I don’t understand Kickstarter. I know what it is, why it’s good and how people use it to gain funding for their cool products, and I’m fine with those things, but there’s one aspect which really just doesn’t sit right with me or even make very much sense. In many regards, it’s truly the essence of the system itself.
More specifically, it’s the strange – and often downright silly – way that reward tiers are handled at some times for games. $1 and you get nothing, which is fine; $15 for the game itself is reasonable, it’s basically a pre-order and you often have beta access thrown in too; $30 for your name in the credits panders to the human need for validation; $60 and you’ll get some physical trinkets alongside the previous tiers, which is once again fine.
But as you go further up the ladder, it devolves into a weird system, where you’re often paying to work on the game or do testing at earlier and earlier stages, rather than being paid to do so.
I’m aware that I’m not the first person to have found myself dumbfounded by some of these “rewards”, but looking at the latest offender, which comes from rhythm specialists Harmonix in the form of Amplitude for PS3 and PS4, you’ll see why I’m making this statement now.
“We’re letting up to 500 people in on the process of getting music in the game.” says the blurb next to $500 pledge. If 500 people take that offer up, then not only is that 250,000 for Harmonix, but that’s a whole load of money saved paying focus groups and basically doing qualitative testing to find the right tone of the game. They would be doing this either way, but now the money is effectively coming from the testers themselves. Sneaky.
That’s obviously not the only reward, and some higher up ones are perfectly fine in my mind, at least in terms of contents, rather than value – dinner with the Harmonix founders or Tim Schafer probably isn’t worth $3,500, but there’s nothing wrong with it existing as a reward. It’s the same for the final tier – you’d get a helicopter ride for $375 rather than $10,000 and could probably pay someone even better much less for a jam session, but it’s an okay reward in itself.
Here’s the worst bit though, they’re asking people to pay to have their song in the game. I know next to nothing about the music industry, but I do know a thing or two about getting audio for your games: unless you’ve got a friend who is good at it and will do it for free, you have to pay for it.
Harmonix seem to have other ideas here. If you pay them the lowly fee of $7,500, they might put your song in the game. Of course, it has to be of a decent standard, suitably non-vulgar, and you’ll have to actually own the song and have the individual tracks for Harmonix to remix to suit the style of the game, but then it’ll be in the bonus section of the game. While I realise that it’s a good way to gain exposure for lesser known artists, it’s also several thousand dollars for the privilege.
In my mind, Kickstarter should generally represent the bare minimum costs for a game to get made, with any other purchases making the profit. Those costs should – and could – be achieved without the ridiculous tiers which ask people to pay to work, or to give away their own creations. It’s not just Kickstarter or Harmonix though, as Shaq-Fu: A Legend Reborn on Indiegogo has a $6,500 “perk”, which two people have actually purchased, to work as a concept artist. You might even get a real job after it, so you can make all of that money back after a good few months. Bargain!
Music is at the heart of the game, and the heart of Harmonix, so it’s absurd that they’re leaving it up to people to buy their way into the game’s soundtrack, and therefore the mechanics, rather than just doing their own job a bit better. But, of course, that’s not going to make them hundreds of thousands of pounds – at least not as quickly as their chosen methods.
Kickstarter isn’t just pre-orders, it’s a horribly unbalanced system, where rewards sometimes aren’t rewarding and can even be the opposite. I don’t think I’d want to buy a game where people have paid – as opposed to having been paid – to work on it, and I just can’t understand how anyone could.
carson321
I agree with the fact that it is ridiculous that people are being asked to pay to work on a game, but I cannot say that it would stop me purchasing a game if I knew that it had been in some way funded by these actions.
Also, I think people get a bit carried away and swept up by kickstarter, if there is a project they are interested in, they will be reading down the donations list and salivating more and more to the point where they don’t actually realise they are paying to do someone elses work
Tuffcub
This is the same Harmonix who were sold for an undisclosed multi million dollar sum in 2010. The same company who, in 2011, paid their shareholders a “multi-year earn-out. In December 2011, the former stockholders of Harmonix were awarded $533 million”.
You have a made a fuck load of money already, get the fuck off Kickstarter and leave it for what it was meant for, new people with new ideas, not getting us to pay you already ready profitable company money to remake one of your old games.
colmshan1990
Also Amplitude is a Sony owned IP, this is already being advertised on the official Playstation blog and the developers are refusing to answer if Sony is going to fund the game.
What the hell is this doing on Kickstarter at all? It looks like Sony publishing a Harmonix game using the public’s money.
Kennykazey
This.
tonycawley
Think tuffcub has hit the key point of the article here. Kickstarter is for independent people who have a good idea but no money to find it’s development. People and companies who have the money shouldn’t even be in there.
TSBonyman
This. I find it distasteful seeing big companies using Kickstarter, it shouldn’t be allowed.
hazelam
maybe some people consider getting to be part of the creative process that goes into making a game, or having some sort of input, as a reward.
even if it doesn’t end up being all that creative a position.
in the end though, if people didn’t want these rewards, they wouldn’t pay for them.
unless of course they just want to support the project, in which case the rewards might be a secondary concern.
i don’t know much about the music industry, what would it cost to give a band/artist the kind of exposure the Harmonix game would provide.
maybe 7.5k would be cheap.
the again, maybe it’s ludicrously expensive.
if the people who paid are unhappy with their rewards, that’s one thing, but are they?
i haven’t heard a lot of that kind of talk.
the only times i’ve really heard of problems with Kickstarter is when a project gets abandoned, or the creator legs it with the money.
or they don’t actually give any of the rewards that were promised.
tonyyeb
I know nothing about this developer or their history but as far as I’m concerned if people want to spend their money on these ‘rewards’ then let them. Personally I’d never do such a thing, even if I was in the music industry, trying to get my music out there. But that is personal choice. Yes I don’t like wasting my money but I also don’t like being told how to spend it either.
zeroTRoN
Multi MILLION $$$$ company wants YOU to fund thier coke & prostitute addiction . Dont delay! ACT NOW & you…… YES YOU, could have an awkward , disconnected dinner date with two money hungry d bags, who would probably stick YOU with the check.
What are you waiting for? Give them all the money!
Act NOW & you could sit in a second rate office space that they rent for the month, & do busy work that likely wont have shiz to do with the game. Hurry. DEH NEEEEED MOAR MUNNEYS
MrYd
The basic idea behind Kickstarter is a good one, and works well.
But, as always, it’s ended up being horribly abused. If you’ve already got huge piles of money, and you want to work on something owned by someone else with huge piles of money, it just doesn’t seem like an appropriate way to go about it.
The “paying for work you’d normally get paid for” thing isn’t as big a problem to me. Maybe that money is a good investment. Your $7500 could get you a lot of publicity, not just in the game but if you were clever and made a big deal out of it (I’m sure there are plenty of websites that might run a story about it).
Some new scheme might be required. A simple pre-order thing? Here’s the money, make the game, if they don’t make it, you get your money back. Maybe with an option to pay less on the understanding that if things go wrong and it never gets finished (because sometimes things happen), you don’t get your money back. Problem there is the various payment options. Paypal aren’t, or at least weren’t, keen on people paying for things that don’t exist yet. Pay with any sort of card using a reputable card processing company and you might well be able to reverse the charges later (and their massive lists of rules might or might not cover it)
Or some sort of proper investment scheme set up for small payments. They want £500,000, and 20,000 people pay £25 each. You get your copy of the game for that, if it ever makes it all the way. After that, you get a share of any profits. Say, 50% for those 20,000 people, and 50% for the people that did all the work. Some guessing at how much Sony or whoever takes, and you could have £5 a copy shared between those 20,000 people. 100,000 copies later, you’ve made your £25 back.
It’d probably never work, because people would want a lot more than their £25 back, someone would try hiding all the figures so they never have to pay anyone anything, and the Americans would hate it because it might sound a bit communist.
WalkingP
Seems to me there are a lot of people out there with plus bucks and minus IQ.
Lieutenant Fatman
I understand people not being happy about this happening, but if people are willing to back it with their cash, then that’s up to them. Kickstarter aren’t going to block it, they make money regardless of who’s project it is. They’re a business as well, they’re not going to turn down money.