Woe Is Gaming! Wildman Kickstarter

wildman

I’ve wanted to comment on Chris Taylor’s Wildman Kickstarter ever since it first appeared.  The sale of Gas Powered Games and the suffering of Wildman was fun to watch for the same reason I cheered the bankruptcy of THQ: they didn’t know what the hell they were doing and needed a wake-up call.  I’m beyond tired of game developers operating in a vacuum, making ridiculous assumptions about “what gamers want” and creating their own narrow-minded formulas for success.

In a way, Kickstarter is a much-needed dose of reality in the game industry, and I wish every major game had to survive some kind of crowd funding test before it could enter production.  We might have been spared derivative garbage like Homefront and Saints Row, since they would’ve relied on actual interest rather than cynical multimillion dollar ad campaigns revolving around dildos.  Think of how many billions are wasted in marketing instead of being spent on development — it’s impossible to sympathize.  Gas Powered Games is privately owned, of course, but that also means Chris Taylor alone is to blame for its underwhelming pitch.  Get out of the vacuum, sir.  We live in the Internet age, where millions of passionate players struggle to be heard by the industry, and although it may not seem coherent or constructive, Kickstarter encourages you to start small, listen carefully, and build on success… if you can humble yourself.

The Wildman pitch video was a raw, unblinking look into the hubris of a developer’s mind, telling us practically nothing but asking for over a million dollars in return.  That’s how they think.  And now he tries to say Kickstarter is the real problem.

Really?  Is that why Star Citizen has raised nearly $8 million using the exact same model?

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This is part of the Woe is Gaming! series, which analyzes events and topics in order to heighten the discussion of the business, design, and culture of the gaming phenomenon

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