While many of them succeed, some tend to have more trouble delivering on their promises than others.Īsking players to support a game before it’s finished can certainly benefit developers, but taking that route may be problematic as well. Having people’s money involved from the start leads to higher expectations, which is often burdensome for smaller indie studios. There are many examples of early access games failing to become what they were advertised as or falling into development hell. Below you’ll find a collection of just such stories. This indie sandbox game by Radiant Entertainment showed up on Kickstarter in 2013 and quickly gained the attention of backers, who pledged over $750,000, vastly exceeding its original $120,000 goal. It is currently available in early access on Steam and has been since 2015. Stonehearth is primarily a survival town builder and simulator, heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress and various Sim games by Maxis.
You start off with a couple of villagers (described in-game as hearthlings) and slowly gather resources, build new houses and defend yourself from orcs, goblins, wolves and other invaders. If you’re creative enough, you may even design your own buildings. The core gameplay is fun for the first couple of hours, but the lack of content in the game’s later stages and frequent bugs that halt construction or lead to other issues will soon remind you that Stonehearth is still in the alpha stage (even though it was supposed to come out in 2014). The lack of content is the main problem right now, especially if you compare what’s in the game currently to what was promised during the Kickstarter campaign. Developers still have to add multiple playable races, hearthling classes, enemy types, factions, map biomes, festivals, a multiplayer mode and much more. After so much time, I doubt we’ll see too many of these features finished. That said, there’s still some light at the end of the tunnel for Stonehearth. Last year progress was made in hearthling AI and other systems, and in a video earlier this year developers confirmed that 2018 would be more content-focused, as they started working on multiplayer and more map features. The indie studio is also very open about their process and uploads videos every Tuesday to let players know about the latest changes.
Star Citizen first appeared on Kickstarter in 2012 and soon became one of the most crowdfunded video games in history-it has raised over $175,000,000 as of today. The man behind this enormous project is Chris Roberts, a game designer who worked on Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny and later created the Wing Commander series.
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