Kickstarter Delays, 2020 edition (edit: cropped the “All” axes to make it more legible. Keeps going up to about 1350 days):
A look at how well projects have estimated delivery since I started using Kickstarter, through December 2020. Does not include non-deliveries, but I’ve only experienced 2 of those.
Kickstarting computer games is such a bad idea. I did two: Pathologic 2, on the strength of The Void, and AI War 2, on the strength of AI War. Both seem to be good games, but by the time they were released I no longer had any time to play them.
I’ve only Kickstarted one video game: WarMachine Tactics, which should’ve been a slam-dunk. XCOM using the rock-solid WarMachine ruleset? Heck yeah!
Heck no!
Late, buggy, and last I checked still unfinished and a GUI nightmare. In the final analysis I’m still happy I supported Privateer Press, because (at the time) I was a huge, huge fan of their work (I think they’re finding their feet again, but there was a year there that I just lost 100% of my interest), but yeah, never backing a computer game again.
Heh, I backed that too.
I don’t know that I’ve had that many bad experiences backing videogames - mostly, like boardgames, TTRPGs, etc they’ve turned out to be good. But I’ve had more videogames come out questionable (the only negative Steam review I’ve left was for a 2012 space sim project called Starlight Inception, which I backed instead of Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen…which may still have been the right call even though Starlight Inception was trash, since Star Citizen doesn’t properly exist and E:D I got in some bundle or other) and they have the highest rate of outright failing to deliver of anything I’ve backed - I’d say of the remarkably small number of such projects I’ve backed out of my hundreds, probably 70% were videogames, 25% indie TTRPGs (at least a couple of which had reasonable explanations like, say, the creator being harassed out of the industry by bigots) and maaaaybe 5% boardgames.
Mostly the reason I’ve stopped is that they end up turning up in bundles before I ever play them. And we’re past the point where I feel like I need to crowdfund things to resurrect the genre. And although there are a few developers I like well enough that I’d support their projects just to support them, most of them have been bought by Microsoft (Double Fine, Obsidian, Inxile) and so there goes the hope of keeping them independent and creatively free. 
At this point, I back Spiderweb Software games and that’s pretty well it, as far as videogames.
Looking at the distribution of costs, I think a lot more of the video game expense happens before you can see what you’re getting – there’s no equivalent of a print-and-play basic version with equivalent gameplay to the finished product, or a rulebook that you can read before you back, because the chrome that gets added by huge teams of coders and artists and so on is very significant to the finished product. So that makes it inherently riskier.
I think the critical filter for crowdfunding boardgames vs crowdfunding video games is that crowdfunding campaigns for boardgames tend to require an almost printer-ready design in order to have a successful campaign.
Whereas, based on my very, very limited experience, videogame crowdfunding is usually, “I have a great idea! Here’s some concept artwork I’ve commissioned.”
Yeah, very much so. Plus like, there’s just more work that has to go into coding a videogame, more places it can go wrong, and the actual studio has to do a lot of it (though there’s a fair amount of middleware to help these days, at least), whereas with a boardgame, you basically need rules and art and then you hand it off to a printer who has probably done dozens of boardgames before and like, you might decide to do something weird and funky that they have to specifically set up for or whatever, but a lot of boardgames it’s a really established process by now.
And I don’t want to trivialize how much can go into developing those rules and that art, but it’s something videogames have to do in-house as well.
We’ll call this Purchase #1 for 2021
pillbox’s 2021 Purchase Tracker as of 2021-01-26: 1.1
Hyped! It’s just a question of whether I’m backing solo or there’s enough group pledge in SW London. 3 so far, I think
I like Human Punishment (the original game) but it’s not my favourite social deduction game. I generally prefer my social deduction to be fairly “pure” (The Resistance, Mafia/Werewolf) rather than being combined with nominally-cooperative gameplay (Battlestar Galactica, Homeland). The last KS delivered a month early, though I haven’t played it since. So I probably shouldn’t go for this…
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13233511/human-punishment-the-beginning
I got burnt out on what you’re calling cooperative traitor games by BSG and Dead of Winter. Lots of neat ideas and moments but it seems to be exceedingly difficult to keep the pacing even vaguely coherent when you have this dramatically different set of pacing cues that decide when the game ends completely separately from any of the traitor stuff resolving or failing to resolve.
Which isn’t to say a “pure” traitor game can’t be a dud, too, but if it’s a dud it’s a dud because the premise collapses–either due to some problem with player investment or something really unfortunate happening like a traitor outing themselves too early. I find it’s really easy to restart or quit most of these sorts of games when there’s a premise collapse, though, as they tend to be pretty simple in terms of components and it tends to be clearer why that step is needed.
Whereas the more complex ones have all this stuff to set up, tear down, and reset and they’re (on paper, but pretty much never in practice) designed to survive premise collapse which makes it harder to sell people on stopping the game when it isn’t clicking. On top of that they can fail to click without the premise collapsing entirely–the traitor element can be working as intended, but the game just flows too easily or too difficultly for the non-traitor players to ever really engage with that mystery properly.
Among Us is a really great example of a game that just ends when there’s a premise collapse. Traitor blows it early? The game is over and you can play again instantly.
After backing Radlands, I got an email that I am now a Superbacker oO 
In any case, after backing it I read the Spacebiff review and then I told my partner it’s “Mad Max in Pink and Purple” and he said “We’ve been playing that all the time and it’s called Borderlands”
So no mistakes were made 
My copy of The King’s Dilemma has been “shipped”. In the sense that shipstation have sent me an email with no tracking number or indication of where it might have been shipped from, or any ETA beyond “4-6 weeks”. I suppose this might be helpful to somebody.
For anyone that has enjoyed playing the solo RPG The Artefact, a reskin with spaceships instead of fantasy items is now up on KS.
I really enjoyed Artefact, it’s one of the best examples of just how many writing prompts you can actually come up with immediately even on a day when you feel like you’ve got no imagination. A spaceship version sounds fab.
Zinequest is this month if anyone wants to browse smaller experimental RPG stuff:
There’s a real range of projects, trying to pick my purchases very carefully since there are so many that look really interesting
Since Lee hasn’t mentioned it, last day for Maeshowe:
I’m backing Colostle (paperback, solo standalone), The Drain (Print + PDF, Mothership), Bucket of Bolts (collector’s, solo standalone) and Nerves (PDF, magazine) so far. There is an awful lot of cool stuff to look through.
