Camelot Unchained - New MMO Kickstarter Project

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.
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 :).

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.
 
I still dont understand all these 1 man MMOs that they are asking for $1k to $50k to do. There is no way that 1 person will be able to do that, and some of them show the client but that is the easy part. The game is only 10% client, the other hard part is the 90% networking and server. There is now way that they would be able to write that and have enough server to host the game for more than 5 people.
 
I still dont understand all these 1 man MMOs that they are asking for $1k to $50k to do. There is no way that 1 person will be able to do that, and some of them show the client but that is the easy part. The game is only 10% client, the other hard part is the 90% networking and server. There is now way that they would be able to write that and have enough server to host the game for more than 5 people.
I'm wondering if some of these little kick starter and early access games are just a hope the dev can show off his/their product in hopes of getting a big company to come in and buy them out and/or take over the project? I suppose some may be trying to do just that. Not saying this is what CU was trying to do but with some of these projects I do wonder.
 
I'm wondering if some of these little kick starter and early access games are just a hope the dev can show off his/their product in hopes of getting a big company to come in and buy them out and/or take over the project? I suppose some may be trying to do just that. Not saying this is what CU was trying to do but with some of these projects I do wonder.

Yeah I am sure that some of that is likely, but what game studio is going to invest in a MMO that they basically only have an idea of, and barely any real game. They are usually interested in games far along enough to just finish, not build from scratch.
 
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.
There is also the issue that all these Kickstarter MMOs have way too ambitious plans for v1 of their MMO. But if they don't have ambitious plans, they are already set for failure because already released games will have far more content than they will. And why is less content a problem? Because all these games (kickstarter, non-kickstarter, released, in-development, all of them) are just sometimes-better, sometimes-worse clones of the same games from 25 years ago. Only content differentiates between them.

Come up with a NEW type of MMO, with a good thought-out gameplay design, and focus on just an enjoyable base that does not have to rely on a lot of content to compete with all the other MMOs.
 
There is also the issue that all these Kickstarter MMOs have way too ambitious plans for v1 of their MMO. But if they don't have ambitious plans, they are already set for failure because already released games will have far more content than they will. And why is less content a problem? Because all these games (kickstarter, non-kickstarter, released, in-development, all of them) are just sometimes-better, sometimes-worse clones of the same games from 25 years ago. Only content differentiates between them.

Come up with a NEW type of MMO, with a good thought-out gameplay design, and focus on just an enjoyable base that does not have to rely on a lot of content to compete with all the other MMOs.
That's super hard to do though. A truly new MMO concept is not an easy thing.

In general, the MMO market is just hard these days. There are some really good established games with big studios behind them, and since people usually only pay one you've got your work cut out for you peeling off subscribers.

I don't think big ambitious projects should do kickstarter, it really works for smaller stuff.
 
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