>In March of 2016, Nightdive Studios released our video of our vision of System Shock Remastered. Done in Unity it was an immediate hit with almost a half million views on YouTube. In June of 2016 we launched a Kickstarter campaign to make the vision into a reality. It was tremendously successful with over 21,000 backers contributing over $1.3 million to the campaign. We put together a development team and began working on the game. But along the way something happened.
>Maybe we were too successful. Maybe we lost our focus. The vision began to change. We moved from a Remaster to a completely new game. We shifted engines from Unity to Unreal, a choice that we don’t regret and one that has worked out for us. With the switch we began envisioning doing more, but straying from the core concepts of the original title.
>As our concept grew and as our team changed, so did the scope of what we were doing and with that the budget for the game. As the budget grew, we began a long series of conversations with potential publishing partners. The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great.
>Ultimately the responsibility for the decisions rests with me. As the CEO and founder of Nightdive Studios, a company that was built on the restoration of the System Shock franchise, I let things get out of control. I can tell you that I did it for all the right reasons, that I was totally committed to making a great game, but it has become clear to me that we took the wrong path, that we turned our backs on the very people who made this possible, our Kickstarter backers.
>I have put the team on a hiatus while we reassess our path so that we can return to our vision. We are taking a break, but NOT ending the project. Please accept my personal assurance that we will be back and stronger than ever. System Shock is going to be completed and all of our promises fulfilled.
This. Also isn't this better than having a shitty remake?
Xavier Johnson
Kikestarter strikes again
Hunter Price
what is it with kikestarters and mismanagement of funds and projects?
I guess the OG model with publishers being dicks to devs and keeping them on a tight leash is the lesser of evils when you have these twats going full-bonkers and delusional on a project once they get a little bit more support than they anticipate
Levi Ward
to add: just work on the damn game, you fucks
release it like you intended it and take a vacation on the remaining cash and/or invest it in a future project
Kevin Lopez
Shame, but I stopped caring when they shifted to the new generic sci-fi art style anyway. If they're not full of shit and return to the style of the original pitch I'll be happy, if not I'm indifferent, good thing I didn't back it.
Jayden Collins
Why would you ever pay for something that you have no guarantee of receiving?
10 posts and no link, didn't troll me, you asshore
Nicholas Evans
Because you have sufficient disposable income and sometimes the money has less worth to you than the sheer chance of it working out. It is only for rich people, though. Anyone who cares about the sum they donate to kickstarter enough to get mad if it flows down the drain should not have been donating in the first place.
Ian Morgan
I'm launching a KS later this year and I'm really worried, I've never done something like this before, but I don't want to end up like these pieces of shit.
Hudson Thompson
>changing the original game, thusly making an original immersive sim >WITH JUST 1.3 MILLION DOLLARS THE ABSOLUTE MADMEN
Julian Flores
Sometimes I forget people can afford to throw away $60, feels poor man
Joseph Collins
Literally the tenth post you idiot.
Jordan Nguyen
They're usually headed by creative types with zero common sense or management skills.
Camden Garcia
>Unity People never cease to amaze me. Of course he'd never pull through. Retards would never see this coming even if it was in front of their faces.
Grayson Murphy
You can also use google you absolute mongoloid. I bet you kickfarted this game actually
Mason Smith
>s-spoonfeed me f-senpai
Christian Stewart
Sometimes you gamble and you lose
Noah Reed
>decides on unity >changes to unreal engine when he gets actual funding
Levi Parker
makes sense to me, Unreal is made for shooty games. Unity is made for RPGs.
except the Unity demo looked amazing and very faithful to og SS, while all we've seen from the Unreal build looked like generic crap
Jordan Harris
If you're thinking about this thing already, that's the first step to not fucking it up. Don't get nuts about stretch goals and think carefully about whether you can really afford backer rewards.
Maybe hire a professional kickstarter faggot to run it for you.
Anthony Stewart
>one of the core ideas about Kickstarter is not having to rely on publishers for funds >get money-blinded and overextend your abilities, forcing you to beg for publishers to fund you Pottery. Every time.
Jace Watson
A lot of people probably backed on the strength of Night Dive's past port work. And it's not like the original pitch couldn't have been realized in Unity, they had a demo.
Joshua Wood
as for about 3 times what you need to make the project.
Jackson Martin
remember that your goal is releasing your product, NOT getting 20 million and tripling the scope
Christopher Thompson
What is your project?
Dylan Torres
>tfw no Turok 3 on steam
FUCK YOU NIGHTDIVE
Adrian Moore
They made the right decision by stopping production. A lot of teams suffer from this, yet they never address the issues.
Recognizing the problem and being upfront about it is a brave decision and the best. Unless they run away to mexico with the money.
Xavier Foster
Well, one of the problems with kickstarter is that it really usually does not actually rake in enough money for anything than a super-indie projects. In kickstarters, you can usually get in somewhere between 50k for basically a one man made type of games, or somewhere upwards of a 1.5 million for a really high profile today (like say, Kingdom Come). However, in order to get past the 100k lines you basically need to pitch a project that looks and sounds like upper-middle or high level thing. And those usually cost 2+ mill as an investment even if you are relatively moderate. That is why kickstarters that have scope anywhere beyond pixel-art indie stuff actually generally end up financing only a PROTOTYPE, that then gets further pitched to an actual publisher, because there is no fucking way you'll get to make a mid-level development project financed by kickstarter alone.
Blake Richardson
Kaiser is busy with forsaken
Isaiah Smith
>kickstarter
Caleb Lewis
>Unity is le bad meme
Lucas Brooks
Many kickstarters end up working out but yeah there are too many scummy practices and people are too stupid with their money. A lot of the time there's good reason these guys can't get publishers to fund them.
Almost every Kickstarter campaign reads like a sales pitch, it talks like the game is already in existence and lists all the things you'll get by pledging, when what it should be doing is trying to convince me that you can actually get this shit done. Show some actual credentials or at least a portfolio or prototype. Explain the budget in detail and honestly acknowledge your shortcomings.
I hate stretch goals too even though they seem like an inescapable staple of kickstarters now. Often what the creators seem to do is pitch a low initial goal, less than what they actually need to make the game as they've outlined it, in the hopes that the low goal will incentivize people to pledge, since it seems more achievable. And then all the money they actually need is hidden in the stretch goals which they are basically counting on to be fulfilled. La Mulana 2 asked for 200k for the entire game, but its stretch goals were like "100k more and we'll add a bestiary". They eventually changed the goals because people caught on. Or how Shenmue 3 asked for 3 million as a base goal but later revealed they'd need 10 million to actually make the game as they had envisioned it, without compromises.
And of course there's the cases where the campaigns get significantly more money than the creators expected, so they inflate the scope to soak up the extra funding, but it quickly ends up getting out of control and the project falls apart because it's deviated so far from their original plans. I'd actually respect a Kickstarter that said "any funding beyond the initial goal will be used for rewards production/shipping, but that's it. The game's getting the budget we said it would and anything extra is just lining our pockets."
Nathaniel Hughes
>attempting to modernise a game makes it lose all its old school charms
who would have guessed?!
Caleb Torres
That's not really what happened here though. Everyone was happy with the demo, which was very faithful to the original but with prettier graphics and modernized controls. The problem came when they decided to abandon that and make some generic sci-fi game with backers money instead.
Dominic Williams
I guess it could be fun whenever that gets done.
Jordan Peterson
looks more like they remade the basics of the original and its hilariously retro compared to other even semi recent FPSRPG's and it simply wouldnt sell , so they modernised the fuck out of it and it became a different game which wasnt their intention. now they have to stop and decided what to do.
bear in mind they are also making SS3.
Christian Cruz
>bear in mind they are also making SS3.
"they" are not making it retard
Owen Nelson
Warren Spector and OtherSide Entertainment are doing SS3
Brayden Martin
yeah how about we wait to see how underworld turns out before getting all excited about ss3.
Wyatt Bell
Nightdive are SS rights holders and will be publishing SS3 ~
Jaxon Walker
>take people's money to create a SS remake >realise you don't actually want to create a SS remake >keep the money Kickstarter is such a fucking scam
Henry King
Just play the original.
Jacob Ortiz
Even that's not necessarily an indicator for SS3 since Spector's studio is entirely separate from that one. It's probably going to be a long-ass time until SS3. I have a (baseless) suspicion that they only announced it so early in order to boost their profile while searching for a publisher for Underworld, in order to secure the company until work on SS3 actually starts.
Andrew Barnes
So, basically, no one wanted to publish a faithful remake? Because it reads as if would-be publishers wanted some changes to make the game more easily approachable.
Tyler Baker
>We moved from a Remaster to a completely new game This is why you need publishers: to act as taskmasters on pie-in-the-sky developers who will always try to expand project scope without any hard consideration of budget or timetable.
Publishers = GODS
Jonathan Hernandez
They already changed from a faithful remake to a full "reboot" (i.e. completely different game) early in development.
Ayden Allen
Try reading it again
Zachary Williams
Problem is most creatives know nothing about the business side. Good Kickstarters actually hire a middle man to create a pitch that will sell.
Jackson Lee
You're the only one getting excited, I'm just stating a fact.
Gabriel Myers
How do we stop devs from expanding scope and bankrupting projects Sup Forums?
Colton Taylor
Good It was supposed to be a remake, and they wanted to add some shit rpg mechanics
Ryder Jones
uh oh retard alert
Hunter Ross
>OH NO NO NO NO NO Not how you even use this Reddit meme. Was GG this much of a mistake?
Jackson Martinez
This, but unironically.
Ayden Torres
This is why you ALWAYS need a "Stop dreaming up more features and just make the fucking game." guy.
Benjamin Jenkins
>A modern take on System Shock, a faithful reboot; it’s not Citadel Station as it was, but as you remember it. Many improvements, overhauls and changes are being implemented to capture the spirit of what the original game was trying to convey, and bring it to contemporary gamers. It was going to be a reboot from the start. The reason I avoided backing in spite of loving System Shock is that it was clear they would be doing a lot of changes, but not clear what those changes were going to be. And of course, they wanted people's money before they'd pin down what they were actually going to do. Which screamed NO to me.
Anyone who backed it only has themselves to blame.
Christopher Adams
Yes, they're called publishers.
Luke King
Of course it was. I still don't know if it's supposed to be a panicked fan screaming when he realizes something's gone wrong, or the poster saying it in a mocking tone, and when I ask someone posts a wojak edit of a fat guy with piss-stained underwear and I get called a soyboy.
Gamergate and Sup Forums were mistakes.
Colton Hall
>reddit spacing
Leo Taylor
it is t. programmer who has used unity
Logan Gutierrez
What the fuck is Reddit spacing? Explain that, too.
Daniel Adams
>reddit meme
Samuel Lewis
that's why Patreon is a better choice for these projects
Matthew Clark
Shouldn't have given money to a literal who dev. Also, the "era" of big successful kickstarter games is over. Even the eternally poor Obsidian have moved away from Kickstarter for PoE2 crowdfunding.
Luke Thompson
>continue paying me to not complete my project
Blake Powell
>f-senpai underrated
Easton Morris
>implying kickstarter isn't just a means for devs to prove to publishers that there's demand for their game
Michael Rogers
Patreon is only good for porn game projects
Aiden Scott
I didn't want it.
Adrian Lopez
>Kickstarter is a scam
James Turner
Why? There's already a source port.
Jayden Jones
why there are literally no consequences if you fail
Jonathan Sanchez
There are consequences. To your reputation. If you are asking why there are no legal consequences it's for the same reason there are no legal consequences for a charity soliciting donations to find a cure for cancer but never managing to do so. Even in the case of proper investment, as opposed to the "charity" shit like kickstarter, there are no legal consequences for failure providing you never did anything grossly negligent or illegal. The real question is why did retards believe there were ever any guarantees? Don't get involved in high risk ventures if you don't like taking risks.
Adam Diaz
>Publishers = GODS ok dude calm down
Evan Ramirez
He's adding stuff from the N64 version,
Jack Ross
...
Hunter Anderson
>Night Dive's past port work I thought they just repackaged fan and community projects after buying up the IP.
Zachary Sanchez
First video looks like original System Shock. Second video looks like run of the mill Steamshit ripoff of Bioshock in Space, which was already done by Prey.
This project is done for.
Asher Brooks
>game has a publisher >publisher keeps the devs on track and game gets completed >kickstarter game >devs fuck around and waste all the money on booze, hookers and hair implants >game is cancelled due to lack of funds
Elijah Ward
>game has a publisher >keeps the game on track toward being a sliced up mess of season passes, microtransactions, and "wider audience"-friendly design
Bentley Barnes
Yeah because Kikstarter were so fucking complete and full of content and not total shovelware mobile crap like Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun
Jeremiah Powell
>what is it with kikestarters and mismanagement of funds and projects? Serious answer user? Literally nothing, you're just seeing it all laid out in public. Tons of devs try to do projects that fail miserably. Most startups fail. There are plenty of internal projects that go along quite a ways, then somebody decides that the result won't be good and they shitcan it. Remember, a million bucks is not much to a big publisher, it's not nothing but it's well within the range of advanced testing and then deciding that no, it's not worth spending another $25-50 million on.
What the average public isn't used to is actually seeing all this. Normally when something fails they never even know about it. It's a 100% unavoidable tradeoff in creativity: if you try more creative stuff, you will see more shit and more failures, and in exchange once in awhile you'll get real gems that would not have happened (either the same way, or at all) otherwise. Expecting every or even most crowdfunded project to succeed is frankly just retarded, that's not how it works.
As far as backers: it's on you to be careful about what you back. If you want 100% guarantees, wait until something actually ships and has reviews, same as always. It's not a fucking preorder guys.
Easton Harris
>Unless they run away to mexico with the money. What money? Spread 1.3 million over 2 years, and it's not hard to imagine there's none left.
Jaxon Cox
>Kickstarter is bad, therefore publishers are #BASED
Jordan Green
You have to understand that most anons have zero comprehension of actual business costs or money. They think "whoa a million bucks that's so much" but that's only true in the 3rd world. In the first world that's not that much salary, licensing, equipment, and so on for a few years. It's completely possible to make a decent game with that (or half that) but only by carefully controlling the scope of it and not getting carried away. A million is comfortable for a team of say 2-5 people for a few years depending on where in the country, with all business running costs and final publishing costs and so on all taken into account. Some people could make it go farther but it's better to be conservative.
Actually I wonder if that'd be a correlated indicator of crowdfund success: where in the world the project is based out of (or for USA, where in the country). If you specifically only backed projects located in parts of the country with a very low cost of living that might be a good sign that your money would go farther.
Daniel Bailey
you stop overfunding kikestarter campaigns through giving them 4x the goal and don't fund patreons
Leo Gray
start looking into project management stuff. that's the one thing most of these failed KS lack, someone skilled in actually managing the whole thing.
these dinglenuts let feature-creep screw over the entire thing
Brayden Bennett
What Kickstarter really needs as a service is much better "bankruptcy" procedures, just like we have IRL for standard businesses with actual investors. There is no need for it to be so amateur hour there at this point just because it's crowdsourced. Devs should first of all be required to have an LLC at least for managing everything. Then there should be some firm deadlines done as part of the project, including with any scope expansion due to goals being exceeded baked in. After the end of the campaign no more of that would be allowed without super majority support from backers. If a core deadline got missed by a 6 month or more margin, backers could either accept a new plan from the dev, or decide that it was time to wind the project up, at which point it'd be liquidated with backers as senior creditors. Backers should also have a contractual right to a non-exclusive perpetual unlimited license to any IP the dev creates themselves in the case of failure.
Failure is part of success and creativity but it needs to be orderly and swift. That's a big missing piece of the crowdfunding puzzle.
Benjamin Miller
Oh well, I guess Prey was a decent enough System Shock sequel, even if the enemies were less interesting and the ending sucked.
Evan Long
>why there are literally no consequences if you fail There are. If you succeed you make lots and lots more money. If you fail you get nothing and are unlikely to get much if any backing ever again.
As long as you don't actually commit fraud then the most that should happen is that backers get the largest amount of liquidated assets they can, that is a fair flaw in the system right now. But if you mean that people should be punished for failing beyond that then no fuck you kid.
Matthew Gray
NO REFUNDS
Hunter White
some they just package with dosbox some like ss2 they got permission from modders to include compatability fixes in their release in the case of turok it was rebuilt in a brand new engine
