@Caveman

you seem to understand my point , the market wants it badly but the publishers doesn't and the investors won't put the money on something like this as its not gonna sell no matter what (in their opinion).
the only one i can think of is If Sony bought it as a exclusive then they would pump money into and give them the freedom required but thats the only publisher i know of today that takes big AAA titles risks like this outside of the norm (IE FPS games).

Syndicate got raped indeed, but funnily enough it got raped by one of the old Amiga fanbase, they had several Amiga's up and running since from before Darkness 1 was made, they wanted to do Syndicate really badly and they did but eventually they had to abandon it in favor for what we have today (that is what the in house source on Eurogamer said some years back)...a sub standard fps.

PS: they could call it... Call Of Duty: Elite Dangerous ... it would ship millions before they even knew what the heck it was.

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@Toaks

Quote:

Toaks wrote: the market wants it badly but the publishers doesn't and the investors won't put the money on something like this as its not gonna sell no matter what (in their opinion).

Well, that's what we will see. If the market wants it Braben will get the Kickstarter money and won't have to bother with any publishers. :)

35% raised so far.

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@Toaks

Well,we have to show the publishers that they are wrong! That's why i support Elite Dangerous. Besides,i think Elite Dangerous is in better hands when it is done the kickstarter way,because if any publisher bought the ip,it would end up as yet another fps shooter.

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@SpaceDruid
I'm afraid you are talking nonsense:

Quote:

He made a very good game a very long time ago and some decent sequels, also a very long time ago. Since then, his companies only announced "highly ambitious" game The Outsider remains a very much figment of his imagination, sticking as he is with the notion the game isn't abandoned.

The Outsider is basically finished, but from reading between the lines he is afraid that it is the wrong kind of game for the current market, such that it would be very risky to release it (wasting lots of money on advertising, manufacturing, etc) & potentially kill his company in the process. He appears to think that *for example* multiplayer is an absolute requirement for a big hit (seems he is ignoring Skyrim?), but multiplayer is almost impossible to add on to The Outsider (due to how it works).

Quote:

He's claimed to have been working on this game (in various guises) for at least the last 15+ years, you'd think he'd have a better idea of what he was going to do in this game. It just seems right now he's still in the phase of coming up with ideas, which he should be well past by now. Particularly as he's trying to pitch a finished game to the Kickstarter crowd.

I think he has a very GOOD idea of what he wants to do. Indeed he has specifically been developing the technology necessary to do it, with each game his company has worked on (inc The Outsider). Most likely he is being vague so that (a) competitors don't steal his ideas (in the case that the Kickstarter fails), and (b) so he doesn't commit himself to lots of specifics when it might turn out that some of them are harder to deliver in the time frame than he thinks. Both seem reasonable.

Having said all that, I do wonder if he is rushing ahead with Elite 4 a bit, because of Infinity (The Quest For Earth) is aiming for the same thing (and they already have procedural generation finished for planets/etc).

Last edited by ChrisH on 13-Nov-2012 at 08:00 PM.
Last edited by ChrisH on 13-Nov-2012 at 07:58 PM.
Last edited by ChrisH on 13-Nov-2012 at 07:55 PM.
Last edited by ChrisH on 13-Nov-2012 at 07:53 PM.

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@Bezzen

Quote:

35% raised so far.

This basically means it's pretty much guaranteed to get funded. Kickstarter projects tends to do really well very early, and then in the last 2-3 days. It'd be a shocking departure for a project like this to reach that level so quickly and not succeed.

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@A1200

Methinks I may have to find £150 in the next few days.

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@Toaks

Quote:

Rasberry PI was a great invention but by the looks of it, that failed too as its not possible to buy anywhere (did the mainstream market kill it as it would have changed the whole industry?)

Are you kidding me? The reason you're having problems finding them is that they're selling vastly more than they thought they ever would. If that's failure, I want to fail lots.

As for the "mainstream" market: No. The mainstream market can't make them fail. How could they? To quote from their About Us page:

"We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children."

If mainstream manufacturers step up and provide cheap, small, hackable computers that are better suited than the Pi, then they help meet that goal. For the Raspberry Pi foundation that'd mean they'd be able to focus their resources on their goals of computer/programming education and evangelism for kids instead of having to struggle to get hardware out the door.

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@ChrisH

Quote:

ChrisH wrote: The Outsider is basically finished, but from reading between the lines he is afraid that it is the wrong kind of game for the current market, such that it would be very risky to release it (wasting lots of money on advertising, manufacturing, etc) & potentially kill his company in the process. He appears to think that *for example* multiplayer is an absolute requirement for a big hit (seems he is ignoring Skyrim?), but multiplayer is almost impossible to add on to The Outsider (due to how it works).

OK first off, the game was dropped by Codemasters and the team working on it lost their jobs. His claims after the event sound very much like face saving since he promised so much. You reading "between the lines" doesn't represent the facts. Sorry mate. It might be your opinion that he's telling the truth with his version of the story, but that doesn't give you the right to say I'm talking nonsense.


Quote:

I think he has a very GOOD idea of what he wants to do. Indeed he has specifically been developing the technology necessary to do it, with each game his company has worked on (inc The Outsider). Most likely he is being vague so that (a) competitors don't steal his ideas (in the case that the Kickstarter fails), and (b) so he doesn't commit himself to lots of specifics when it might turn out that some of them are harder to deliver in the time frame than he thinks. Both seem reasonable.

"I think he has a very GOOD idea of what he wants to do."

He's been "working" on Elite 4 under various names for longer than most of his prospective customers have been alive. And this is the best sales pitch he can make?

I'm not talking about specific game details that a competitor might steal, I'm talking about him filling the entire sales pitch with "maybe" and "we might" etc. You don't need to be an investor to tell a bad sales pitch when you see it. Dragons Den has been on TV long enough to the average joe to have seen hundreds of them.

He is a very skilled technical person. But I don't think he is a very good games designer. I've no doubt the technology he's working on is amazing, that's pretty much what his sales pitch was ("Hey this game fitted a universe on a floppy"), but for years I've heard him waffle on about how bad every space game that has come out since was.

Absolutely no respect is given to how people have taken the very basic game that he made and improved it massively. Instead he's always claimed Elite 4 would be better, everything else is crap, etc.

Meanwhile a couple of decades pass and no new space game from Braben. I'd think in a section of the world that we inhabit, we'd be use to FUD and vapour by now. No wonder no publisher has taken him on with Elite 4 so far.

This isn't a preview or teaser in a magazine he's doing, this is him trying to get funding from Kickstarter. Compare his sales pitch with Obsidian's Project Eternity. They didn't release anything a competitor could steal, yet they managed to convey a well though out game, with the design in place, the staff to build it and the know how to make it great.

Frontier Developments have made a bunch of casual games including a pet simulator.

For somebody wanting seven times as much money as Obsidian and without a proven track record of building complex games with the company he now has (and the only one they attempted, they abandoned and fired the staff)...

Well lets just say I don't expect I'll be seeing this game any time soon. Maybe another Wallace and Gromit game though, they were fun for a bit.

Quote:

Having said all that, I do wonder if he is rushing ahead with Elite 4 a bit, because of Infinity (The Quest For Earth) is aiming for the same thing (and they already have procedural generation finished for planets/etc).

And that's why I don't like the guy on a personal level. He accuses others of having no imagination or ambition and then attempts to flog his cheap watches from an old bag as he stands next to a jewellery shop.

Others have already taken the torch that he dropped and ran several marathons with it. Maybe if he had a little respect for them, I'd have some for him.

I suspect he'll get the funding anyway though. Enough nostalgia is in place that people with no experience in investments will contribute in sufficient numbers for the initial target to be reached. I don't think this will be sufficient investment for the game to be completed. Either he will abandon this game claiming the technology isn't right yet, or release a considerably lesser game than he intended which won't match up to what's already out there.

I was going to say if I'm wrong and he makes a decent game I'll pay for this websites hosting for a year, but I don't think my business partner would appreciate that, so I'll have to settle for eating my hat. I do really like my hat though, so it's not an entirely meaningless gesture.

Last edited by SpaceDruid on 14-Nov-2012 at 12:39 AM.

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@olegil

Quote:

Frontier did not. A LOT of people complained about the space battles in Frontier for being unrealistic while in fact they are completely realistic it's just that people don't know how physics work.

Personally I didn't like how this was executed in Frontier despite knowing it's more realistic. I found the controls really obnoxious. Though to be far they had the disadvantage of being one of the first.

Look at Terminus for a game that drew on lots of these efforts and managed to do realistic physics while still being very playable (though with the huge downside compared to the Elite series of being set only inside the solar system, so a tiny game world in comparison).

It was realistic physics + an "onboard computer" that let you turn on/off a bunch of assists that all had results that were meant to be possible for your ship to actually support. E.g. you could get a Elite style starfield, but it was described as projected onto your heads up display to help indicate speed rather than as actual stars.

In terms of maneuvering, you could get it *similar* to Elite, but what they did was that your "onboard computer" would compensate for your maneuvers by firing navigational thrusters accordingly (if you switched to exterior cameras you could even see the correct ones firing). If you turned this on, turning the nose up would start changing your path upwards by firing navigation thrusters accordingly; if not it'd make your ship start turning around it's axis to face backwards.

So you could switch back and forth between making full use of accurate physics to turn and shoot backwards etc., and a simplified, "airplane" like way of flying that was still correct.

I hope they'd pick that kind of approach, as it made it far easier to get started, and you could start taking advantage of fancier maneuvers like strafing past an enemy ship at high speed while making the ship body rotate to keep your front with your main weapons pointing straight at them during the entire flyby as you got comfortable with the controls.

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@Toaks

Quote:

3,5 (A new Kind?) was crap

There is no "3.5". A New Kind was a straight reimplementation of the original Elite in C by a guy unconnected to the original.

It delivered exactly what it promised. It on purpose didn't add anything. But the code is/was really hackable, and cool to play with. I remember plugging it into a (really) basic OpenGL renderer and adding procedural planet surface generation (based on some open source planet surface generator code I found) for fun.

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@vidarh

I downloaded the source before the author removed it because Braben ask him to do so.
Kamelito

@kamelit0

Me too. Haven't looked at in years, though. But I'll make sure to keep a copy...

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@SpaceDruid

Quote:

I suspect he'll get the funding anyway though. Enough nostalgia is in place that people with no experience in investments will contribute in sufficient numbers for the initial target to be reached.

I know you don't like Braben, but that's a bit condescending. Maybe the ones putting in £5,000, but you don't need to be on Dragon's Den to punt £20 or £50 on a game you really want.

All Kickstarters are a bit of a gamble but it's a bigger risk for Braben. It's all very well him rattling on about Elite 4 from his virtual bar-stool, but once he takes people's money it's not just his company but his whole reputation that's on the line.

Kudos to him for doing it. I'll bear your cautions in mind, but I'm still putting money in. I loved Frontier and I'd prefer to give some chance of success to someone taking their own risks in a very stale games industry. Maybe if it works out, we can invest in a bottle of ketchup to help your hat go down!

Chris

@clebin

I'm not trying to imply people are idiots or anything like that. I just mean people who don't make a living funding projects, ie Joe Blogs.

It would (normally) be unusual to raise the funding for Kickstarter projects from Joe Blogs alone. By far the biggest contributions of Kickstarter projects are people that make a living investing, which is why they usually offer the VIP service for the larger pledges.

So what I mean is I think the larger part of his funding will come from these small contributions by people that want to play the game (based on nostalgia), rather than from investors that want a return on their investment. That's usually bad news because fans don't make good critics when it comes to prioritising spending or setting limits.

Last edited by SpaceDruid on 15-Nov-2012 at 03:19 PM.

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@SpaceDruid

Quote:

SpaceDruid wrote: It would (normally) be unusual to raise the funding for Kickstarter projects from Joe Blogs alone. By far the biggest contributions of Kickstarter projects are people that make a living investing, which is why they usually offer the VIP service for the larger pledges.

Not sure what Kickstarter projects you've been looking at but I've never seen one Kickstarter project that offers a monetary return for anyone backing them !!!

I've "donated" to quite a few (all movies) for the simple reason they were interesting to me and I wanted to help make them succeed…

Here's the thing, no-one backing a Kickstarter project makes any money from it…

So why you think "financial investors" are funding these projects is a bit strange as there is no financial return to be made by a backer, so you'd have a hard job making a living from backing Kickstarter projects…

All projects are indeed funded by "Joe Blogs", it may just so happen that some of these people are "financial investors" in the real world so to speak but rest assured they don't make a penny backing a Kickstarter project…

As It clearly states in the Kickstarter rules…

http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics?ref=nav
Quote:

Do backers get ownership or equity in the projects they fund? No. Project creators keep 100% ownership of their work. Kickstarter cannot be used to offer financial returns or equity, or to solicit loans.  Some projects that are funded on Kickstarter may go on to make money, but backers are supporting projects to help them come to life, not financially profit.

Care to point me in the direction of some of the ones you've seen where a finical return can be made as I'm most curious about them…

PS:Nearly forgot… I agree with you 100% about Braben…

Last edited by Franko on 15-Nov-2012 at 05:54 PM.

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@Franko

Quote:

So why you think "financial investors" are funding these projects is a bit strange as there is no financial return to be made by a backer, so you'd have a hard job making a living from backing Kickstarter projects…

Simple really, I've been adding up the money raised in the limited higher end range and seeing it generally provides the largest chunk of money versus the donations in the lower end.

I was thinking about sticking my oar in with a few games on there, but not now!! (That's why I have a partner. He cancels about 80% of the cheques I write )

I didn't see any point in "donating" a sum larger than the cost of the game in a shop if there wasn't anything to be gained from it other than the game. Oh sure, maybe the odd 100+ quid donation from a fan with excesses of cash, but not the sums raised. I made an assumption based on that.

So what you are saying is the people donating £5,000 or more are basically only getting a 30 quid game for their money? Oh and a space station named after them...

Tap, tap, tap. These Romans are crazy!

No wonder we keep getting recessions...

Well now Kickstarter is even more baffling than ever. How it is successful I mean. I've seen a few games come to life and get released like the fabulous FTL, but I assumed the more professional titles were attracting the more professional offers. A kind of "Steam" distribution for investors if you like. That's the only reason I've been paying it any attention.

Last edited by SpaceDruid on 15-Nov-2012 at 07:09 PM.
Last edited by SpaceDruid on 15-Nov-2012 at 07:08 PM.

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@SpaceDruid

Quote:

So what you are saying is the people donating £5,000 or more are basically only getting a 30 quid game for their money? Oh and a space station named after them...

Well, in the case of Elite, they get the game, get to reserve their name; their name will form part of the naming database; they get access to all the beta rounds; be a founding member of "The Elite" in the game (whatever that means); participate in the private alpha testing; be a member of the design forum; have a planet named after them; get a "Commander xxx Jameson" name reserved for them; have a central star system named after them; and get dinner with Braben and the team...

Not really worth 5k to me (or even 1k, but I might put in 50-100 or so), but there were only 5 rewards like that and there are plenty of people with money enough to drop more than that one stuff that seems worthless to other people (*cough* Amiga users *cough*....).

Quote:

How it is successful I mean.

It is successful because there's a large disconnect between what usually get funded on the basis of high chance of success in the market place, and what groups of people are willing to pay for niche products.

As someone who hang out in an Amiga forum you should know this just by seeing the crazy prices people are willing to pay for Amiga hardware, whether classic or PPC stuff.

The market is far from efficient, because there is imperfect information about demand - niches are hard to tap into -, and Kickstarter is tapping into that by allowing people to gauge the interest of niche markets where there are often people who are willing to pay far above the odds, whether for nostalgia or because of needs.

In the case of Elite, there's close to 30 years of pent up demand (many have not played or did not like Frontier and First Encounters), and the generation that grew up with it are now in our 30's and 40's for the most part, which means we're at a stage in our lives when most of us are in established careers, and many are starting to free up cash again after having finances strained by kids (unless we divorce; sigh, the X1000 purchase I badly wanted to make is on hold for a bit longer). This is an incredibly powerful demographics to go after (it's no coincidence Marvel movies of the last decade have largely targeted story-lines from the early 80's....).

Kickstarter also benefits from psychological effects: Get people to get on the ladder at the low end, and suddenly the next step up looks cheaper because it's just a little bit more. The brain also rationalizes that if you've done something once, and felt good about it, you're the kind of person that does that type of thing and enjoys it, so you're *much* more likely to decide it's ok to spend more on it later.

At the same time, you become part of an in-group, which creates a psychological need for the group to be successful (just look around here) - people spur each other on to recommend it to friends, or to raise the commitment, especially in the last few days if it looks like the group might "fail".

"Rational" valuation based on intrinsic value of the goods people fund goes out the window very early in this process - it's just as much about feeling good about the project as the finished result. As a bonus, if you commit a lot to something, the brain works overdrive to justify the value by making you feel good about the result (hence how people can spend thousands on branded products that often have minimal differences to unbranded ones and will still be incredibly happy with their purchases) ...

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@SpaceDruid

Quote:

SpaceDruid wrote: I didn't see any point in "donating" a sum larger than the cost of the game in a shop if there wasn't anything to be gained from it other than the game... So what you are saying is the people donating £5,000 or more are basically only getting a 30 quid game for their money... Well now Kickstarter is even more baffling than ever. How it is successful I mean. I've seen a few games come to life and get released like the fabulous FTL, but I assumed the more professional titles were attracting the more professional offers. A kind of "Steam" distribution for investors if you like. That's the only reason I've been paying it any attention.

Kickstarter is simply about helping out people who have an idea/ product they want to realise and bring to fruition… crazy huh...

People who choose to donate or back them with sums of money large or small are doing so because they want to see/ have that product themselves or are just backing projects to give others a chance of succeeding at what they are trying to achieve… totally nuts eh...

There is zero financial gain for anyone whom is a backer and if you donate a very large sum you do so (for most projects) knowing that any item you may receive (if at all) will be worth far less than your donation but it's the feeling of helping others out that you can't put a price on... sounds absurd eh...

Perhaps some people don't understand that but hey, the worlds full of strange people some are generous and some are skinflints, to you obviously the generous ones fall into the strange category and "baffle" you as you can't understand why someone may want to give away £5000 for something only worth £30, while to others it's the skinflints who moan and say I wouldn't give money to that whom are strange and baffling and why they tell people they won't be giving money to something that they don't have to in the first place... tis indeed a strange world...

Thing is (well now that you know how it works) no one is forcing anyone to give away their money, so if it's investments your looking for then contact a financial advisor or stockbroker and leave Kickstarter projects to the strange people who don't mind giving away money... (otherwise you'll go broke pretty quickly if you thought you were investing in something)...

PS: I would tell you how to make money if that's all you're really interested in but having wads of cold hard dosh is not all it's cracked up to be, so I'll spare you from that burden...

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A new video has been posted. Braben talking about procedural generation and showing some fluffy alien clouds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTBvpd3_Vqk

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@Franko & vidarh

Don't get me wrong, I understand why a relatively small sample of people do what they do. As you say, the Amiga community is but one example, but what surprises me about Kickstarter is that it's now mainstream people that are involved.

You know, the kind of people that take one look at Amigaland and say "no way I'm I paying that for a computer"

If we were talking about Elite in isolation, then I wouldn't have problems understanding, but there are hundreds of kickstarter projects and new UK based website recently launched. This is big business now. It's big business made possible by people that on average, rather steal music and games via torrents than pay for them (statistically speaking).

And this is all happening at a time where the western financial world and job security are at an all time low. It's quite staggeringly amazingly going against the worldwide trend on spending.

Add on top of that the fact people are donating large sums for no financial gain, it's amazing how much money is being generated.

Quote:

PS: I would tell you how to make money if that's all you're really interested in but having wads of cold hard dosh is not all it's cracked up to be, so I'll spare you from that burden...

That's why I invest. I already have "spare" money that I'd rather have working to help others than sit in a bank or ride on stocks and shares, but that doesn't work as a long term plan if you don't get the money back at the end of if to invest in the next project. I don't invest to get more, I already have more than I need. But I do expect to make enough back that I can keep doing it.

I've so far stayed well clear of computing and games in general because it's a very fickle market, usually involving having to operate under larger investors rules, this Kickstarter thing looked like a way in from a distance. I have donated to a couple of their schemes out of my own pocket, rather than through my company, but they were relatively low sums and I was only expecting the t-shirt or whatever it was that was promised (as well as hopefully the games). I saw the higher sums gave access to the development teams and that's where I thought the deals were made.

And before anyone asks (again), I wouldn't touch the Amiga Market with a bargepole. If I want to throw money away, I'll give 5 grand to Braben.

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