Wow, I bow, sir, to your dedication. Great post. It expressed exactly my frustrations and fears. And the solutions to fix them seem sound!
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What is… Infinity Battlescape - Multiplayer Space Sim - Prototype - Hands On
Having watched more of the livestreams, I’m convinced this is by far the best, despite having a graphical glitch near the beginning and a couple of crashes. Reasons:
- He makes it clear from the start, that he’s playing a pre-alpha tech demo, and much more is due to come after kickstarter. He reiterates this several times.
- He talks a lot about planned gameplay, ship types, installations, possible team tactics when the game is finished.
- He explains the current flight mechanics and ship systems.
- He’s very impressed by the state of the tech demo and says it’s much better than than most he’s seen at this stage.
- He’s very enthusiastic and seems to enjoy himself, without being gushy. Says he’s not affiliated with the devs and seems objective about it.
- He seems to to a much better job about getting the right message across than even ones with dev interviews.
Basically, he paints a very good picture of what the game should be like when finished and NOT how OMG amazing it is now.
I’d make this the go to video for showing what the game’s all about.
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7 He screws up the landing SPECTACULARLY a couple times proving it’s fully under the player’s control to go anywhere during the decent to anyone who might say or think otherwise. 
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@Hutchings I just wanted to mention that your post on Imgur is excellent and definitely helps paint the vision for the game.
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Thanks @NavyFish I’m increadibly happy with how well it’s done so far. It’s a valuable tool for communicating the project to people that don’t know us yet.
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The community is doing a pretty great job, but the Kickstarter page and other things coming from the devs seems very lacking.
You’re developers, I know. I have this problem too and have only been recently learning how to promote things.
I hope you spend some of that money hiring someone who does nothing but marketting.
It’s not really the problem persay of that @ihategigamo said, but just that you aren’t hyping and selling it much.
Someone from another studio was in IRC and we had this back and forth that I think sums it up:
[code]
Seamless flight to a planet != gameplay. There are plenty of videos showing this with Infinity right now, but videos to show gameplay are very lacking. People want to support a game not a tech demo.
I’d really like to see some more focus on the game side which will only help the KS campaign.
<innociv_> There is very little gameplay and that’s what htey need backing to complete
<innociv_> What E:D and Star Citizen did is lied and hyped stuff up. That’s how you sell something and get lots of money. Yep.
It does not have to be in engine to talk about how gameplay scenarios will occur. Give examples, draw pictures, talk about what a gameplay session will be like… ect…
you need to sell dreams, like TQFE, the reason we are all here
dreams and nostalgia sell very well
Exactly, sell a dream of what this game could be
<innociv_> They give examples on the kickstarter
innociv_: easier to ask foregiveness than permission
they didn’t position themselves like that, it’s more of a scale down position they have
<innociv_> like having capital ships attacking a planet
It shouldn’t be a dream that is unattainable, but a realistic vision of what to expect after a year or two of development if it were funded.
<innociv_> and the planet having artillery shooting that cap ships
<innociv_> so you need to go down and kill the artillery with bombers.
<innociv_> JB1, well I mean you’re kind of objectively wrong and that’s just a personal statement.
<innociv_> A reasonable, obtainable outline of what you want to make does not sell well.
yeah, you hint at something huge, just a capital firing on a planet for 2 sec in the video can have a huge impact
<innociv_> You’re one of the less than 5% of people that feel that way and support based on that. Maybe the other 95% think they feel that way but they use their wallet otherwise, so it’s a meaningless feeling
<innociv_> It needs more concept art and pictures in general
<innociv_> Stretch goals need to be pictures.
<innociv_> Reward tiers need pictures.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I am a member of a studio who ran the most successfully funded mmorpg kickstarter campaign with over 2.2 Million in funding.
<innociv_> And that kickstarter didn’t hype it up?..
hehe, JB, you work for FD?
concept art helps sell the dream.
CSE
NHL?
<innociv_> Camelot Unchained
<innociv_> Infinity needs to do more to promote to the MMORPG crowd as they have deep pockets.
I agree and selling their vision for gameplay and demonstrating they can support the numbers they say they do right now will greatly help in that regard.
you guys must have been biting your nails 2 days before the end of the KS
<innociv_> But yeah, the I:B kickstarter caught me by surprise and is very lacking. The cinematic trailer isn’t very good. Lacking concepts to give more of an idea of how gameplay will appeal. Yes, it just looks like a tech demo and concepts of ships. That’s exactly what I said, that they aren’t selling it hard enough.
oh very much so
I agree with you completely on that innociv_
<innociv_> Best part about the trailer is the flying through scaffolding and primarily the score/sound.
<innociv_> The other videos are good, though
From reading the forums and interacting with people here, I’m sold on it… but the general public doesn’t do that much research or will get thrown off by the first 3 minutes of that KS video which are rather boring to be quite frank.
<innociv_> I told them before it launched that pragmatism doesn’t sell well. People look at tech demo and the capability they have and they do not have the same foresight as [the developers] to see where it can go.
<innociv_> You have to hype it and sell it.
<innociv_> Yeah I’m sold on it because I’ve been following this for like 8 or 9 years and they’ve like… never not delivered. I mean they never set high expectations, but they’ve never lied or pissed anyone off.
<innociv_> I know they’re capable to make it with the funding. The two head people have industry experience even though for one of them it’s in industry and not commercial development.
<innociv_> But most people aren’t going to look into it that much to see it’s worth backing, and the KS does not sell it well at all.
<innociv_> I told Keith this, but they wanted to be pragmatic and humble about it.
- innociv_ shrug
<innociv_> I think though, that if they set their site up well and fix these things, they could get 600k-1.5mil by early 2016.
i’m just very glad they are asking fro $300k and not $500k that was the initial goal
*that was considered
their “industry experience” really isn’t worth anything unless they have a very well known name they can tie to it, like Chris Roberts. What they have to sell is the idea of the game and show off what tech they have to gain the trust of new backers. I’ve seen the tech, it’s great, I want to see a 50 person battle or more as they’ve said they can handle 100. And I want to see a lot more information on the gameplay vision.
you should make a thread on the forums and give some suggestions, maybe ping the devs in the post
don’t forget to mention that you are at CSE[/code]
You just aren’t selling it hard enough. Most of these successful kickstarters are prerendered CGI and concept art with nothing playable at all.
Where is the concepts where you’ve painted atmospheric reentry effects on the ships?
Where is the in-engine webm from far away where you can see the entire solar system and then zooming in to a fleet of 100 fighters and some capital ship that’s around a moon around the gas giant? Even if it’s not real gameplay that’s playable, it shows but you’re going for and that the engine does/will support.
You took up a ton of space just showing ship concepts that could probably be side-by-side when you should be more concepts of what the GAME and GAMEPLAY will be like.
The concepts for factories on the planet surface are largely sort of boring. Why not some stuff that shows how large capital ships could have crashed onto a planet after fighting in space? Or what ships fighting through weather effects might look like? Combine your in-engine with some photoshopping to make convincing concepts.
What about a concept how someone might be able to sneak up on much larger numbers because some weather type thing that makes their sensors and visibility low so they can get up on someone one at a time? Like one different team shipped snuck up behind the formation of some others?
Shit, you could do it on some weak heavily outgassing gas giant that has a moon swooping through its atmosphere, stirring it like soup, with massive storms zapping off the gas giant’s storms and onto the moon that’s partially passing through it. That’s something totally feasible and realistic, even if it would eventually fall into the gas giant due to the drag, these are things that are happening at some point in time somewhere in the trillions of possibilities.
The stretch goals should be an image, ideally that shows the progress bar. I believe Kickstarter has an API for that. If not, you can scrape the page, and have an image regularly generated with the updated amount.
There should be an image for the reward tiers that has a graphic showing an example of what each gets
You need to sell it, hype it up. It doesn’t have to be really real but it just has to be what you’re shooting for. Especially so in regards to gameplay because you just have a tech demo that doesn’t really give people an idea of what gameplay is like?
During the remaining ~25 days you need to do nothing but spend time making and doing things to promote the Kickstarter, pretty much.
ASAP, you really need to improve the page itself and talk more about scale and gameplay like JB1 said, I think. And put up more concepts or new in-engine updates that show the cool stuff you’re going for that’s missing.
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Yup. If I had to pick one thing to change, this would be it by far.
No other game offers what I:B does – the kind of epic space combat that others pretend to and got funded for in 7-8 digit figures. And yet the I:B sell is so tempered and restrained. The vision and confidence was so good that Inovae as a team has dedicated years to building this on time off from day jobs, and yet that sheer vision and assurance is so undersold in the KS, as if they don’t want to overpromise.
If there’s no chance of overpromising and feature creep, then there’s no reason to not market the shit out of what the game WILL have - hundreds of players in epic battles in a seamless star system, from surface to deep space and gas giant cloudscapes to asteroid belts.
Why sell yourselves short?
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If we had a budget pre-KS a lot of what you mention could have been possible.
We’re doing what we can to increase content, and there is more coming.
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Ehh, you had to have faith I guess because these things would have lead to a quicker start. Your community was pretty confident you’d at least hit 300k if you set it to that, though that original 500k is hard for non-established nostalgia-string tugging developers. You had to pretend you have the 300k the day it’s launched already and work on its promotion as if that were the case because that’s what leads to getting much more pledged.
And you’ll earn even more by setting up your own funding source to go up when KS ends. It’s almost certainly going to hit 300k as it is now, and could be much higher. Anyway, good luck. Hope you get the KS page much improved before the last week where you tend to get a larger push, to make that last push larger.
But yeah, it’s too late now to fix what already happens. But I was saying this in IRC before it launched, that it’s just not being sold hard enough and that it’s set to mostly appeal to people who have already been following it. Moving forward, it can be a lot better.
Thank you for the support, but keep in mind that we still have more events and content planned, and are taking as much of the critique into account as is physically possible. We may not be replying as often as some would like, but we`re trying to read everything we can.
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+1 on progress bar and reward infographics (maybe someone with too much free time on their hands wants to make one?) that we’ve come to expect from kickstarters.
Also upgrading the Who We Are to something like the INovae site’s Meet The Team and compressing the Hellion skinning screenshots into something that takes up less vertical space seems wise and easy.
EDIT: On second thought why not just take those Hellion screenshots and put them in a rewards infographic then you get 2 for the price of 1.
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I have tried to get the word out as best i can on the infinity kickstarter, its probably not much but every bit helps
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Yes it does, thanks!
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Fixing the Kickstarter?
Get the following people in a voice chatted - recorded - review battlescape session:
- Chris Roberts
- David Braben
- John Carmack
- Flavien Brebion
- Keith Newton
- All others who have access - just without voice
Currently Infinity is off the first page of Kicktraq 
I really became used to click this way to the campaign…
Still on the front page of Kicktraq for me. We dropped 3 places though.
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Phew… yea. when I posted the reply that we are off that page we just lost 8 places. Now we are back ^^
It probably just rolled over, hopefully we’ll climb back up as people start waking up =).
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Yeah you guys need to get the interviews going REALLY hard. I would of had most of them lined up beforehand starting on the first day of the Kickstarter.
Look at this google search result:
https://www.google.com/webhp?ssrp=1#q=infinity+battlescape&safe=active&tbm=nws
You notice anything here? There’s like no English speaking new sites listed up here. The most popular article I see around the net about your game is titled ‘what ever happened to Infinity?’ I would try and do non stop interviews for the next 3 weeks (like 20-30). Hell I would go full on sell out mode, spike that interviewer’s kool aid, cause you guys need this money which will be your lifeblood for the next year or two.
Sites I would suggest getting interviews during the next week:
gamefaqs.com
pcgamer.com
rockpapershotgun.com
escapistmagazine.com
metacritic.com
Hell this entire list: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/video-game-websites
Oh and I see a lot of gaming articles on main stream sites now like:
huffingtonpost.com
Hitting up all those sites will let ~100 million ppl know about your game! I really want to see that $1.5mil stretch goal get hit, good luck !!!
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