My "Kickstarting" After Action 2011-2014

[Taleric]

Several years have passed since my initial encounter with vanilla minecraft and the concept of "Kickstarting" a game.

Not just Kickstarting by using the site but buying into alphas/betas/early-access.

My conclusion is to never invest more than $10-15 in a project with the option to invest/reward more at completion.

I reviewed my long list of "investments", the successes were incredibly bright yielding hundreds of gaming hours while the failures never reached a playable level.

Most bizzare my investment had an almost inverse relationship to the success of a given project?!?! Explain that junk lol!

How did everyone else fair?

[jorgebonafe]

I watched one day a video of TotalBiscuit talking about Kickstarter, where he said that it's better to consider it more like a donation then an investment, since you have no guarantee you'll get whatever you payed for in the first place. Seems like a good mind set :)

That said, I used it twice, for Broken Sword, and Dreamfall Chapters. Both got made. I didn't enjoy Broken Sword that much, mostly because I thought it was way too easy. But it was an ok game. And Dreamfall Chapters was just awesome. I only played two chapters so far, because I don't have a lot of spare time on account of university classes... But so far it was very good indeed.

So I supose my experience with Kickstarter was very positive so far.

[Gilberreke]

So far, I've had overwhelming success with Kickstarters, bit hit or miss with early access. Overall, I'm happy with the choices I made.

[devak]

Minecraft: My love of it can mostly be attributed to Better than Wolves, but even without it the 8 euros i payed for it were worth the time invested.

Patterns: cancelled
Towns: cancelled (management issues)

Planetary Annihilation: Mixed bag, for mysterious reasons my previous PC hated the game and not even the devs themselves could find the reason. People with 3x worse computers ran it better. It introduced me the the annoying politics and changing targets and lack of communication.

Prison Architect: Stopped playing, but have 38 hours into it and i liked it. Worth it.

Rust: "Survival multiplayer" that came down to being a cavemen, while getting sniped by high-level players with military gear. Failure

DayZ: lag and bugs. Failure.

[Katalliaan]

Starbound: Terraria-like game that just didn't hold my interest.

Distance: Commercial version of Nitronic Rush that's still in development.

Spintires: Issues between the developer and publisher basically killed this one before it could be finished.

Space Engineers: Okay as a platform, but the game itself leaves much to be desired with a very wonky multiplayer (as it wasn't designed with that in mind).

Factorio: Pretty solid factory-building and base defense game.

Parkitect: Solid building mechanics so far, although it only has sandbox play right now.

Minecraft: Quality of the updates started to decline around beta 1.7. Very little reason to play vanilla any more.

Kerbal Space Program: Devs refused to acknowledge bugs and rushed to a "release" build, likely due to the plans for a console port.

Star Citizen: Very slowly moving forward. Could be good if they fix the performance issues, but currently is just a bunch of instances of a small play area that can only support a couple dozen players.

DCS WWII: Developer went silent, and Eagle Dynamics (owners of DCS franchise) claimed it was because he didn't ask for enough money but "generously" offered to finish the product but heavily cut down on the backer rewards.

Planetary Annihilation: Haven't actually gotten around to playing this one, but I do remember reading about an expansion that fixed many issues with the game and was free to Kickstarter backers, which ticked off the people who had to pay for it.

Rimworld: Was a very enjoyable dwarflite the last time I played, and it looks like it's only improved since then.

So my opinion is that you should only buy into early access if you're willing to accept that the game will not improve, because there's a risk of development just stopping, and that you should not preorder/kickstart at all.