Kickstarter Guesstimates

Good Morning Friends! I am about to take you down a rabbit hole, because yesterday without really meaning to… I absolutely dug one. I am not exactly sure what causes my brain to travel the pathways it does, but like so many things in my life, it started out simple enough.

I had seen some news scroll across my feed about Ashes of Creation and I logged into Kickstarter to try and remember during what phase of testing I would be getting access. For those who are curious, we are in Alpha 1 still and have Alpha 2 and two phases of closed beta before I get access. Granted I knew I was backing a slow-moving horse when I chipped money in to fund this project, but what I did not remember is that every single project has an estimated delivery date associated with it. These are wildly inaccurate, but it planted a seed in my brain as to exactly HOW wildly inaccurate they were.

This of course led to me pulling a google sheet, logging the projected dates for all twenty-five software projects that I have backed since the launch of Kickstarter. After that, I spent the next hour googling to find release dates that map up to each product giving me the above table. I guess I should talk a bit about my methodology because I was trying to keep things simple I logged the month and year for each project and then did some “datediff” math to figure out how many months late a given project was when it released. There were a few projects that have never been released, and for those, I have currently plugged in June 2022 even though I know it is equally wildly inaccurate. Of those projects, one had an updated release date so I used that instead. I get that my methodology is not perfect but this is just to create some general trends that we can talk about.

Abandonware

Riding the way of “pretty Minecraft” games was TUG, an open-world survival builder MMORPG by Nerd Kingdom. TUG stood for The Untitled Game, and honestly, it looked really interesting to me because at the time it was trying to do something that nobody had really pulled off. In the years to follow the launch of this project, however, it has been done over and over again and pulled off successfully. To date, this project is 89 months late based on the original estimate, and the last update to the Kickstarter was in March of 2017. We know this is a dead project but no one has been willing likely for legal reasons to actually just come out and say it. In the comments, you can even see someone going as far as trying to start a class action lawsuit against the company. I gambled some money and I lost, and I am largely okay with that.

Best In Class

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mages of Mystralia from Borealys Games that not only met the original Kickstarter delivery estimate but beat it by one month. Granted this is maybe not the fairest example because before the Kickstarter launched, I had already played a very polished demo of the game at Pax South. However, I feel like they need to get credit here for beating the Kickstarter estimation game and actually being able to deliver on a project ahead of time. I also feel like we need to give credit to the mobile game Cockatilt and The Wonderful 101 Remastered which were both released within a month of the original estimate which would simply account for the natural shift in a schedule.

The Worst Offenders

Of the games that have actually been released, the worst offender in the delay is Crowfall. This is not shocking given that MMORPGs notoriously take about twice as long to produce as the original estimates. By the time Crowfall was officially released in 2021 it was 55 months later than the first estimate, so just over 4 and a half years late. Granted there is part of me that would prefer that the game still is in testing so that maybe it could turn into a game that I was actually interested in playing. It was a game with some interesting concepts that coalesced into something that I was wholly uninterested in and I am not sure I have logged into the final released version. That is part of the risk of backing a project that is only funded on some pretty prose and a few bits of concept art.

The Full List

I realize that I posted an image of a spreadsheet, but for sake of those with “old eyes” like myself, I am going to actually share the information in text form. Here is the full list of the twenty-five projects I have backed throughout the years sorted ascending based on “months late”. If you are so inclined I have shared the raw spreadsheet here.

• Mages of Mystralia – 1 Month Early
• Cockatilt – 1 Month Late
• The Wonderful 101: Remastered – 1 Month Late
• Ravaged – 3 Months Late
• Warmachine Tactics – 3 Months Late
• Hamsterdam – 5 Months Late
• Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance – 5 Months Late – Projected Release Date
• TemTem – 6 Months Late
• Sunless Skies – 8 Months Late
• Wasteland 2 – 9 Months Late
• Divinity: Original Sin 2 – 9 Months Late
• Amplitude – 10 Months Late
• Battle Chasers: Nightwar – 10 Months Late
• Battletech – 11 Months Late
• Dead State – 12 Months Late
• Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey – 19 Months Late
• InSomnia the Ark – 22 Months Late
• Boyfriend Dungeon – 25 Months Late
• Torment: Tides of Numenera – 26 Months Late
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 27 Months Late
• HEX TCG MMO – 30 Months Late – Now Defunct but did release
• Ashes of Creation – 42 Months Late so far – No Release Date
• Crowfall – 55 Months Late
• Curse of the Deadwood – 66 Months Late – No Release Date
• TUG – 89 Months Late – No Release Date – No Updates since 2017

The Kickstarter Gamble

I think one of the challenges with Kickstarter is the interface and the way that the project pages are designed to make it seem like you are purchasing a product. In actuality, you are gambling on an idea that someone out there has, and hoping that maybe just maybe it comes to fruition. You are investing in the future of a product, and like with all investments… sometimes things go off the rails completely and you lose all of your money. For the most part, I have done pretty well thus far with my video game Kickstarter, though the long-tailed nature of them has led me to plunk my money on the line far less often than I did in those heady early days.

The first project I ever funded was Wasteland 2 in 2012, and the last project that I funded was Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance in 2022. The last one I am not even sure I am that interested in the game, but wanting to help support more Fallen London nonsense to exist in the world because it is a phenomenal setting. Granted my sample size is small with only twenty-five games backed over a ten-year span, but there is definitely a trend toward games coming in late. Given that the average on my list was just shy of twenty months late, and the median was ten months late… you really need to take that estimated delivery date as the complete nonsense that it really is. If you are backing a Kickstarter you are gambling on the future of a franchise and the hope that maybe just maybe someday you will get to play it.

Does this impact my likelihood to back a game on Kickstarter? Somewhat to be honest, but I had already reached that conclusion before looking at the data. The types of Kickstarters that I now back are less about me wanting the product and more about me wanting to help support and fund the product. For example, I thought Boyfriend Dungeon was a worthy cause and was a game that should exist in the world, and even though I have yet to play it… I was more than happy to plunk some money on the line knowing at some point I would walk away with a discount copy of the game. Other games like Crowfall or Ashes of Creation were essentially just me getting a cheap copy of the game and a space in line for the alpha/beta process if they turned out to be phenomenal. There are folks who have an ax to grind with how inaccurate these estimates end up being, but I am not one of them. I just abused it for a blog post.