Over the last few months, a number of long-running Kickstarter projects have lurched towards failure. It's a non-trivial number of projects. To the point that my attitude has shifted from "Failures of high profile projects are fairly rare" to "Failures of high profile projects are somewhat common although not guaranteed", and my backing attitude has shifted from "Just avoid stuff with really obvious red flags" to "I would recommend avoiding a wide variety of projects".
Basically, this is stuff that's been in dev for years, has generally updated during that time, and then just stopped. And it's the same bullshit every time: My Health, Making Games Are Hard, We Are Waiting Until It's Perfect, We Were Too Ambitious, Oh Four Years Ago When We Asked For Money We Had No Idea What We Were Making, We Don't Want To Update Until Progress Is Made So We Didn't Update At All, etc.
Here are some of the games that really fell off a cliff over the last little while, in order of funding date:
1. Drifter: Dev took basically a year off from actually producing anything. Recently after people started getting increasingly more disappointed there have been a few point releases, but it really seems like the dev took a year off. Drifter 0.6.2 came out September 2015, aiming to release a new version every week and a new major version every month. December 2015, Drifter 0.6.3 came out, with a report that 0.7 would be done in a few weeks, and there'd be major updates every 4 weeks, with 4 major updates left for 1.0. Drifter 0.6.4 came out 7 months later. There are frequent updates now, but they're all little incremental point updates. v0.7 is still just around the corner.
2. Hiveswap (Homestuck game). Literally years into the KS with no updates they announce they fired the team making it and were going to build it internally. Then a year later they were going to reboot their internal team. Then basically nothing.
3. Barkley 2. No updates for over six months, update today to say they've made procedurally generated borders. Almost 4 years since taking over $100,000, they expect they will have a vertical slice ready in a few months.
4. Limit Theory. Dev disappeared for 6 months, came back to say he had a bout of mental illness but was turning a corner, then disappeared again for about a year, then came back to say "okay, well, I was sick again, but I'm turning a corner. No updates for another year.
5. Godus. No updates for 6 months, reports team laid off. It's weird, because for years people were shitting on Godus and they were updating frequently and having good communication for a long time, despite being nowhere near done. But now it's dead.
6. Asylum. You might remember this developer KSing another project 2 years ago because Asylum was wrapping up. The rare backers-only updates seem to exemplify how they're still poking at a fairly early version of the game. They ran out of money and downsized. One backers only update over the summer.
7. Cryamore. Announced a partnership with Atlus to publish the game last fall, game to be published this summer. Last update: May 2016. Project took $250,000, main dev on Twitter saying negativity is getting to him and he no longer wants to participate in open development. Maybe should have thought about that before taking $250,000? A programmer makes around $75,000 a year--if I asked for a cash advance on three years of salary, got it, didn't do my job, and then got mad when the company asked what was happening, I'd expect the company would sue me. Radio silence from Atlus.
8. Jon Shafer's At The Gates - Jon updated regularly and was making great progress on his game for a long time. Then he took a very extended, 6+ month mental health break. It's not clear why this affected the game at all given he supposedly had a team, but I guess that's that. He then took another 6 months off because he broke some ribs. I get that recovering from an accident can be long and painful. The problem is that this is not supposed to be a one-person team and backers were not disclosed of the pre-existing medical condition. Should you have to tell people about your medical history to make a game? No, I don't think so. But if you are a sole proprietor and you sign a contract for $100,000, it's expected that a material risk that impacts your ability to work on an ongoing basis would be disclosed, at least in broad strokes. Apology update mid-August but limited actual progress in over a year.
9. Delver's Drop. No updates in 6 months, no past updates September 2014 to March 2015 and then apologies and woe is me updates about how hard game development is.
10. TUG. No updates since February, since they decided to take a year off to a) reboot the game technically and switch endings and b) totally change the game's business model. No communication from devs anywhere. You might remember these guys were the ones who promised to help developers who got robbed from that stupid fucking YouTube Minecraft clone that failed a few years ago because no one involved knew what they were doing.
11. C-Wars. No updates in March, no Steam patches, no posts on forums in response to multiple threads asking if the game is dead.
12. Megatokyo Visual Novel. The game's blog, actually a blog for the author of the game, gets an update every few weeks from either a fan or an employee to say what the author has done. Most of the time what he's done is "had a lot of work on his plate, working on lots of things, not much progress on the game, life is hard, family illness" stuff. Game seems to be in pre-pre-pre-pre alpha concept art stage, so look forward to it in 30 years.
13. Legend of Iya: May 2015: Dev posts he's run out of money and will launch a side project to make more. Dec 2015: Dev posts side project didn't work and he was on the brink of giving up but then Undertale gave him the determination to become an anime hero or some shit. April 2016: Dev in comments saying he's still working, but no KS update. *crickets*
14. Elysian Shadows. Although these developers have had time to make epic rants owning feminists over the last few years, they haven't had time to make a game people can play. Frequent updates of dudes in their pyjamas drinking beers in their makeshift office apartment gave way to an update late last year saying one of the 3 main guys was fired and took his work with him. Silence this year.
15. Last Life. Essentially no updates since 2014. The updates I've seen since then mostly apologize for not updating. The last public update was December 2015. There has been one update in 2016, backers only. Backers mostly angry. Last Life was supposedly being published by DoubleFine so I figured I'd see what's on the go with their side of things. I found a reddit post
from last month asking if DoubleFine is still publishing the game. Checking Archive.org they took it off their website some time between October and November 2015 without any kind of communication on why they are no longer involved with the project.
These are all projects that took over $75,000 in money. These are not little starving artists getting paid $1,000 and not managing to get it together. These are people taking the equivalents of a year or more of full-time professional salary. It's stressful owing people money, and that's a lesson as to why you don't take hundreds of thousands of dollars of peoples money instead of working 9-5, doing your job, and keeping game development as a hobby.
These don't represent most Kickstarters. But my tracking list is going from 8-10 failures to 20-ish failures over the next few months at the rate some things are going.
