Walking Dead is more about the atmosphere. It's not about watching a bunch of dudes get torn apart for 32 pages. We expect stories of survivors and it to be about them. Kirkman has explained if Grimes bites it, he'll continue on with the other characters like Glen or Carl.
The Batman thing I'd understand (although I'd love a LA Noir GCPD game), while WD's new characters works considering it's an ensemble cast. Also, consider that Lee (via the player) will have the option of making choices that Rick would never consider as options that early on in the story timeline.
Oh, I thought the idea was "I want to make a game ala Adventure Time meets Zelda and a Shafer P&C." Lots of ways for a beginner to cut his teeth these days.
Ugh... or the game does the same crap with Claire, because god forbid you show a woman in her 30s in a video game.
Personally, I like this choice. They're maintaining the feel of the series but I'm sure the cameos will remain just that. But here's the nice thing about giving us a new character - Lee is not safe and his future is unknown. For all we know, we might be playing Clementine or some other new character in episodes 4-5.
Well then do it, but get something made before you go on Kickstarter. Tim put his good name front and center, everyone else on that site explains their project pitch, even me. Put a team together, maybe with friends and get something concrete. It could be a board game model , or a full design with a demo. It takes a while, but it's worth it.
Right, people will always pay for quality, or what they perceive as quality. Look at Bottled Water. We can get water anywhere free of charge, but what do many people do? Buy filtered water in bottles. But I've seen this treatment first hand.
My friends and I released a Japanese Pen and Paper RPG called Maid RPG, and we pitched it to anime fans and 4chan. We ran playtests, demos and little previews on the site, answering any question on hand. We also stated we weren't going to go after pirates, only asking them to try the game and possibly donating, and the PDFs would not have watermarks or be locked down. Paid PDFs were theirs to keep with free updates and rule fixes.
Wouldn't you know it? The PDFs leaking on the internet boosted our sales up 500% because we treated our customers like human beings and we knew we had a solid product on our hands.
So what would you have done?
To some degree, some bit of concept/design theft is acceptable. But there's times where games mindlessly follow the design to the limit and they just become "well, why bother playing this game when you could just go back to the game that they ripped off."
It's a nice idea on paper since there are plenty of morons out there, but it becomes a eugenics issue really soon once it hits the floor. How do you test this? An IQ test? A situational drill? Who gets to decide if you can have a child?
It gets into some really creep twilight zone stuff as you think about it.
So sadly, we get stupid people doing stupid things at a kid's expense.
A long time ago I used to work at an arcade, and for all intents and purposes, we WERE day care. Now I didn't often mind, I like kids, but sometimes the kids were just dumped there with absolutely no money and left to staring at the demo screens.
Rather than having them climb the walls or getting into trouble, I made them do my work for me, picking up trash and litter - 10 pieces got them some tokens. The kids had something to do, they got to play, the arcade was a little better and they were hovering around me, where it was safe (the arcade was rather huge and often understaffed.)
I'd say this is a justified statement.
Then in that case, contact them and say by all means bring legal trouble. You have a valid code, and they have bupkis in proof.
I've worked a lot of long hours in the industry, and while before I thought of it as a way to show how dedicated I was, it never quite worked out. The best advice I can give you is go shop around for another job or start looking for people to make a side project that you can make money on AND keep a nice work week without abusive hours.
Yeah, I kind of figured that was the case. Thanks for that strange view into the looking glass.
"On Friday, we'll make you angry" - So I take it Tim Rogers will cover everything, leaving a simple press release on a first person shooter to be a diatribe on how he wanted a BB gun like the Christmas Story kid?
I can never get a straight answer of what cis-male means. Every example given I've seen doesn't bother explaining it in any real logical manner of it existing other than being a code phrase for "breeder", "sheeple" or "norm" at worst and at best, another stupid phrase or category that separates and divides me from others where there really needs to be no division.
It's also a great way to get me not to listen to your statement, even if I might have completely agreed with it in the first place. Way to go with that whole "inclusive" thing.
Baby steps. Vote with your money. Perhaps this will get more people acclimated to sites like Kickstarter and get to promote and purchase games they'd love to play at the ground level.
And on the small scale, this will help bypass publisher wariness.
Think of it as a pre-order, but where the developer, the game creator, gets the lions share of the profits after a target number of copies sold is reached.
Most development firms just make their money specifically in the creation of the game, rather than any kind of substantial sharing of the profits would have for successful product making via Publishers, leading to a kind of "Gun for Hire" mentality, where devs make as many games as they possibly can at the same time, with little care of quality, specifically because they'll only get the same amount of cash if they sell 50k or 5 million copies, rather than the expected claim of successful released products keeping the firm afloat til their next release.
Also, this Kickstarter has proven that there IS a market for point and click adventure games, same as the successful Phoenix Online kickstarter or TellTale. However the reason why companies don't go after it is because too many of them are putting too much faith in metrics, placing publishing in a bizarre catch 22.
A good real world example of this- Richard "Lord British" Garriot was constantly under pressure by EA execs to cancel his award winning Ultima games because the latest figures were stating that people weren't buying RPGs lately. He pointed out the reason wasn't because people were tired of RPGs, but because the current market of RPGs were crap. He was constantly proven right.
He got it close, I think the message isn't that it will only work for big names but that it won't be as successful for smaller companies. Phoenix Online just did a kickstarter, and took a little longer to reach its target, but had a far smaller goal, and it actually told people what the game would be about and that it would involve Jane "Gabriel Knight" Jensen.
If Tim Schafer sneezes, the entire media posts it up. And that's the big difference. Many Kickstarters get huge boosts once it makes it up on a major enthusiast website.
Felt this needed to be seen.
