Obviously I don’t have knowledge of everything you’ve considered before making this decision, but as an outsider looking in my very first thought on reading your post is “oh, they’re still thinking of it as an MMO”. Reasons 2 and 3 unquestionably applies to those.
Why wouldn’t you want as many people to be beta and alpha testers for a game which you, as I’ve understood it, wont have to supply the servers for, though? The people who go across the internets saying your game is a buggy piece of crap will do so regardless of whether or not they’ve actually played it; the more people who actually have played it the more people are likely to go “well, yeah, but it’s got potential and it’s kind of cheap right now”.
Same thing applies to getting people who actually really want to test the game. If you want testers, hire some. Kickstarter will give you paying costumers (investors get returns, costumers get products), and those costumers will have a right to feel entitled because you accepted their money. The level of entitlement others feel they have a right to feel will be proportionate to how much money they paid, and the number of people who decide to act as testers anyway will be a function of how many people are able to do so.
As far as the goodies go (reason 1), you could just make those available through the higher tiers, ye know?
Well, no matter. My interest in I:B is still mostly limited to the potential it could lead to an MMO, so what you do with this Kickstarter doesn’t really matter all that much to me as long as you raise a lot of money. Of course, any indication that you’ve got an MMO mindset is good news to me.
Still, that whole raising a lot of money seemed to work out fairly well for Minecraft… and KSP… and DayZ… and probably failed for thousands of titles I have thus never heard of. Seems to me the optimal approach might be a really expensive alpha followed by a less-than-retail-cost beta, once you get the basics working?
TL;DR: This is my box. Find somewhere else to think.
The same goes for f2p (free to play) games or cheap ones : easy come, easy go. Putting high prices necessarly filters out the less motivated ones. On the other hand, you’re right to point out that with high prices will come high expectations.
Some exception scenarios can only happen because someone found the right combination for the bug to happen. The occurrence of this rises as there are more testers. You can’t possibly hire 100 testers (or more !) when you’re struggling already with your finances. Besides, let’s be frank : a lot of AAA games were released with a few bugs that would have been easly (for most of them) resolved with a few more testers. And they were bought anyway just because of marketing / huge trust of buyers.
Alphas and betas more expensive than the retail cost ? Never heard of. The only cases of Alphas and Betas being more expensive that final product were those who gave you cumulated extras that would cost you more if you bought final + extras. Getting access to Alpha / Beta is a minor “reward” by itself, even a “give-and-take” by my standard.
Oh, about mods sold with real money : don’t go down that road until the game is fully finished.
There will be official servers(never heard of a beta with no official servers). But even if that is not the case, the more beta/alpha testers you have, the more support/moderators/etc need to be hired to hold back the “zomfg my g4m3 crashed!!%#!” player tidal wave. You do need thousands of testers to find the more obscure bugs, but do you need tens of thousands? Millions? They would have to spend more money with support than with actually fixing the bugs.
I guess you have never backed a kickstarter project then, right? Both Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous used this model, for example.
An alpha or beta is released much faster than the retail game, so you can consider the bigger price as the fee for getting the game before everybody else.
And back on subject, I think its a valid idea to release the tools to allow people to import their 3d meshes into the engine to try them out. But does this mean that modding tools would become a core feature instead of a stretch goal? Im not sure if KS would allow a pledge tier with a “modding tool early access” reward that is only unlocked if a certain stretch goal is achieved.
As someone who’s interested in pledging to the alpha tier, if my income holds steady, but who wouldn’t be interested in the mod tools, I think I side with Cray and others who have been suggesting that buggy tools aren’t really an issue, but that they should be put in the hands of people who are interested in using them. Having the mod tools as either a tier above alpha access, or a stand-alone add-on, makes the most sense to me.
Either way, however, I think it’s reasonable to release alpha/beta level mod tools to people who are alpha/beta testing your game, or in parallel with the alpha/beta tests of the game (if it would be possible to pledge for the tools without pledging for alpha/beta access). They should more or less evolve in parallel with each other, should they not (or a tick or two out of step)?
I would love access to mod tools. Yet with my current career and projects I might struggle to get the time to use them, I’d sure try to make the time and still probably pledge for them.
Having separate levels of the KS for the mod tools would allow for pledges depending completely on what people would like, or be capable of. (Mod wise.) obviously…
Along those same lines you may find someone that may not have any mod/3D/texture/coding experience or very little will pledge to that higher level just to get those tools because they will say to themselves. “I can learn that stuff, that’ll be cool, I have a reason to learn it.” I did years ago with FS9 and Battlefield 1942 and so one…
I’m sure there are others here that can mod will agree there is something special about been able to make parts of a game your own through the use of mod tools. Nowadays there are plenty of casual gamers that do have the ability to mod, it defiantly keeps games alive for many years with new content. Having those tools, even in a very basic form will be very beneficial.
Personally I think SDK (code) should be released for free - naturally initially under some very strict license to protect your intellectual rights and clear statement it’s unmanaged and unmaintained. Put content developing under SDK and offer that, here’s why;
Content developers can make their assets faster as well as sell them much easier.
Modders (programmers) in conventional cases cannot sell or at least earn enough to make it worth while so it’s all done due the love of the game and the modding it self.
Thing is, it’s hard to be a modder if you don’t know if you’ll love the game until you actually play it. I only saw videos and what I could gather out of it is a modern engine with unique features but that doesn’t show it’s performance and doesn’t tell me if I’ll like the final product. Paying top tier rate to gain access with so many unknowns is not appealing and is completely irrational to me.
What makes more sense to me is to sell access to editors and asset builders and make the source (logic or engine…whatever you’re planning…) available under well crafted license and conditions, as that will bring more benefits for both sides, here’s few;
People will be able to submit bug fixes so end product will be more stable and mature.
People will be able to submit patches that will enrich your game with new features which you can if you choose so, then include in your game.
People will get familiar with your code so by the time game is
finished and you wish to offer the code under more friendly license
you’ll have a core audience and solve most of starting problems that
are accompanied with any project at its initial stages.
Ones that will be interested in modding your game will eventually
sooner or later require building tools so you can easily offer them
for same rate after KS.
Set clear conditions and demand that authors in case 1 and 2 give a statement where they renounce their intellectual rights and you’re fine.
In my eyes it’s a win-win situation. You’ll solve things faster, gain all the power of the community and most of all, wont have to deal with leaks and in this case, receive support from various channels. Selling code SDK will mean that selected few will have access to it, a rotten apple will leak it and then bunch load of people that will find genuine problems and could help you with it, wont lift a finger as they didn’t get it through correct channels.
If I’m not mistaken one of you is from Epic games, if so you already know how, what and why it works in that way. Community makes or breaks the game, so feed it. In this case in my opinion paying a top tier rate for code access is like paying for a car I never saw, drove and don’t even know when it’s going to be made.
That being said. Regardless of your decision I’m surely if I can (uncertain times) chip in at KS, I just wont go for SDK as it doesn’t make sense to me due reasons stated above.
So you think the modding tools should be bundled with any tier that includes the game?
I do agree with the principle that modding should be accessible. Someone new to modding should be able to give it a go without making any additional investment.
However, the primary objective of the campaign is to raise money so I think charging extra for early access to modding tools is totally reasonable.
This is somewhat off topic but In fact yes, I do think that modding tools should be bundled with any game, it’s modding that gives longevity to the game as well as fixes most of the late bugs after developer abandons it.
On the topic - I do understand what’s the philosophy behind it, I just personally don’t agree with it. In this specific case it’s a chicken and egg problem. They need funds so are willing to accept limited amount of people closer to their inner circle but then again, I as a (programmer) modder, I want to be first convinced I want even be part of that circle and that’s impossible with an idea on paper, arts on blog and a video on youtube…so you see the dilemma?
That being said, founding idea it self is a no-brainer to me and will gladly do it when time comes.
@INovaeKeith, I just hope that you include some kind of coding capabilities in the SDK release. Make scripting an add on if need be, but please do include some support for this.
And as a personal favour for me, make object types visible. By default. Or at least make error messages that clearly identify where an error is occurring.
I’ve used jmonkey engine which has NetBeans ide type code editor. I’m used to eclipse using java. I haven’t begun c# language courses in school. But there pretty similar codes, I’ve also done vb.net coding, not very fun. I’m guessing the engine is c++ if I remember old forum threads. But getting plugins for existing IDEs is pretty common. Visual studio is very advanced now and one I hope to become more familiar with. I also tampered with cry engine. It was basically a sandbox landscape editor for starts , the code behind uses visual studio 2010 version. An integrated IDE in the engine would most likely create a lot of work in development if not included already.
