Community Question: What do YOU want to ask the community?

(_Megabyte) #41

ETQW ruined all penis enlargement industry.

(SockDog) #42

Because if the kickstarter funded a substantial proportion of the development they’d be able to make a game for those people with no actual risk to SD’s overall operations. If the kickstarer failed they can at least say they gave the idea an opportunity, maybe even learn from it. Also depending on the game they’re doing now they may be able to reuse assets to lower the cost too. Hell I’d even be open to the idea of them partnering with another indie dev to do the project.

I’m of course thinking that the idea of an W:ET/RTCW remake (I think ETQW would just require too much retooling) with updated graphics and more mature back end is what people want. Gameplay etc to remain largely untouched and certainly not geared towards F2P or other “popular” mechanics.

(millerq3) #43

Its called lip service.They bombard us with questions/polls they already know the answers to (they made enough mistakes with dodgy partners etc so they should) and in doing so distract us from the fact that by now they should have announced their intended game or least a snippet.

(Apples) #44
  • What do you want us to do to show you that your experience (as gamers and long timer SD followers) is recognised and usefull for us in the making of a [yet to be announced] new game?
  • What is the airspeed of a coconut laden swallow?
(Ashog) #45

Ahahahaha. That is actually probably so true! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:
I guess Badman is sneezing now :slight_smile:

(tokamak) #46

Like the preorders in Brink? Brink is often cited as an example of why preordering a game is generally a bad idea, however much that pains me.

(SockDog) #47

No. I’m saying that SD could make something they may deem too high risk or niche to invest their own money into. Quite unlike Brink they wouldn’t have to field the issue of, “Will this game appeal to enough people to sell and return a profit?”, because that question would be answered by securing funds through the kickstarter. Instead they could be very open about what they are going to do and just do it, I don’t think we need to question SDs capability to execute, the problem with Brink seemed to be their inability to commit to a single goal.

From a consumer point of view, yes, it’s a risk buying something blind. Yet a low price point and perfect communication would reduce the risk.

(Humate) #48

Out of curiosity, what sort of player numbers worldwide are we talking with kickstarter mp games?

(SockDog) #49

Guess it depends on the goal and entry price for a copy.

(Humate) #50

I would imagine the goal would be to have a playerbase large enough, that players can expect a game every night.
Do you think games on kickstarter, have the capacity of achieving those numbers?

(Ashog) #51

don’t know what you mean by achieving at kickstarter but the point there is to collect money for creating games, not to create games. And it’s not about creating a player base either.

for the numbers of backers / money achievable, see for yourself: http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/games/most-funded

(SockDog) #52

Carmageddon got 16k pledges and exceeded its $400K goal by $225k. Not sure how much SD would need to turn out a W:ET style game if they reused existing assets they had and just focused on gameplay. Don’t forget the kickstarter is just the funding, once it starts moving along you have the traditional retail to increase profits and userbase.

Key point is that a less marketable product can exist if the niche are prepared to put their money where their mouths are.

(.Chris.) #53

Honestly though, after Brink how many people would want to fund such a project? It left a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths. And to be fair so did ET:QW. An ET style game developed by SD probably doesn’t sound all that promising to a lot of folk who played the original ET.

We’ll just have to see what this business with warchest and fireteam brings, I think for right here right now they’ve made the right choice

(SockDog) #54

Sure there is an element of trust that’s been lost but nearly every thread on here about SD has someone saying how W:ET or ETQW was awesome, if only they could make a new one. I’m also not entirely sure what a F2P game is going to do to win back that trust as it will yet again be saddled with stuff that’s unnecessary to the core gameplay. Will it for example include mapping and mods if that interferes with the revenue model they’re going to employ? Is there going to be levels and unlocks that bring balancing issues into play (or like Brink prebalancing the game into some mediocre mush)

Ultimately, a kickstarter would be a very low risk endeavour. If it went nowhere there isn’t a huge investment to write off. They have many people out there that played W:ET who may be willing to hand over $15 if convinced the game would play the same. Not saying this should be SD’s primary business model, even to the point that they maybe just produce it with a small team and work with another developer to do the work.

(Ashog) #55

Kickstarter is almost never aiming to finance a game fully, if not regarding some notoriously lucky exclusions. But it provides a huge lump of additional money without having to rub the carpets down at sponsors/publishers offices.
Of course, Kickstarter is not as simple as one might think (announce, spread the word, whore easy free moneys). Kickstarter places a lot of responsibility on a game dev, since one of the tools to lure more people to pledge is to promise either a free full game key on a certain deadline (when it’s done) or some additional merchandise that first have to be designed and produced, then promptly sent to pledgers individually which is in fact a huge organisational and logistical pain in the arse. Also regular video and text updates on kickstarter is a must. This distracts the small game dev team A LOT from actually programming.

Regarding ETQW, if one checks the average player opinion in internet from the people who indeed tried it or at least tried the demo, it is clear to me that most people were frustrated and quit the game early on (for example, all of my 10 former W:ET BiH-clan mates stopped playing it almost immediately even tho they had keys). However those who endured the steep learning curve, including me, have been enjoying the game greatly all over those 4-5 years. I personally think that even despite the real ETQW-killer fails such as terrible netcode, ranked servers and lack of patches (early support drop), as well as terrible custom content limitations, the game was much better, yielding and diverse than W:ET or any other FPS objective-based game ever (I’d dare even to say better than any CTF game such as TF series). Another huge lump of gamers simply never heard about Quake Wars (this is actually the majority of FPS players), which is of course a consequence of the castrated marketing by Actifail and Kotick, who thought they could save money by simply having Quake and Enemy Territory brands in the name of a new game. Fools.

(Humate) #56

[QUOTE=Ashog;406742]don’t know what you mean by achieving at kickstarter but the point there is to collect money for creating games, not to create games. And it’s not about creating a player base either.

for the numbers of backers / money achievable, see for yourself: http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/games/most-funded[/QUOTE]

I mean in terms of promotion / marketing… which in turn means playerbase.

(BioSnark) #57

[QUOTE=Ashog;406742]don’t know what you mean by achieving at kickstarter but the point there is to collect money for creating games, not to create games. And it’s not about creating a player base either.[/QUOTE] Outside of the added benefit of attracting money or publishers, the amount of media attention projects get for being on that site is significant. I doubt that’s a quantifiable gain.

(tokamak) #58

The huge advantage of kickstarter is the insane diversity of product pricing you get to offer. It´s not just paying 25% more for a collector’s edition. There’s simply huge stuff for the big investors and very cheap stuff for the mainstream.

(BrioCyrain) #59

My community question would be if the community wanted either:

ET: Doom
ET: Rage

or pretty much ET: QW/W 2

(tokamak) #60

I would like to see a parody of this culture clash between old fashioned shooters and modern military shooters. A social commentary on the gaming culture as a whole and a great excuse to have best of both worlds.

Some stereotypical fantastic science fiction shooter messed up it’s waygate and suddenly the world consists of urban battlezones merged with fragments of absurd arena settings. The terrorist and elite squads of the real world must team up against the arena champions and brutal monsters of this fictional world.

This allows for so much liberty. You can have the elite swat taking themselves way too seriously have all these conventional modern mechanics and weapon options, have vehicles and rely greatly on team-work. And on the other hand we have a bunch of individualists, a bunch of very strong super-beings that rather fight for themselves and do rocket-jumps and collect powerups littered through the field. You can have the human champion, the super-robot and the large alien brute offering completely different flavours of arcade shooters.

Letting those two factions collide on one battlefield would be amazing. It would be a bitch to balance but we’ve already see how highly asymmetrical teams can still be a match for each other in RTS games.