80% of the top KS campaigns have missed their ship date or have failed to adequately deliver their goods or services.

The problem is in the contracts not the publisher/developer relationship. What a good deal of these KS projects have is great ideas from great designers and great developers, but what they lack rarely have are business managers, accountants, logistics managers, administrators, et cetera.

The KS model, as it stands, is a mess and really needs some tweaking…

ralphwiggum:
I don’t believe things are as black and white as saying publishers are evil and kickstarter is the messiah of the gaming industry. Nobody likes a rushed game, but we’ve all seen examples of games run over budget and time because the developers weren’t held to account. Whilst bigger budget doesn’t necessarily equate to better games, AAA titles generally require more programmers who in turn need to be paid a decent wage…can kickstarter reliably cover the costs? If you want your game to sound like it wasn’t voiced by the kid next door *cough* Black Mesa *cough* then the costs of hiring voice actors also drives up cost. I say good on kickstarter for bringing in a new player to the ballgame but it’s laughable to think this is the end of traditional publishers.

Well said.

If people should learn anything from the Kickstarter fad isn’t that so much that publishers are inherently evil but more developers are often have a complete lack of business sense. I mean how many Kickstarter-funded projects meet their own deadlines with all their promised features intact? Not an awful lot.

spooler: ^this
Kick starter is not the glorious new dawn everyone keeps claiming it to be.

The scary thing is kickstarter basically gives open-license for the dodgy developers to rip everyone off, with minimal practical recourse.

Kickstarter could really do with a milestone system rather than all money up-front, but then your basically back with a traditional publisher model which is so ‘evil’

ralphwiggum: I don’t believe things are as black and white as saying publishers are evil and kickstarter is the messiah of the gaming industry.

^this
Kick starter is not the glorious new dawn everyone keeps claiming it to be.

this is very true actually. There’s a lot of developers out there that do a lot of dodgy shit that’s wrong by the publisher. So it goes both ways. Yeah there’s a lot of asshole publishers out there that do dodgy shit too, but if a game is inherently flawed as a result of the developers inability to work properly then that’s not the fault of the publisher.

However Publishers have become necessary evils in the modern industry, thanks to crowd sourcing we can now be rid of the process once an for all.. that said, dodgy developers will still be dodgy and still approach kickstarter and crowdsourcing in the same way they have done in the past with publishers… actually it can be even worse because now people will have more of a sense of entitlement- meaning if the developer fucks up, they fuck up twice as bad. Its risky, but no more risky than say buying a game at retail.

Maybe they need to stop treating publishers like a source of free money, something is seriously screwed when these companies can spend a hundred million dollar budget one making the same quality games which we’re starting to get from kickstarters.

GPG should have just pitched a Supreme Commander (1) successor, thousands of units, physics driven RTS on a huge scale. It is hands down the best thing the studio has ever done and at my uninformed estimate, probably a lot cheaper to achieve. With modern systems and without the annoyance of being on the cusp of dx 10, as was the case with Supcom 1, something truly engaging could have been achieved.
I am aware of TASpring and Planetary annihilation, but these don’t fit the bill.

Why go to a publisher when you can go to Kickstarter and retain 100% of your IP?
Not to mention get 100% of the profits?

KS has a huge consumer base and if that wasn’t enough, it is a marketing machine that will spread word about the project (What a publisher is supposed to do among other things).
Then depending on the platform the Developer chooses to launch on, adds to that extensively. See Steam record sales for Indie Developers for case point and if per chance, they don’t want to part with 15% of their profits for Steam Advertising and Bandwidth costs, they can distribute themselves.

Publishers are no longer needed in a digital age… And like the music industry, going down kicking and screaming instead of adjusting and maintaining profit…