Anyone want to hazard a guess at why Galaxy Heist is failing quite this spectacularly on Kickstarter? It seems like it’s fallen flatter than anyone was expecting.
Link here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spacebeardev/galaxy-heist/description
I’m going to go with the general forum sentiment without even looking at the content.
“Because it’s not IBS!” 
I’m just starting to worry that the gaming community at large are getting sick to death of multiplayer-only combat-arena type games that have been saturating the hell out of the market for the last half-decade.
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I have been concerned about that too, for a while now and the only thing that IBS is offering that the others are not is seamless planetary landings/transitions, now is that enough to stand out and get funded, I don’t know.
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Everything about the game play looks clunky, both flying and running around. I’m not seeing what game engine they are using either.
Unreal engine. 4:43 in their video.
- Their production quality on their video is not good.
- They don’t sound particularly enthusiastic.
- Their target of £65k is too low for people to think the resulting game will be any good.
- The idea sounds good but the gameplay looks mundane.
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I think there are a great many small projects by few people and just due to the natural way interest in projects is divided on the internet, a lot of these end up failing.
Makes me think that if a bunch of these indie devs banded together in groups of more than 1-4 people we could see a lot more big projects rather than tons of schlock. Just look at the survival genre right now, theres thousands of these shitty games by 1-2 people, imagine if that manpower was amassed. For that to ever happen there would need to be some kind of revolution in indie game development networking and methodology, though.
open source game development might be funny
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Indies that you are talking about (1-4 people) just don’t have the money to expand to 10-20-30, it’s as simple as that and most of the ones working in such micro teams work underpaid or unpaid, and when you have unpaid workers, motivation is a huge problem…
Yes, there is huge potential in all those countless indies combined, however combining them takes money, something that is not that easy to come by.
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It just doesn’t work that way…
Well, big projects would certainly be the result. Huge. Overwhelmingly large. Feature creep to make the original Infinity seem like nothing.
Problem with feature creep like that is that there’d be nothing to see.
The most realistic situation i could see something like that ever becoming widespread is some kind of dedicated website that handled everything from credit giving to the repo to the initial discovery of potential partners. Im just spitballing though.
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One of the reasons people go off and start their own micro-indy studios is for creative control, and coming together in larger collaborations kind of negates that. Yes, you’re out from under the thumb of publishers, but now you’re inevitably going to be doing design by committee, which, well, is one of the big problems with working under the thumbs of publishers…
Personally, I’d be head over heels if some indy studios who were working on small projects came together and simply decided that all of their games were set in the same universe. Nothing more. Just, these are stories and events that are occurring in the same universe, maybe so far apart from one another that there will never, ever be any kind of direct overlap or interaction. Even that, though, would require some sort of collaborative world building, which I just don’t see as being realistic.
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I think the Old Contributions forums were a good example of this. It would be nice to see a certain future MMO embrace that kind of social modding and development… this is me brainstorming and tossing ideas about like the rest of you.
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There are quite a few ongoing open source games though, and some of them are fantastic.
Keep an eye out for planeshift, 0AD, and Nexuiz… Also, I think planeshift has been in development longer than infinity has been. Then again, they are not expecting anything to come of it other than ‘a fun project’.