So lately, Early Access and Kickstarter have been under a hailstorm of criticism, and rightfully so. Abandoned projects (Clang, Spacebase) and scams (Confederate Express, Areal) should be criticized. But more often than not, these diatribes against the two focus on the negative and the failures, while numerous examples of Early Access games done well and Kickstarter successes are brushed aside or overlooked.

Which I think is pretty unfair to the many games that have delivered and to the developers that do maintain communication and provide regular updates.

So I thought it would be cool to talk about those games and campaigns

Personally I've backed eleven Kickstarters: Hyper Light Drifter, Confederate Express, Catacomb Kids, Rain World, Dex, Rimworld, Olypmia Rising, Heart N Slash, Four Sided Fantasy, and SuperHOT

The less said about ConEx the better, but every other campaign there has displayed regular progress and updates. Dex is already out on Early Access, Rimworld is on Alpha 6 with Alpha 7 soon, Catacomb Kids had its alpha out to backers in December just like the dev promised. Rain World has near daily updates over on its TIGForum devlog thread

And that's only Kickstarter. I'd say Early Access has an even better track record.

Don't Starve, Infested Planet, Secrets of Raetikon, Drunken Robot Pornography, Sir You Are Being Hunted, Betrayer, Divinity Original Sin, Hack N Slash, Planetary Annihilation, Endless Legend, Heavy Bullets, Turbo Dismount, and Wasteland 2 all passed through Early Access and released as feature-complete games

Doorkickers, Prison Architect, Assault Android Cactus, Broforce, Invisible Inc, and XenoRaptor are games that I feel are the gold standard of Early Access. Regular updates, devs that listen to and incorporate feedback and suggestions, games that offer very playable experiences rather than bare-bone frameworks

I've backed a bunch of Kickstarters, but I think my favorite so far has been Camelot Unchained. Solid rewards, good campaign, great transparency, and they just ran a special streaming event over the summer to get fans and backers involved. Really great community management overall, and the project seems to be coming along very well. Ha, I even wrote an email to them during their campaign and Mark Jacobs personally wrote me back addressing all the points, so that was pretty damn cool. Caring like that is what makes a good Kickstarter.

In terms of Early Access, I haven't done too much, if only because of my backlog. Well, that and the fact that I'm not a huge fan of procedural generated games, and playing a game with more static content in Early Access is a dicey proposition, because you end up burning through content that isn't even polished to a release level, but you can't ever experience it for the first time again. I was just talking about Secrets of Grindea in another thread though, and for a static-content game, they've done it right. A lot of F2P games do it right too, like Path of Exile and Nosgoth.

I can honestly say that I haven't had a bad experience with either Kickstarter or Early Access, but I tend to be a bit choosier with them than some, I guess.


Edit: Ah, forgot about Sir, You Are Being Hunted, which i didnt didn't back, but did get it as soon as it popped on Early Access. Think they did a great job with it, seems like there are reasonably sized updates at a decent clip.

Lichdom Battlemage was EA done well. Not the best game on the planet by any means but constant communication, a schedule they stuck by and clearly communicated, tons of changes based on community input.

I'd add Thomas was Alone, FTL and Sequence to the Kickstarter list, thought they were a bit ahead of the massive influx of games. Most of the others off the top of my head have been covered in the OP.

I haven't been 'hurt' by Kickstarter yet, but whether or not that completely pans out remains to be seen.

For the time being, I'm a Kickstarter for:

1) Skullgirls DLC: for all intents and purposes, I have been most happy with this one. Not only have the devs been incredibly upfront from day 1 (so much so that they had to deal with complains from several fans and even some press re: the cost of development), I've been getting what they've promised in a relatively on-time fashion, and the team maintains its communication schedule quite well.

Overall, since Skullgirls, I mostly hold each Kickstarter I 'consider' (which has been none other, but that has more to do with personal disinterest rather than actual missing of this critiera) are the ability to see precise budgeting forms and the estabilshment of timeilnes that are real and tested by the group.

2) Mighty No. 9: looking forward to this. While I have my own reservations about Inafune, who I don't]/b] doubt are the guys at Inti Creates, including Aizu. Gunvolt proves that they are still very knowledgeable in how to make a tight, fluid 2D platforming action game, and the footage from all of the beta stuff so far out of Mighty No. 9 suggests that they're basically using the same formula with a Mega Man skin. The fact that Fangamer is backing them for the physical merchandise is another plus.

In terms of early access:

1) Divinity: Original Sin: I didn't jump on this until much later into its development - practically a month or two away from its official release date. Was it worth it? Definitely; however, I wouldn't say that it convinced me to keep giving to Early Access games, as I recognized Larian Studios as being a team that have produced games in the past and weren't some upstart company.

2) Starbound: This one is a bit trickier to describe. I haven't gotten back to it since it was released and I have no real intention to. While I know that new features were being planned, this was one instance where I wish I did wait - something tells me that at least seeing which new features were going to be included before the game entered its final release might have had me playing it for more hours than I really gave this game.

tl;dr: Kickstarter hasn't burned me, yet, but I feel like I've picked mostly games that have been heavily publicized on games media and GAF, whereas nothing on Early Access has made me transition to supporting it whole-heartedly, ESPECIALLY not for titles that I would argue come from development teams that are unproven and have nothing to show.

I've backed over 40 projects, and Shadowgate is by far the best kickstarter campaign I've seen.

-great pitch
-regular updates
-devs very responsive to questions
-game delivered and good

Only thing they haven't done yet are the physical rewards, but the game only came out last week so I expect them to wait a while so the disc version has whatever updates they add from post-release feedback. A+ campaign.

Xenonauts was pretty good, although they went waaaaaaaaaaaaay over time-wise. Wasteland 2 was almost as good as shadowgate, though I never had reason to contact them. They were pretty sharp though, as they instantly noted the blowback Broken Sword 5 got over drm'd discs, and recently sent out an update asking people to let them know if they wanted a steam-free disc. Kudos to them for that, shows that they're being proactive with potential problems.

That's pretty much it as far as trouble-free goes. Broken Sword 5 had multiple problems, I had to get my money back for Shadowrun after their debacles, Planetary Annihilation has no saves and is not drm free as promised, Hero-U and Spaceventures had terrible planning and I'm doubtful as to how they'll finish, I have no idea when grim dawn is coming out (although in fairness they are still hard at work), Broken Age was broken in two because the management was so screwed up, and so on and so forth.

More misses then hits, even when you go with established devs.

Nuclear Throne does Early Access right.

Oh, I missed this

More_Badass said:

And that's only Kickstarter. I'd say Early Access has an even better track record.

Don't Starve, Infested Planet, Secrets of Raetikon, Drunken Robot Pornography, Sir You Are Being Hunted, Betrayer, Divinity Original Sin, Hack N Slash, Planetary Annihilation, Endless Legend, Heavy Bullets, Turbo Dismount, and Wasteland 2 all passed through Early Access and released as feature-complete games

Click to expand...

Planetary Annihilation is not feature complete.

The Skullgirls character expansion is the only the only Kickstarter I supported and so far so good. They already had a good foundation because the base game was done, they had an experienced and motivated team, and showed a cost breakdown from day 1 where they went into detail where all the money will go.



They got a lot of shit at the time, as people refused to believe that a character in a 2D fighting game could cost $200K, even though people in the industry spoke up for Lab zero and talked about how that's actually accurate and actually lower than how much it costs AAA companies such as Capcom to make a character.

Right now they've completed 3 of the promised 5 characters, and work on the fourth has already begun. They've even included a bonus sixth character that's already in the game.

I've only backed Yatagarasu AoC and Shantae.

Yatagarasu AoC has already made it on to Steam. All backers who put in $10 minimum have an alpha key that includes one of the new characters, corrections, and balance changes. They bring the game to fighting game events for tournaments and are even having a location test in Japan soon. They've missed their February 2014 deadline, but are very serious about this game. So I'm pretty happy with my donation to their campaign. This is a sequel to the original, though. So a playable version of the game already existed and I had no reason to believe they wouldn't make this.

As for Shantae, we get regular updates on the game and stuff. That's about it, but I haven't kept too close of an eye on it. Either way, they actually had in-game gameplay to show off in their kickstarter video. That and being attached to Wayforward was enough to convince me.

So I guess unless I see your game running in some form or have a prototype, I won't donate.

EDIT: Ah, right, Early Access I don't mind buying into since your game is playable. I won't buy it via Early Access until I see a version I would be satisfied with, though.

SpeedRunners (Early Access) - Regular updates (content and fixes), new maps, new characters (4, with another pack coming soon), new features (level editor/workshop support) and more. Ohh, and the game is a blast to play.

SpeedRunners is Early Access done right.

Divinity: Original Sin did both and it ended up as a fantastic game and a game that was without a doubt made better by participating in both.

Shovel Knight was also an amazing game made possible by Kickstarter, but should serve as a reminder that in the end the money gained wasn't completely enough to make the game and the devs were almost without money in the end.

Pillars of Eternity is almost overwhelming in terms of depth with their updates. As is At the Gates (Jon Shafer Kickstarter). I have three Early Access games: Nuclear Throne, Invisible Inc and Prison Architect. All are going very well in terms of development and updates. Door Kickers I was an Alpha funder and I couldn't be more glad as I am. I've already got back the money spent in terms of entertainment, and the guys keep adding content and features.

I've only had one kickstarter project that failed its fulfilment "Unwritten: That Which Happened". But that was due to an unfortunate family crisis that afflicted Joe Houston. And iirc he is keeping the project in life support hoping in the future to come back to it. He offered the backers an option to get a refund.

The Potato Salad Kickstar has got to be the best one I've seen. It's not a scam, and it hasn't been abandoned. He did it just for jokes and asked for just $10, and got $55k instead. He ran out of Stretch Goal ideas so quickly. I just love the fact that he didn't even expect it to generate such a crazy amount of backers. The best part is if you backed $1 or more he said he will say your name out loud while making the salad. He has 6,911 people backers, he's going to have a fun time saying names heh.

I would really like to fund some projects but the fear of them being scams or them deciding to abandon it because it's too hard causes me to be untrusting.

I'm pretty happy with the KS projects I've backed so far.

Shadowrun Returns was pretty nice, and the first of the RPG renaissance projects to come out. It's cool that it came free with the Dragonfall Director's Cut standalone that just released.

Divinity Original Sin is simply amazing, and my favorite RPG in ages. My GOTY so far.

Wasteland 2 just came out. No time to play it just yet, but I'm really looking forward to a playthrough.

Dead State and Project Eternity are in beta. They seem to be progressing nicely.

The Torment teaser has been nice.

As for non-RPGs...

Xenonauts has been great, just what I wanted out of an X-Com spiritual successor. Retains elements of the original such as time units and larger squads that I consider pretty important.

Planetary Annihilation accomplished what it set out to do. It was cool to rocket-crash a moon to destroy a planet, but I guess it's still not my genre. Nice OST, though!

Star Citizen is making (slow?) progress. Arena Commander has been a fun diversion.

Defence Grid 2 has just sent me my special edition key when I didn't even pay for anything higher than the normal steam key. They also gave beta keys out and provided very regular updates - although this almost bordered on spam sometimes, but rather that than nothing. Yet to play the game though since it isn't quite done yet, so can't judge it although the beta was brilliant, but so far it's been a great experience

Haven't seen Assetto Corsa mentioned yet, which must be one of the better Early Access examples out there. Unlike many games, Kunos(the developer) had a very good foundation built prior to asking people for money. It came very light on content, but the developers had lots of stuff in the pipeline and have been steadily improving the game ever since.

Even though Kunos is a small team, they are relatively experienced and have some damn good credentials. It didn't take a leap of faith to get in on this one if you were a sim racing fan.

I posted my top played steam games in another thread today. 2 of them were early access titles. I think that says enough about the merits of that scheme.

Kickstarter I have little experience with, and so can't really give much input, but I totally think EA can be done right, by supporting the game in a timely fashion, and being honest about everything with the customers.

Prison Architect and Don't Starve are great examples of this. PA does a monthly update of meaningful content. One month they didn't.This was because one of the team had a baby. And they still said sorry. And no one cared. This is how you do it.

Shovel Knight was the first one I backed to get a final release, but man was it worth it. Absolutely fantastic game.

Wasteland 2 was my first Kickstarter and seems to have been released on good terms, though I've been out of town and not had a chance to play it.

Tabletop Simulator has been very similar to minecraft in its early days with a basic but still highly functional and fun beta release and constant updates and comments from the dev's on their forums. They are for sure a model that every early access game should strive to follow.

Pillars of Eternity is a bit late but we all know damn well they're gonna release by the end of the year.

A few haven't come out yet and are a little late (Octopus City Blues, Armikrog, Hyper Light Drifter, Radio the Universe) but they all have fairly consistent and substantive updates.

The rest still have a long ways to go til projected release. About the only delinquent project I've backed was Auditorium Duet which is nearly 2 years late, hasn't had a dev blog update for months and even longer for a KS update (and even then it was just too confirm the winner of some stupid t-shirt design contest), not to mention they developed and released intake, an entirely separate and, at that point, unannounced game, in the time since. Really grossed out at this one, but it's an outlier.

Early Access: The only 2 EA games I've done are Rust and Galactic Civilizations 3. Even though Rust hasn't updated their legacy build in ages, I still got 200 hours in it so that's more than worth the $20 I spent. Now I'm essentially getting the sequel to that game I spent 200 hours on for free over the coming weeks and months so I really really can't complain.

GalCiv 3 I haven't played as much from it's early form though I've been meaning to jump back in. They update regularly, have had several big content patches, and they are from a known developer who I trust which is why I haven't felt any worry about backing them.

Kickstarter: Only one game I've kickstarted, and that's Might No 9, and I did it for the same reason I did GalCiv 3, I trust the developer and it's basically a sequel to a series of games I really really like. Everything about MN9 looks absolutely awesome to me and while it's not out yet, I truly believe I'll like the end result.


(edit) In other words, I'm picky as hell about what EAs and KS I back... Big known entities with titles I know I'll enjoy.

I've backed 16 projects to date and two of them are out (Shovel Knight and Road Redemption, which is in Early Access). I don't have any horror stories but I'd say at least half of them have run into at least one issue I was qualify as major, or at least worth mentioning. (Shovel Knight is not one of them -- it was brilliant and I'm proud to have backed it.) The key is to stay on these people because a lot of high-risk Kickstarters are just a bunch of guys plugging away on their computers, working for cheap. This is how you want it done, because the ones with management tiers and big name devs looking for six-figure salaries are the ones that fly off the rails. But the downside is these guys aren't necessarily businessmen, so the backers need to hold them accountable sometimes.

One thing every Kickstarter I've seen has messed up is the delivery date. They all blow it by quite a bit, some of them by a lot. This is understandable because it's just so hard to hammer down a hypothetical date to finish a game. Just worth noting that anyone planning a Kickstarter should be very, very generous with the time you give yourself for completion.

Kerbal Spacecraft, Starbound, and Elite Frontier.

FTL was a massive success to me. What an incredible game. I still go back to it every once in a while and get totally addicted again for a few days.

I backed Wasteland 2, and I enjoy what I've played so far. Not amazing, but a good RPG.

Others I've back have yet to materialize. Project Eternity from Obsidian, Tides of Numenera from inXile and Cosmic Star Heroine from Zeboyd. All three seem to be coming along nicely based on recent updates I've seen.

Hate the steam early access, just encourages people to pay for for developers game. Star drive is still a mess and dayz is a joke. Maybe kickstarter is different but with steam early access it feels like a rip off.

I've backed 39 Kickstarter game projects (that got funded) and this is my opinion of those already released:

-Volgarr the Viking and Divinity: Original Sin are god-tier.

-Giana Sisters and Shadowgate are excellent.

-Wasteland 2, Xenonauts and Paper Sorcerer are currently sitting in my backlog, so no opinion yet.

-Shadowrun Returns was worse than I expected.

-Only Broken Age and Moebius have been disappointments to me, and the only games so far that I regret backing as I feel the devs were disingenuous in their Kisckstarter pitch. And even then only Moebius is what I would call a 'bad' game.

For me, the possibility of a Volgarr, a Divinity or a Shadowgate far outweighs the risks of a Moebius eventually creeping in. So yes, I still believe in the potential of crowdfunding. It's clearly the best thing that has happened to gaming since Hidetaka Miyazaki decided to apply for a job at From Software

Only one I'm nervous about so far is Mark of the Old Ones, and thats honestly just because I backed it on a whim and I'm not sure what to expect or how its going to turn out

Heart Forth Alicia, on the other hand, is looking slick

I've yet to back anything on kickstarter, but I've learned: I should have backed shovel knight, fighting games are incredibly expensive, and don't give money to double fine. Why is double fine the only studio that continues to complain about funding? Maybe they should finish a game? No wonder psychonauts 2 isn't getting made, there's two sides to every story, its not just that publishers are evil. Personally I don't like kickstarter as a concept but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

With Kickstarter, I've tried to really consider long and hard whether the project creators seem like they can live up to their pitch and if their pitch is really something outstanding. The former is obviously more important than the later, but a really impressive pitch can be enough to convince me to kick some money towards the project.

In general, all I've kickstarted at this point was Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun. In the case of WL2, I was already comfortable with inXile's ability to make a game and found myself confident that they could live up to their pitch. The game came out within a reasonable time frame, didn't seem to suffer feature creep, and has been pretty good for the 10+ hours I've put in since thursday (also not including the time I toyed around with the beta). I'm very happy with this project and found the deal to be even sweeter with how they threw in some of their previous games to give backers something to play while they waited. Though I did not back Torment, as I did not want to have multiple projects with inXile before saw one project done, I will gladly back future projects of theirs.

In the case of Shadowrun, though Harebrained's experience as a video game designer was rather limited (albeit still existing, unlike with Clang!), that the original guys behind Shadowrun were involved made me confident that they at least understood the project and how to make it "work". Furthermore, the pitch (It's like Neverwinter Nights but Shadowrun!) was enough to gain my interest, so I went ahead and backed that too. The game came out within a reasonable time, had a few kinks that got worked out as the game got updated, saw an excellent expansion that was even better than the base game, and then a stand alone version of said expansion (both of which were given free to backers, which was a nice gesture). I felt strong enough in this project that I actually bought a preorder of the game for a friend. That faith paid off, as I really really enjoyed the final project. I will happily support future games from these guys.

There were also a couple of tabletop games that I was willing to kickstart but wasn't able to afford at the time. I've since purchased the end results of those campaigns and have been extremely satisfied with what I've gotten and will gladly support future projects from those creators (one of which is actually starting a new campaign on Tuesday, so I'm looking forward to that )


I've generally shied away from Early Access because it seems a tad bit harder to be confident in an EA project. As such, I've only technically purchased three EA titles, but the reality is that one (Voxatron) was a humble bundle title and another (Gnomoria) was an IndieGame Stand sale. In both cases, the games were dirt cheap enough and interesting that I felt I'd get my money's worth within an hour or two of dicking around.

That said, the one legitimate Early Access game I've bought off of Steam was Caribbean! just yesterday. The clincher that made me go for this project is that the concept, Mount & Blade (a game I already adore) but pirates, was interesting enough for me to want it and that the direction of the project is that it was being built on top of M&B to begin with. As such, the game on Early Access is already pretty feature heavy and feels far enough along to where I feel confident in kicking money their way. The final push is that the game's already modest price was even lower for the weekend due to a sale and so I won't even be all that much out of my money if they run out of funding and have to cut the project. Thus far, I am happy with my purchase there and look forward to future updates.

I'm still going to continue to be weary on Early Access titles that do not inspire a great deal of confidence/interest, but I don't think the experiment is a wash. Meanwhile, I think that Kickstarter is still really great if you are super careful about who you back.

edit:
Also, I guess I technically purchased Kerbal Space Program as an early access title, but that was a gift for a friend. He seems to be pretty happy with it, so I'll consider that a win as well.

In my opinion, this campaign is perhaps the most recent one that does everything right
That Which Sleeps

1) Interesting concept/premise
It's a grand strategy where you play as an ancient Old One corrupting and manipulating the world in secret

2) A lot of development and progress pre-Kickstarter
The game is pretty much playable and complete with all major features and systems. Devs have an hour of footage showing them both making and playing the game, as well development blogs on IndieDB and TIGForum

3) A reasonable goal
Since the game is pretty complete, the goal of the Kickstarter was to raise funds to hire an artist, so they can revamp and improve the art and assets

4) Stretch goals
The Religion stretch goal had already been in the game, but the devs removed it since they didn't have the time or money to fine tune and fully implement the system. Procedual generation, same thing: already designed and prototyped but didn't have the time or money to keep in the game. The other goals are all built off of the already existing mechanics and system

5) Responsive and engaging developer
The best thing about this campaign. No other campaign I've backed has had such a communicative developer. Every question is answered with such detailed responses, exactly how the game works, down to the numbers and percentages. While most devs can only say, "This is what we want to do", these devs are able to describe every system, every feature and mechanic, in definite terms, since the game already exists rather than being some quick vertical slice made for a Kickstarter campaign