Two hours to go, and so close to $4 million. I myself had to think hard about getting in on the cloth map level. The opportunity cost – all the other nerdy crap I could buy with the money – had to take precedence. I did add enough to pre-buy the expansion pack. Still, I’m spending less than I would have ended up spending if the game was just sold new. But all that’s going to development and salaries and not to packaging, advertisement and distribution.
I’m pretty excited about this new market model for niche markets like this. As much as I was loathe to embrace digital distribution over owning physical copies of a game, it has allowed me to conveniently and inexpensively acquire and play older games. For brand-new full-price games I still expect a physical box and disc, but I expect that soon enough I’ll have gotten over that too. As it is now, I have bought games on Steam that I already had in the closet, but I’d much rather have them available at my fingertips than have to dig them out when I get a bug to play them. Having the physical copy is becoming less and less important to me, so it doesn’t matter even if Obsidian or Steam goes out of business, because later I can re-aquire rights to the game for cheap.
Compare that to how they’re trying to market digital comic books – you can’t loan them to friends or resell them, but they cost the same as the physical copies.
Well, the enhancements they were talking about at that point sounded like window dressing to me anyway. But I’m surprised how close it got under the wire there. I would have figured that anyone interested in supporting the project would have gotten in well before the countdown.
Contributions seem to really spike at the beginning and end of the funding period. Here’s an interesting collection of graphs charting the project’s funding progress. Check out the second graph, “Pledges and Backers by Day”; there’s a huge spike at the end. Looks like a lot of people already backing it increased their pledges too.
I myself had been waiting for the beginning of a new fiscal month. I suppose that if a similar dynamic explained the pattern, there would probably be a jump around every two weeks.
The entry for $4 million says that they’d be using every dollar from $3.5m to $4m to enhance the game, so even if they hadn’t hit $4m with Paypal pledges they would have had plenty for enhancements.
My biggest worry is that they didn’t think thoroughly through the man-hours necessary for each stretch goal. I don’t want to hear in October 2013 that Big City 2 is cancelled because Stronghold took too much longer than we anticipated. What happens if (likely ‘when’) they start missing budgets?
I’m sure the initial goals and maybe the first few stretch goals were thought through, but as the project went on, it felt like they just kept throwing stuff up to keep the money flowing. I hope I’m wrong and that they’ve got a kick-ass project manager that can keep this shit on-time and on-budget.
4 Million is pretty good for 2D isometric RPG, right? Even one with a lot of content, I would imagine. Specially these guys, having worked on the IcewindDale games should be able to pull it off.
Of course, Icewind Dale I and II were infamously rush jobs in order to keep the studio afloat for bigger projects. They lacked the plotting of a Baldur’s Gate. But if another linear dungeon crawl like Icewind Dale is all they manage to crank out, I can’t say that I’d feel my money is wasted. But it sounds like they expect to exceed the epic scale of Baldur’s Gate.
What I wonder is how much money they’re accustomed to having available. The initial asking suggested the thought they could produce another Baldur’s Gate for 1.1 million. Is there a site where they list the budgets under which various video games were produced?
