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In Defense of Kickstarter
I did kickstart a reprint/upgrade of The Vesuvius Incident, because that is a virtually unknown classic that I always wanted to upgrade myself. And that kickstarter turned out fine. Improved rulebook, superior components, and only took about one year to arrive after the kickstarter was announced. The guy who published did end up losing a little money on the deal, but he kept all of his promises.
After that, I haven't kickstarted anything else, because I agreed with Barnes about the dubious quality of most kickstarted games.
And yet, I have bought several games that began life as kickstarters, but continued to sell additional copies from a website or even through retailers. And every one of these games has been good or even great. I could be a victim of confirmation bias (aka drinking the Kool-Aid), but I tend to be good at picking out decent games. Naming specific games:
Lords of Gossamer and Shadow - a professional grade diceless rpg that was clearly and heavily inspired by the cult classic Amber diceless rpg. The rule book has nice full-color artwork, clearly written rules, solid play examples, and plenty of fresh ideas to take the Amber diceless thing into a different setting.
Camp Grizzley - An excellent horror co-op game. Easy to learn, easy to play, very thematic and tends to deliver a good narrative.
Saltlands - A good post-apocalyptic game with some interesting mechanics and a variety of play options, including solo, multi-player, easy to hard, co-op, competitive, and semi-co-op.
On the other hand, I have seen a lot of crap games getting churned out via kickstarter campaigns, but so far I have avoided them.
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- hotseatgames
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- Michael Barnes
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So far, I have yet to truly regret not backing anything. Including Kingdom Death or Gloomhaven.
Nor have I regretted selling pledges. Flipping a $125 pledge for $300 - no regrets.
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- Space Ghost
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Happy to sell to a FATie that missed out and wants in at cost!
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- Michael Barnes
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- Black Barney
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- Sagrilarus
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I wail on Kickstarter in spite of being in on three, two games and a magazine. I had played the one game in beta, the other was a friend's design and I had read magazines from the same publisher. So my risk was lessened on each. But the issue I have with it is the blind buy, not the final product. There's junk coming out through more traditional channels as well, but you get to make that call with the actual product in your hands, not via a web page full of promises that may or may not come through.
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- Erik Twice
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For example:
Blood Rage: Lack of balance, Loki strategy is extremely cheap while VP for winning battles is underpowered to the point of uselessness.
Xia: Being damaged is worse than dying, some missions have a 60% chance to fail and lower payoffs than missions they are almost identical to, commerce broke the game, dice rolls have too much range for their desired goals.
Pandemonium: Poor rules, bolted-in mechanisms (Allies), semi-cooperative aspect doesn't work,
Incómodos Invitados: Trading clues, one of the main mechanics, doesn't work because people shuffle useful ones back and forth and discard the rest.
Overseers: Bad game on its own merits but even if it were not, the buffling aspect doesn't work and the powers are not balanced.
Everytime I play a Kickstarter game I feel the game development was cut two months short. It's really that bad.
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On a more general level, I do agree that there are benefits to kickstarter and that it has made more kinds of games possible than before. However this aspect is overshadowed by a bunch of stuff I'm less than happy about:
a) It's patronage, but culturally is treated as a preorder. And pre-orders are already quite bad.
b) It's mostly driven by consumerism rather than appreciation of games or anything actually worthwhile.
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- Michael Barnes
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You do realize we are not talking about liquor here, don't you?
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- Matt Thrower
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But even that can backfire. I backed the second printing with expansions of Vast: The Crystal Caverns because it sounded really intriguing and had a lot of positive rep.And I don't regret backing the game itself at all, but I *do* regret backing the expansion. There's plenty of life in the base game without it, it adds exponential complexity because of the way the roles interact, and it's certainly not a game that needs miniatures.
The first physical game I backed was the new Paranoia edition because I knew by their previous work that the people in the design team would come good and I wasn't disappointed. For a long time, that was the only one.
I have backed a few videogame kickstarters because they're often cheap. Even the worst of them was worth the fairy minimal cost of entry. I backed Tao Long for the same reason - it seemed interesting and unusual and worth a punt for £20. But even then, other games from the same studio at the same price point look like garbage so I stayed away.
If I wanted to defend kickstarter, I think its biggest boon is simply one of visibility. The media hype around it and some of its key projects, especially the ease with which its allowed companies to resurrect games as nostalgia purchases, has helped propel tabletop gaming into its current golden age.
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Argent (I know some hate the art, but it is a finished project)
Tech-no-bowl
Anything done by lvl99 really.
Spirit Island (have over 50 plays of this and its been out like 3 months or something)
I won't argue that there are crazy dumb things there, but there are some total gems too.
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