Alright, let me correct some of the stuff here.
Crowd-funded Games:
No product guaranteed despite payment provided
This isn't true of all crowdfunded games. If you pledge $10 or more to us, you get our game at launch, period, and if something catastrophic were to happen to the game somehow, you'd get that money refunded, in full, no questions asked.
Additionally, a lot of the rewards people pledged for they've already gotten on our game (and other people doing Patreon, same goes for their campaigns too). Anyone who pledged to, well, any tier already has gotten their rewards for the appropriate tiers.
Content often locked off to non-payers
You've heard of lootboxes, right?
And content from Patreons is often pirated on many sites, as well as posted (again) by the devs themselves.
Business model encourages delays and reworks
Nope, it's the opposite. Business model of crowdfunding
discourages delays and reworks compared to normal funding for the simple reason that if you take too long or aren't considered to be doing your job properly, people pull out of funding. Just look at what happened to Akabur; went from $10,000+ down to $5,000 as a result and he's continued to drop due to lack of product being created.
With normal funding, a project could get reworked countless times and investors will still keep putting in money.
And as for titles that have been delayed/reworked that are "normal games", just see my post on the second page of this thread, literally over
one thousand of them from all eras of gaming, almost all of them prominent titles; I'll repost that here for you.
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(Amazon's first big foray into gaming, sank millions into it and multiple huge events)
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(A playlist of 35 cancelled games by AAA licenses or companies)
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(games that changed drastically and had to scrap most of their stuff)
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(more of the above)
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(has a list of quite a few big name games that were stuck in development hell that came to exist eventually, like Mother 3, which literally jumped from the N64 3D to GBA in 2D and after a cancellation that lead to nearly 5 years off the map, it came back in 2006, making total "development time" effectively almost 10 years between announcement and actual release)
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(more of the above)
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(and even more)
And a wikipedia list of literally *over a thousand* games cancelled;
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And another list of unreleased games;
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And on Cutting Room Floor too, you can find countless games that had massive changes in content during development, like TF2 and Overwatch which I both named and many others.
Entire product development is on the Crowd-funding platform's rules and can be destroyed/hampered by rule changes, eg the whole bestiality/non-consent crackdown
Again, exact same thing is prominent for normal games. Remember the debacle with Hatred on Steam? There's also tons of censorship issues and advisory board stuff that companies have to adhere to when making a standard-produced game, FAR more than Patreon or any other crowdfunding campaign would ever force on you.
You can see some examples here of some of the more ridiculous ones that cost time and money to fix.
Threads are often made by Creators/sock-puppets focused on increasing revenue and not much else
Have any statistics for that? Because as I said in the last post, I don't know of more than a few creators who are doing this, while the majority that I've seen are doing the exact opposite and engaging with their threads. I could go and tally up a list if you'd like on the first 30 or so pages.
'Normal' Games:
Product guaranteed at time of payment
I replied to this up above.
Dev blogs are free and open to all, devs do not chase down people posting progress reports on other sites (as there is no financial benefit to doing so)
What AAA company has dev blogs besides Blizzard with patch updates? Very, very few "normal" game companies have dev blogs at all, and if they do, it's usually by a head PR guy like Jeff at Blizzard, and practically never is it from an actual team perspective of having the entire team get talked about like most crowd-funded games do. This is probably the weakest point of all because crowd-funded games have FAR more insight and transparency into what the game creation process and status is than practically any AAA company or normal game does, by the sheer design of crowdfunding campaigns needing to update their backers on progress.
Additionally, who "chases down people posting progress reports on other sites" for crowdfunding? Can you find a single example of this? I've definitely heard of it from AAA companies silencing news outlets and youtube videos and even temporarily cancelling games based on people leaking news of development, sure, but for indie/crowdfunding games I've never heard of a single example of this.
And again, in another backwards statement, there would be a massive reason to block it for AAA games, because if a big release is leaked or information on a new type of hardware or game mechanic that's fairly unique is leaked that was supposed to be hidden during the development process, it can cost the company
millions of dollars because other companies can jump on that and instantly start making their own counter attack to this new type of hardware, or put similar features of gameplay in their games and beat the other game to the punch. This happens in the industry
all the time when stuff gets leaked with big companies and big games.
Business model requires devs to finish their product and release it to obtain money, quality of product increases revenue gained
People making "normal games" get paid the entire time they're doing their jobs by investors or the company they're working at, but they almost never get paid from game sales.
When the game is complete, the people who made the game themselves get basically squat, and the publisher/development company/investors that were financing the game and paying said creators keeps all the money.
You know that's how it works with practically every business similar to this, right? The only exception are creators who are exceptionally well known, like Kojima probably got some good money when he was working with Sony directly, for example, but his staff probably got almost nothing, if anything at all.
Game development is up to the dev, they make their own rules
Nope. I really think you should study about what actually happens with making a "normal game", because everything you're saying "normal games" do is almost universally more stronger of a statement to be made about crowdfunded games
"normal" games have investors and higher ups that completely decide what goes in a game and what doesn't go in a game, just like editors at Shonen Jump.
If they don't like the way a plot is by a writer, or they don't like the art an artist's done, it doesn't matter what the director says, the investors and publisher are at the top and if they want it gone or changed, it gets gone or changed, whether you like it or not.
This stuff happens literally daily in hundreds of game companies all around the world.
Threads are mostly made by normal users, focusing on discussion (and of course future pirating) of the game
This is the only point I'll agree with you on, but many devs have started up threads for games they're not a part of making the game in, and participated in other threads not about their game too.
Allowing Crowd-funding games in the same forum encourages creators to just post copy-paste threads to increase their revenue, their motive is entirely different to the average user. This is a recognised problem.
It's only a "recognized problem" to the vocal minority, as the poll shows. Also, I've never seen anyone doing "copy-paste" threads in the 6+ years I've been here.
A release date that continues to grow and grow, such is the fate of pretty much all games developed on Patreon it seems. The whole debacle with the Polish guy or whatever is only more evidence to not trust Patreon projects in the slightest.
Yeah, and that's an unfortunate side effect of games having issues, especially on small teams.
It's not like Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana, Ocarina of Time, or many other games had delays and setbacks that pushed them out for years and years, right?
So? You've still taken in thousands across four years for Future Fragments.
Most non-crowd-funded games today take in tens of millions for about 1/4 the content some indie games are offering.
Many mistakes. That directly cost people money.
Money which I have always been happy to refund, in full, if anyone ever felt their money was ill-used, and this is something I've stated repeatedly publicly and on the Patreon.
Anyways, yeah, I'd highly suggest you study what actually goes into making a "normal game" sometime, there's a lot of your statements here that are objectively untrue and show a pretty solid misunderstanding of how the industry actually works.
However... What are you doing then? Doesn't that mean poll is useless? Doesn't that mean this discussion is useless...
Darkfire said he would consider changes to the forum once he had made the initial changes. Also, discussion isn't useless even if it doesn't lead to anything, because it gets viewpoints and ideas out in the open.
Ok, here is what some will see: A lot of threads on the topic, Dark decides to do something... And then you show up, injecting yourself into the issue like "here comes the savior, since no one can do anything!". This is how this looks...
Nope, just your viewpoint. Never said I was a savior nor did I say anyone else couldn't do anything.
Anyway, if you are so fair and ok, go ahead and add a poll choice I already mentioned, I want to see the results. Unless you don't want to, then I can make another useless poll, just to have a look.
Sorry, not going to add a racist poll choice (which is what that is, because you're effectively saying there's something different with how a Japanese person would make a game vs anyone else). I've also already proven in the Discord that's a terrible idea objectively because unlike every other option which has objective selections (complete, incomplete, etc), there are many edge cases with what a "Japanese game" constitutes (is it Japanese if they're of Japanese nationality? What about Japanese birthplace? What about a game made by 50% Japanese people and 50% non-Japanese? What about someone who's half Japanese and half German? and so on).
EDIT:
Hold on, Yoshiiki has a Patreon for his game? (And he's got posts behind a paywall?)
Doesn't that make him a dev?
But wait, he just said...
That all said, this is turning back into a timesink and I'd rather just work on my games, so feel free to reply however; I likely won't reply because I've said all I really wanted to say in the thread by now.
Darkfire will do what he wants and that's fine, I trust his judgement.
