David Hayter has been in a lot of Kickstarter campaigns, and he's really embraced indie gaming since leaving Metal Gear. Let's take a moment to look at his work with and rectify my past while we're at it.
The PlayJam GameStick is a failed microconsole that, aside from a marginally successful Kickstarter campaign, gained no traction whatsoever. If it weren't for the Ouya, the GameStick might be seen as the biggest failed Kickstarter console ever, but it doesn't even have that to its name. Instead, it and PlayJam are both forgotten. Why? Let's find out!
Star Citizen has had a long, disastrous development cycle. April 2019 to April 2020 perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with Star Citizen's development, and developer Cloud Imperium's approach to it. Let take a look at what happened during this time, and see just why this game is such a mess.
ICO Partners, a marketing analytics firm, released posted data about how games perform on Kickstarter - both tabletop and video games. I wanted to dive into this data to confirm some theories I had about the site a few years ago, and what I found surprised me. Long story short, while the amount of money raised by video games on Kickstarter has dropped significantly in recent years, the truth is that more projects are succeeding now than ever. It's just that there are a lot of smaller campaigns that are earning less money (and headlines).