Jade Rants: Mighty #9 Needs More Money...

[Jason]

I'm gonna play, I guess, angels advocate here just because I do feel this way about the majority of publically funded campaigns.

I like the idea that people like us can go and send $10 to a developer to create something we're interested in. I like that. I mean... I play music for tips. It's not all that different at the end of the day.

However, the problem I see comes from the abuse of the system. I think Might No.9 is an unintentional abuse of the system and I think the potato salad thing is absolutely an intentional one. It happens because it's a system that allows it to happen.

Ragnatz and I have had a few debates about this whole thing and we generally agree to disagree on a few things here and there, but my method to solve this problem would be this, and I'll use Kickstarter as my scapegoat as it's the largest system out there right now.

Again... this is just what I, personally, think should be done...

You have a project you want to get funded by Kickstarter. Awesome, great, good for you. You sit down and figure you'll need $10,000 to get it going. (Nice round number, makes it easy). So you setup the campaign and get all the social media and video and all that put together and whatever else you need to do.

Kickstarter says to you "Ok, you need $10,000. We can estimate for your project type that will take 6 months to raise. (Again, just a random number that makes it kinda easy to work with.) If at the end of that 6 months you have not raised the total amount, we will take a percentage of that but give you the rest. You can then try again to raise the money, but only up to 75% of the amount you originally requested. After 9 months (another random number), you can post another campaign for the original (or greater) amount. If you do reach your goal at the end of that time, we will allow you to raise an additional 10% of the total amount, of which we (Kickstarter) will take 7%. Again, you're not allowed to have another campaign of a great or equal amount to the first for 9 months."

This would, effectively eliminate stretch goals and all of that on Kickstarter.

"But wait!" you cry and wave your hands violently at me. "What if someone wants to find the project after that time? What will they do!?" you fall to the ground weeping.

That's an easy one. It's not like the dev can't take donations or anything else like that privately. They just can't use Kickstarter to do it for whatever that period of time is. There's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, LiveJournal and about a million other options for social media that people can use to promote their project.

Hell you can even throw together a quick little website with Weebly or Wix or whatever that takes almost no time to do at all and direct folks there via social media or even the Kickstarter page.

It works for Daniel Remar and all those folks doing Minecraft resource packs.

In the end I'm not saying crowd funding projects is bad. I'm just saying it's a bit of a mess and needs a lot of tweeking to make it better for everyone... not just the devs who rake in a ton of money with nothing but a few sketches, some chiptune music and a little bit of nostalgia on a page and the promise of your name in the credits for your donation.

Case in point there is Mighty No.9. I'm kinda excited about the game. I loves me some Inafune action games... but it's gotten so big and bloated that doesn't feel the same to me anymore. Kinda like when an indie band gets signed to a big label and now has a ton of money to work with. The spirit changes. I'd say compare Mega Man 8 to Mega Man 9. Know what I mean?

I mean, right now MN9 has made enough money that nearly 200,000 people could have paid for a copy of the game at $20 a pop. That's before anyone even has the game. Where's the incentive anymore to release something that's going to live up to those expectations? They've got their money already. Not saying I think that they're going to just throw a bit of crap into a download and send it out to folks... but what's to stop that from happening elsewhere.

Ragnatz made the point once while we were talking about this that it should be something like a "buyer beware" situation where if you pay for it and it's crap... it's not really the devs fault. They didn't make you buy it (Raggy, if I remember that wrong I do apologize and please correct me). And I can agree with that. Absolutely I do. But if, as the time goes on, the devs on that project decide to cut a few corners and not shine up them graphics as much because they already made more money just asking for money than they ever planned on with the actual product... that's where I say the system needs to have safeguards.

Like I said, I like the system but it's an easy system to abuse. I just think it should be changed to prevent that abuse.

I don't want to do away with the system, I just want to make it impossible to abuse.