that hit all the right buttons, and at the right time. Other old-school RPGs were being funded as well, yet their project failed. Why? They didn't run a good enough campaign. They weren't prepared enough, didn't have enough to show, and weren't "there" enough. And so it failed. Though, I believe Brenda is working on making Shaker into a table-top game, so that's cool. I'll definitely check it out.
Same with Pantheon. Despite having the ever-controversial McQuaid at the helm, the game had enough people excited and could have raised a lot more money than it did, if they'd had a better showing. They were very present in the media, with interviews and articles popping up seemingly everywhere. I think in Pantheon's case, they just didn't have enough to show or talk about. The ideas were kind of coming together as the campaign progressed, and I think that's what ultimately hamstrung their chances. They certainly had a much better showing than Project Gorgon... yet they still failed.
On the other hand, you have Camelot Unchained... a MMO focused entirely on RvR PvP. It did awesome and met its funding. Why? Because Mark Jacobs and co did a great job of running their KS campaign. Mark Jacobs was consistent and frequent in his updates - and always passionate and clear on the goals and concepts they were developing. They had plenty to show, plenty to talk about, and they were very active during the campaign.
I think by now, it should be a given that if you're going to run a KS campaign and have any hope of being funded, you need to study the successful ones and emulate what they did. If I were to launch a KS campaign, that is precisely what I'd do. I'd be gathering info and getting everything in order, with daily updates outlined, etc... long before the KS even started.
A KS for a MMO can be successful.. if it's done well, and if the developers are prepared for the long-haul when they launch it.
Why do they fail? Because the genre is going backwards. Every year we get the same repetitive content over and over again. Games like Minecraft/DayZ/Rust actually do what MMORPGs promise(d). They offer freedom.
They fail because MMORPGers, generally, are a cynical self loathing bunch who are full of emotional baggage and fashionable received wisdom that dictates how they see the genre.
Much easier to whinge on a forum that something isn't being made 100% specifically to their individual taste then to actively support something close in an effort to show that there is actually a market for the type of game they want to see.
It's easier to play WoW, bitch that everything is like WoW, while acting outraged that the next game is like WoW. It requires no risk or investment while they wait for someone else to come along and save them. And they get to bitch. A lot.
Rust? Get serious, rust is not a game, its a bunch of wireframes thrown together. How can you seriously put rust and minecraft in the same box? If you leave out rust your statement acctually makes sense and will be in the spirit of this discussion. Imho.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
I self identify as a monkey.
Indie developers, especially MMO developers, turn to Kickstarter because venture capital has pegged game development as a bad investment for the precise reason given in the article. Very few are successful. Funding a game is akin to buying a lottery ticket. If you were an investor would you have picked Goat Simulator as the game to back out of the hundreds to choose from?
When Curt Schilling went to fund his game development company with the plan of developing an MMO he could not find even a single backer in Boston, where there are more than 200 venture capital firms and where he had near god status because of his pivotal role in ending the Curse of the Babe. Even when he put up essentially the entire fortune he had accumulated playing baseball, no one would back him. So he had to make a deal with the devil and take a development loan from the State of Rhode Island and move his company there. The consequent failure of his company and his personal bankruptcy as a result merely added to the reluctance of traditional financing to invest in games.
Personally i think CURRENTLY Kickstarter MMO's fail because quite a few people have invested in MMO projects and are now waiting (2-4 years, starting in 2012ish) for these projects to launch. Most of these people are not willing to fund another project before those they supported before have launched. Lets call it Kickstarter fatigue has others had said. So any independenant dev starting his MMO project NOW may have a terminal case of bad timing.
Some people have spoken about Star Citizen being an anomaly. I concur. Keep in mind that out of roughly 69 M$ raised only the first few million (something between 2 and 4 million) came from Kickstarter (rest from CIG internal crowdfunding before and after Kickstarter announcement). The question was asked - how long will development take for SC. Take a look here: http://starcitizen.wikia.com/wiki/Anticipated_Release_Schedule for an estimate. Another question was asked - will they keep raising money until launch. Answer according to current information: yes. What will they do with the money ? Primarily develop the Persistent Universe and run the servers. It is a game without monthly subscription, so the cash for keeping the gaming running post launch has to be generated now (all money collected until launch will not be used as profit but for game development and keeping the servers running for a few years). All this information is available for everyone on the CIG homepage.
If this kind of Star Citizen style crowdfunding works out and the game is a success, i expect more projects of this kind in the future. And not only "indie" size but also big AAA projects.
Have fun
it takes an established game company years to produce a good quality mmo at launch. How long do you think it would take an indie developer that doesnt even have the money to produce the game to make the same quality game. I think people perception of how much time a game takes to develop espically mmo's is skewed.
Most established games companies can't produce a good quality mmo at launch either
Do Kickstarter MMO projects really fail more than other genres? Most games fail to fund, and it would make sense that MMO's would fail too.
why ?
We are learn what is next after successful crow founding .It is cash shop / cash grab without end .
It wasn’t long ago that the fired coders’ catch phrase was, “I’ll make a better game than this POS , and you will all be working for me.” A great game can’t be made in three months. And that’s the longest a coder can go before they must start to beg for work again.
Whats the greatest hurdle faced by independents today? Fear of being pirated, hacked, and DDOS attacked. All rolled up in the fear of making no money. Ask a coder, “what percentage of the gaming public wants to steal your game?” Most would answer 80%, some have said 100%. I think its only 60%, but only 5% will enjoy it and pay for it.Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.