The Banner Saga: Inside the Development of a Kickstarterfunded Game
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Production continued non-stop. We developed our riskiest (and most visible) system first: the combat, providing monthly updates not only with videos of our progress, but with a work-in-progress state of the game hosted on Steam, so backers could actually poke around the game itself and see how things were coming along. Hah, we thought! Success! Who else has done so much to involve players in production? Soon, the combat was almost ready for release.
That's when things took an unexpected turn.
We started getting responses from backers with comments like (What is this multiplayer crap?) We'd politely respond. We'd get more comments like (I didn't fund this just so you could make some free mp garbage).
Hmm. Alright, clearly some people missed the message. Suddenly backers we had never heard from before were calling us scammers and swindlers and things much less flattering. We decided to do a Q&A session where we laid everything out in a single update and apologized for missing our original deadline. That's when things really hit the fan.
Some backers were incensed that production was taking longer than our original estimate, back when we hoped to make $100,000. Some were furious that the combat would be free, or that non-backers would get to play it. Some insisted that we had wasted their money by making multiplayer content, despite the assets, code and interface all being produced for the single player game. Many were fuming that the game must be (pay to win), despite the fact that you only get matched against opponents with equal teams, regardless of how you earned them. Within the game itself, the term (pay to lose) had started to appear, since paying money would only serve to get you matched against players with vastly more play time under their belts.
We also had a lot of backers supporting us, asking the detractors one particular question: (Where have you guys been this whole time?) What we soon learned is that many of our backers never read any of the updates. They had never read the original campaign. According to Kickstarter metrics that went up after our campaign ended, only 30% of backers even watched our campaign video, and they felt very betrayed about all of this, to which we personally felt a resounding (What?).
For us, it all culminated in an article that appeared on Gamasutra, in which an editor was expressing the opinion that he'll never back another Kickstarter. In it, he states (the latest move by the development team (Stoic) most definitely goes against what I paid money for. The Banner Saga: Factions was released last week, a free-to-play multiplayer...)
He goes on to say, (For most of my backed projects I've turned email updates off... I honestly couldn't care less if you've put out a new podcast, or got some new concept art to show me -- I want real content! .Don't feel obliged to release an update if you have nothing decent to show me!)
I guess a playable version of the game you backed doesn't count as (real content).
We got that (what?) feeling all over again. Here's a front-page article from a gaming journalist saying that he not only refuses to read any information about the games he supported, but that we had scammed him by doing what we said we'd be doing.
