Quoting: Segata Sanshiro

Are you under the impression that LucasArts gave Ron Gilbert millions of dollars in royalties for the Monkey Island games, so that he's got enough money to make a decent game lying around in his bank account?

Nope, I'm saying that for someone like him it's much easier to go and find a private investment given his past experience and reputation in the industry and not further saturate Kickstarter and make it even harder for lesser known people to get funding which they - unlike Ron Gilbert - would find it almost impossible to get any other way.

From what I've seen, having "big names" really helps give crowdfunding more visibility and more credibility among the general public. "What I've seen" includes both the stats that Cheeseness mentioned and personal experiences of myself and other staunch game backers I've gotten to know.

If developers like Tim Schafer and Jane Jensen had never come to kickstarter, I doubt I would have had sufficient motivation to even create a kickstarter account, and would never have realized what a wonderful opportunity crowdfunding is for giving Indie game developers motivation to do Linux ports. You know the recent articles about how Linux market is often too small to pay for the time spent on the port? Well I've discovered a different way to make developers happy they committed to a Linux port, and that's by being an enthusiastic backer who invests both time and money into supporting them during the critical period of getting sufficient funding for the game to be made in the first place. That same enthusiasm that led us to have a higher Humble Bundle average makes us even more valuable as backers!

Yup, you can thank Tim Schafer for getting me hooked on crowdfunding Linux games, which means I'll be ready to back when you're ready to try your first campaign!!

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Quoting: Segata SanshiroWish "big names" like Ron Gilbert would start risking a bit of their own money instead of other people's...

Are you under the impression that LucasArts gave Ron Gilbert millions of dollars in royalties for the Monkey Island games, so that he's got enough money to make a decent game lying around in his bank account?

That's not what I heard about how LucasArts operated, which might have something to do with Ron Gilbert giving up on publishers and going with crowdfunding to become independent...

BTW running a kickstarter is not mutually exclusive with putting your own money on the line; often both are required to accomplish a project. A couple of Ron's contemporaries from Sierra, Lori & Corey Cole, have had to sink a bunch of their own money into Hero U plus the $400k from backers -- they could not have done it without both funding sources, and the funds are still rather tight.

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Quoting: wolfyrionyou forgot the best game of all ages!!!

And it has monsters as well!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000479544/blackwake-multiplayer-pirate-fps-set-in-the-age-of [External Link]

Hey, don't forget to give us a heads-up when you've found a hot new project!

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Thanks for this review -- Sproggiwood is officially on my wish-list, which is important since certain family members actually check my wish-list at this time of year ;)

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I love to see this as well, maybe my next laptop will actually be decent at playing games!

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More of M.O.R.E is an interesting project for 4X enthusiasts, which didn't make it into this article but still runs for 6 more days:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1447560584/more-of-more [External Link]

This is analogous to the 2nd campaign for fantasy 4X Worlds of Magic (which I'm quite impressed with after trying in Early Acess) being all about funding extra features rather than the base game, which is just about to enter alpha testing among backers.

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Woo hoo, lovely little linux-support icon for the ScummVM titles! Got a couple of classics in my GOG cart right now.

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Quoting: GuestI just searched kickstarter for racing games and action rpgs, but there is nothing worth reporting. And unfortunately I can’t have an RSS feed for my searches, so manual search every time? Not fun.

Same for indiegogo, there is only one RSS feed for *all* projects… Pretty much useless. But there is one (only one) game for Linux: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/return-to-the-dark-reef [External Link] . It looks like it could actually be decent once finished.

Doing the searches for new game projects is definitely much more primitive than it ought to be, but that's only one aspect to putting out a Funding Crowd issue. Often one or two of us do most of the searching, and "nominate" projects that look potentially of interest and don't have ridiculous stretch goals for Linux support, ideally giving a one-line summary for each game (genre, perhaps a well-known dev on the team...) Then other team members can poke through the list and pick which projects they find interesting enough to read up on & write about. If the list is too unappealing, the issue will just get pushed back a bit until some interesting ones turn up.

We can sure use more people who are willing to write up one-or-two paragraph mini-reviews on projects they find intriguing! Even just a couple more people writing up a couple projects apiece should do the trick for a decent sized article. I would say that's our biggest need right now, since normally Munt or I can scrape up a selection of new projects with Linux support. Scaine is an excellent writer who doesn't have time to keep covering all the new projects, and I can rarely manage to do more writing than report on "What Happened".

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Yup, still happy to be a supporter

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Sounds intriguing, think I should look into this one more...

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