GoldenTiger
Fully [H]
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2004
- Messages
- 29,587
Camelot unchained had other investors that jumped in (as promised) after the kickstarter proved the interest. However, as you said, it's a big affair now... Not quite as much in 2013, when I was beta testing eso .Kickstarters just aren't going to work for MMOs. They are too expensive. Even back in the day they cost a ton of money but now they REALLY cost a ton. Remember that the original DAoC was going up against games like Everquest which was, to put it mildly, garbage. There was so much shitty about EQ and UO which were really the only two things out there that you didn't have to produce a masterpiece to be competitive. You could just not be a complete dick to your player base and offer, well, anything but mindless grinding and be worth looking at.
Now though? You are competing with the likes of ESO, FF14, and WoW. All have their issues to be sure, but they are over all very well-done games with a lot to offer that are very polished. If you want to have any hope in the space, you have to compete with them and that's hard. People usually won't pay for more than 1 or MAYBE 2 MMOs at once so you have to be good enough for someone to leave one of those and come play your game.
That needs a lot more money to make happen, and Kickstarter just isn't going to raise those kind of funds. A couple million isn't going to do it, you are talking hundreds of millions.
Kickstarter is good for small, what I'll call "Alt-A" projects where you are making a more niche game that can be made on a small budget. It isn't good for something that needs a huge studio.
I would still be playing eso if they'd fixed their server performance and restored higher player caps in cyrodiil . Sadly, no other game like it has launched since... The inertia is too much now for anything but a mass market blockbuster mmo to break through. I still hope someday they'll fix eso server performance.