EA Origin wants crowd-funded games

 @Hicks233 Thanks i hope for the best too. and my team are very clear that there is a big chance that we might not meet our goal at kickstarter, if you go right now to kick starter you can see the many game project that only raised less then $500 and there goal is over $10,000 and only have a few days left to meet there goal.  worst case for my team, because lot of us work full time at day time jobs or going to college, me and 2 of my "business partners" will pay for the stuff out of our own pockets. but yeah thats the thing about kickstarter, seems like a lot of the games that are getting big time news in gamespot and many other media outlets are teams that were already in the game business to start with.and that says a lot.

@JimmeyBurrows

It would be naive to think that this is anything but business. The developer is going to need to turn a profit or go bust - that simple.

Dreams of idealism and fighting the big nasty publisher tend to go out the window when accounts are rapidly dwindling and employees need paying. Dreams of creativity aren't going to pay bills in most cases.

msfan1289 put it brilliantly where there is a need for communication between customers and the developer.  If the product is a dud the reputation will be even more heavily damaged if it has been crowd financed.

Going purely on "good faith" is a nice ideal but when they're in a competitive market place they need to address those things: the rights, legal issues and communication issues with customers that you find so pesky. They'll need to do it to protect their backs, their intellectual property and to maintain a positive reputation. While a long time fan of a developer will stick by them the average customer isn't going to care less. Only how good the end product is.

Funding based on the people developing - what if the little shinning stars leaves the development team? Do you ask for your money back because you don't like the remainder of the team as much? This despite the lets assume good quality of the product they are making?

That's the only "good" that's really going to matter when it comes down to the balance sheet.

 @Hicks233 like ANY investment it is a risk a person take doesnt matter if its in the stock market, kickstarter, or even giving money to a 10 year wanting to open up a lemonade stand. a risk is a risk, and  you will have to bite the bullet no matter how good or bad the company does in then end. as a person to give money in kickstarter you should well know the risk that there will be when giving money to a project, you should well know from th GET GO that the project will be a hit or it can flop, one thing tho Gamespot does not talk about the MANY projects that used KickStarter and never reach there goal. if a project does not reach the set amount goal they are asking the money is refunded to the people who donated to the project. that is why a lot of the teams asking for money, post concept art, videos and what not.

I for one my team will use Kickstarter as a way to get funding to pay a lot of the programs we need ( can not release anything for sale with student versions of the software, and Autodesk programs are not that cheap). but right now we are making a demo level that wea re trying to finish by the end of summer and use that to showcase our project and we will have a forum that people can go to and give us feed back and we will listen to them.

one thing you have to keep in mind what if they game turns out the way the people thought it was going to be. well if they make a game and it flops after it got made and used Kickstarter money to fund it. not only they will lose there fan base but also there is a high chance that if they try to use kicksater again or Indiegogo pretty sure there name will be shot that no one will donate any money. that is why it is important to work with the fans and ask them what they like, what works and what does not.

in the end kickstarter is another word for a charity, and it is up to the person them self to give them money or not, and should know that giving money to a company for a product will mean that there is a high risk that they can lose the money in a way that the game flops or it is a game they didnt expect for it to be.

oh by the way people Kickstarter i think is own by Amazon.com

@Richardthe3rd

It's a really brave model that's in its infancy so it's bound to have some stumbling blocks.

I'd be interested also in how the ideas of intellectual property and ownership of likenesses will be tackled with the projects that advertise high tier rewards of your voice or likeness in the game. Does that mean forgoing IP rights to your likeness? What if the donator isn't happy with how their avatar can be interacted with or is presented?

Kickstarter is all really enthusiastic. I'm hoping that these projects go well but I'm waiting for someone?s nerdrage to spill over because they donated £10 and didn't get exactly what they wanted. Then the storm will start.

Perhaps that's a social issue and not a development related one. Though when you combine development with social interaction and investment then they are bound to influence each other - for good or bad.

Bluring the lines between customers, investors and fans is going to get sticky.

EA have seen an opportunity to gain customers to their origin platform in a similar way to valve and it?s use of flagship titles being tied to steam and then the integration of the steamworks client and drm. If it was a company other than EA doing this it?d be likely all sunflowers and puppies.

@91210user What are you even talking about here? Are you talking about games exclusive to Origin? That is not relevant at all to this topic. You can buy the games elsewhere if you want to.

EA is also not necessarily responsible for the quality for games developers put on Origin, although they have a right to refuse certain games if they want to. The only thing they may be responsible for is the quality of Origin integration with certain games. So far only Battlefield 3 and Mass Effect 3 does this at all, and both are developed by internal EA studios.

With Steam, we can see this better. All new THQ and Square Enix games for the PC requires Steam integration, but Valve is not responsible for the quality of these games. Whether they are good or bad is up to the developers. Steam has also refused certain games to be put on Steam, but not for quality reasons since one of the examples is indie game Solonium Infernum which is very good.

 @chikahiro94 In my view steams also some form of always online drm crap. Because I cant seem to access it's offline mode. Still I love steam best PC gaming platform.

 @bloody-hell Oh, and back when Stardock owned Impulse, they had games with no DRM. I would be highly surprised if Steam wasn't the same way. Both Impulse (at the time) and Steam both had in-house DRM they offered for free to publishers/developers. Both Gabe Newell and Brad Wardell dislike obnoxious DRM. If a company like InExile made an issue of it ("We don't want any DRM."), I'm hard pressed to imagine that Valve wouldn't let them do so.

And there's always GOG ^_^

 @bloody-hell I'll agree that Valve's DRM works pretty well, although I've heard some games don't require an internet connection to work (haven't checked or verified), which is even better.

The trick that comes up here is I don't believe EA has its own DRM like Valve does. Usually their games license Sony's SecuROM, and they tend to go for the works when using it (SecuROM, like many other DRMs, has levels of severity - DMC4 for PC only required you have the game disc in your drive). I'm not sure if it'll be worthwhile to invest in SecuROM licences for games that aren't theirs, since they'll have to pay for that plus any additional work, testing, etc.

I could be wrong, of course. EA certainly is large enough of a customer to get a special license to use SecuROM, Tages, Starforce, whatever, and have that as an integral part of Origin.

Although I stopped using it years ago because its super paranoid, Kaspersky's antivirus actually caught SecuROM making its changes when I installed games. Might be worth seeing if it still does or not, although I'll bet money that the DRM makers worked with Kaspersky to get it to ignore that ("Oh, its a false positive."). AVG and MSE never caught that kind of behavior.