Yogventures blows a cool half mil

[kjbrona]

I tend to back almost any game that have building/crafting/openworld as their primary goal: 7D2D, Planets³,Castle Story, Dead Linger,etc
Luckily this is the only Kickstarter that I have "lost" money on and it was at the lowest level ($15).

I wouldn't have backed TUG but at least it is something similar so not a complete waste of $15.

[Gears]

Me and my coworkers were talking about this when word just went out about it. Honestly I have no idea where I stand on it. The concept wasn't really that interesting to me, and it blows that 13,000 backers lost their/their parents' money on this. Combining this with them canceling "Shadow of Israphel", they burned out a large amount of support from their fanbase.

All I can say is I'm glad I only donate money to Flowerchild. At least he's honest about where the money's going.

[DerAlex]

...Castle Story, Dead Linger...

From my understanding, both of these are considered failures by "the internet", both for the same reason. Really long times between updates, overpromises and underdelivering, too much ambition, small and inexperienced developer teams in over their head. What's your opinion on those two games? Do you still hope for everything that was promised, or did you spend enough times with the alphas already to consider it money well spent?

(For example, I own both Starbound as well as Cubeworld, and I feel like I got my moneys worth from Cubeworld, but feel kinda scammed by Starbound. Hugely subjective of course, but Cubeworld was fun with 3 buddies for 10-15 hours, whereas I played Starbound for longer than that, but thinking about it, I never really had "fun" with it. Both of those games might deliver on their promises eventually, but for the moment, only one of it was "worth it" for me.)

meta: Is it allowed to go off topic in the off topic forum? Is it even possible?

[Taleric]

meta: Is it allowed to go off topic in the off topic forum? Is it even possible?

IRT the yogventure I had zero expectations when the first alphas were shown. I have been suckered more by full release titles that were disingenuously advertised I improperly researched :(

Since the advent of the betas, mechanics in absence of appeance has been a strong indicator of success. It feels counter-intuitive but several betas that were good bets for me looked like shit till the final stages.

On starbound I hear you but checkout the recent dev activity. They know it is soulless compared to Terraria. The dev activity and "nightly builds" give huge hope that there will be long term activity testing and adjustments to make it whole. I feel like the determined devs from Terraria are left now hell bent on making it good.

About the topic I have been tossing around starting a confessional on your best and worst purchases. Kind of a warning and recommendation to others while getting your sadness/joy off your chest. However it would be short and sweet. Example:

2009-Evil Genius $9.99 : Good find tons of hours :D
2011-Dungeons $39.99 : *Cries :(* What have I done?!
2012-Terraria $9.99 : Heck yeah!
2013-Just cause 2 $14.99 : Meh :/

[DerAlex]

Since the advent of the betas, mechanics in absence of appeance has been a strong indicator of success. It feels counter-intuitive but several betas that were good bets for me looked like shit till the final stages.

Substance over appearance is something some people never understand... I work with a few programmers (non-gaming), and everytime a higherup complains, early in development mind you, that something has to look better, I think "no shit... this is about getting the idea working, the maschine, the barebone. Not make it look great and sellable immediatelly. You don't have any idea about how developing something works, do you?"

On starbound I hear you but checkout the recent dev activity. They know it is soulless compared to Terraria. The dev activity and "nightly builds" give huge hope that there will be long term activity testing and adjustments to make it whole.

The problem, for me, is that Starbound, in my opinion, has NETHER style NOR substance at the moment. I'm still hoping for it to be good or even great at the end, but realistically, Terraria 2 will be out and much better than Starbound at the time Starbound is done, and Terraria 2 isn't even really announced yet...

I don't doubt their good intentions, and I'm sure as hell that they know that the game blows right now. But I honestly doubt they have the talent to fix it.

I feel like the determined devs from Terraria are left now hell bent on making it good.

Terraria and Starbound are by 2 different companies. Starbound is by Chucklefish, whose founder, TIY was the spriter of terraria, NOT the programmer (Terrarias programmer is Redigit). There was quite a bit of drama surrounding his departure from the Terraria-team at the time. They seem to be in good spirit now thou.

2013-Just cause 2 $14.99 : Meh :/

Why? It's considered one of the best if not THE best open world action game. I consider it one of the most "fun", mechanically sound game out there. Sure, the story kinda sucks, but so does chess's (The horse is supposed to be a knight? Why are the Towers moving? What the fuck, nintendo?)

[Taleric]

Terraria and Starbound are by 2 different companies. Starbound is by Chucklefish, whose founder, TIY was the spriter of terraria, NOT the programmer (Terrarias programmer is Redigit). There was quite a bit of drama surrounding his departure from the Terraria-team at the time. They seem to be in good spirit now thou.

2013-Just cause 2 $14.99 : Meh :/

Why? It's considered one of the best if not THE best open world action game. I consider it one of the most "fun", mechanically sound game out there. Sure, the story kinda sucks, but so does chess's (The horse is supposed to be a knight? Why are the Towers moving? What the fuck, nintendo?)

Whoops, I miss interpreted the Terraria-Starbound link, I though there were many more tie-in team members. "Spriter"?!? Yikes guess that bring up the mechanic over looks item lol.

So truth on JC2, I bought it hungry for GTA V :/
On its own JC2 is incredible! Smooth, innovative interaction, grand in scale. I did conquer a significant chunk of the map before leaving. It started to get incredibly grindy and ever since vMC I find scripted events very unpalatable. I could play out in my head how the entire rest of the game would go. If I have gone to JC2 years back it would undoubtedly be in my top ten.

Lol you are going to make me look for the lineage of the chess pieces to see how they did arrive at today's shapes/names.

[SterlingRed]

I don't understand the defenders of the yogs team in this unfortunate but expected disaster. Whether the game devs approached them or vise versa doesn't matter. The yogs team promoted and put their "marketing" weight behind an ill conceived, poorly managed game with a scope large enough to be challenging for a professional dev company with deep pockets. In my opinion that's where the fault is, the decision to embark on this endeavour to begin with. It really speaks of how inexperienced the yogs team is as well as how poor their leadership ability is. It also shows how ignorant they are of game development in general. I really dont understand how people ever thought backing them was a good idea. I mean if you even watch these guys you can see they're actually very bad at playing minecraft! And people expected them to successfully be the front men for a minecraft competitor? Absurd.

[DerAlex]

I don't understand the defenders of the yogs team in this unfortunate but expected disaster. Whether the game devs approached them or vise versa doesn't matter. The yogs team promoted and put their "marketing" weight behind an ill conceived, poorly managed game with a scope large enough to be challenging for a professional dev company with deep pockets. In my opinion that's where the fault is, the decision to embark on this endeavour to begin with.

All of the above is true.

It really speaks of how inexperienced the yogs team is as well as how poor their leadership ability is.

I don't really want to defend them, as I said, I don't watch their videos (except for sips... sips rules... needle in the haystack for me), I don't find their brand of humour incredilbly appealing, I lost my interest in minecraft long ago, and I certanly didn't back this steaming pile, but I don't think thats fair... don't confuse the video-personas with their actors.

The thing is, yogscast 3 years ago is a totally different story than yogscast today. It was 2 ppl back then. I believe they are about 20-30 now, with a proper office and everything. Say what you want about them, but what they did in 2-3 years is objectively incredible.

Back then, they have just started doing what thed do "full time". Along comes Winterkel and propably promises to make them filthy rich. Thats the whole story basically. And now they are just trying to save their asses. Again, I'm not saying it's morally right, I'm certanly not saying it's legally right, but god damn it I can understand it somewhat...

I really dont understand how people ever thought backing them was a good idea.

Me nether. From the first video it looks like shit.

--------------------------

I feel like I'm digging my hole on this forum even deeper everytime... diggy diggy, so to speak...

[Stormweaver]

Terraria and Starbound are by 2 different companies. Starbound is by Chucklefish, whose founder, TIY was the spriter of terraria, NOT the programmer (Terrarias programmer is Redigit).

Huh. I hadn't realised that starbound was made by the same guys who made risk of rain - my interest is suddenly peaked. I'd only been making the terraria connection up till now.

[FlowerChild]

Huh. I hadn't realised that starbound was made by the same guys who made risk of rain - my interest is suddenly peaked. I'd only been making the terraria connection up till now.

Starbound is interesting, but man, has it ever lagged in its update cycle. It's been quite a few months since anything new has come out, and while they regularly post news to their webpage I've definitely developed a "show me the money" vibe towards it.

If you're considering a purchase, I'd really recommend waiting to see if it pulls out of that.

[Stormweaver]

Yeah, I'm going to keep an eye on it for a while (I'm saving up for a graphics card anyways, less money spent now = more awesome later) - but now that I know that the guys making it are technically competant when making games, it's looking far more attractive than just terraria in space.

...and now to play some more risk of rain.

[Sarudak]

Yeah starbound definitely did not hold my interest for long (although it actually held my interest for longer than terraria which I lost interest in VERY quickly). I'm very concerned about the new design direction mainly because they're focusing the progression on the accumulation of a single resource (pixels) to advance to the next tier. And they want to make a variety of paths to get pixels. The problem with this is that there's nearly always some way to exploit the system that makes one way vastly more efficient than the others and to progress you just grind on that method. The worst form of this is in a mod like equivalent exchange but anytime you have a universal resource in a game it ends up coming down to this problem which makes the game grindy and eliminates vast swaths of gameplay from your consideration unless you want to do them 'just for the lulz'. IMHO the lack of a universal resource in BTW is what makes the mod so interesting in the automation aspect because you need to make different types of machines to get different resources and you can be rich in one thing but you still need something else so there's always a project to do.

[EpicAaron]

Huh. I hadn't realised that starbound was made by the same guys who made risk of rain

Risk of Rain was actually created by a smaller company of two students called Hopoo Games, and it is to my understanding that Chucklefish was simply the publisher. Starbound is apparently the first game Chucklefish has attempted to tackle on their own.

I was pretty excited when I thought that the two games were by the same creator as well, but I have been left rather disappointed by Starbound as of late. :/

[Stormweaver]

Ah. Oh well :/

[devak]

From where i'm standing, it looks like a classic failure of experience.

If winterkewl pays 35K for an artist but has no clause to prevent it from moving over....those are beginner mistakes. This whole "who has the money?" deal is a red flag that no proper budget planning was made. It's just the classical story of a bunch of kids with big dreams trying things far beyond their capability with no experience as a safety net.

I don't understand the defenders of the yogs team in this unfortunate but expected disaster. Whether the game devs approached them or vise versa doesn't matter. The yogs team promoted and put their "marketing" weight behind an ill conceived, poorly managed game with a scope large enough to be challenging for a professional dev company with deep pockets. In my opinion that's where the fault is, the decision to embark on this endeavour to begin with.

Yea, basically if either party had been sensible, better agreements would've been made - or not at all. Yogscast is as much at fault for shady (intentional or not) deals as Winterkewl (really? winterkewl?) for making poor contracts and promising where it can't deliver.

So yea textbook "beginners try to YOLO a project they don't realize is HUGE".

[Mr_Hosed]

Wait, you get refunds from failed Kickstarters? When did this start happening?

Legally speaking I thought Kickstarter was donations with no promise of performance nor return... and thus why I've never kickstarted anything nor ever will. I don't like gambling.

I'm surprised how long it took for this whole thing to blow-up though. Obviously they never scaled their workforce and Winterkewl was basically just paying their own wages off the funds and not seriously attempting to develop and release something in a timely manner.

[Katalliaan]

They're not obligated to give a refund - there's been cases where the company didn't ask for enough originally, didn't make enough in the kickstarter, and failed to deliver. There's also cases like DCS World, where the company folded into another one and the parent company completely restructured the rewards.