Hype, kickstarting and expectations - why ppl run mad about release dates, beta etc.

Ill like to take a approach of Eternal Pessimism ,
Usually means I am pleasantly surprised.

I do feel for me personally that Hype can really hinder my enjoyment of something. I tend to not buy into the Hype thing anymore and try to remain as blissfully ignorant as possible.

 

I need to model my life around you......in a non-stocker kinda' way.

 

They do say during anticipation you're happier than you are after receiving what you were waiting for.
Not that I believe that to be true for all cases, but I generally enjoy hyping over a game- just as long as it doesn't go on forever.

 

But I went and made an Escalation Stick 4000........it's basically just a tree branch with a sticker on it, but I put some effort in to it

Da-dada-dum-da-da contribution!!

 

Yeah I can't say this applies to me. Hype annoys me, especially when developers do it, one of my most hated people on this planet is Peter Molyneux. He has fantastic ideas and his games are usually innovative, but the hype is just annoying. Usually I try to avoid it so as to not raise my own expectations. But here I am.

 

This may sound odd but I find that the wait has helped me de-hype the game a bit for myself, I was worried for a bit when everyone was saying it would be the best game ever and of all times that I would get to hyped and expect way more then they could deliver then be disappointed playing a game that while still awesome could never be as good as my hyped up dream vision of it.

I don't feel a strong hate on hype but I do agree it tends to get annoying, I mean the hype over the iPad annoyed the hell out of me because everyone was going on like right after it released newspapers, textbooks, and books in general were all just going to go obsolete over night. I really wanted to grab someone, shake them, and tell them it was just a computer inside a portable touchscreen monitor not the secret to immortality.

 

Any funding the devs can pull gives them breathing room. In a sense that they must have expected to have to work around jobs, of inferior equipment or over extreme distance. But with all the funding, they were given an opportunity to make this game a priority, and I believe we have seen progress that reflects that dedication. What people seem to not understand is that under the weight of all the funding, and the new time spent on the game, it got the chance to grow.

The game is going to be epic. It had the chance to be epic because we donated what we did, and we hyped how we did (not saying it wasn't epic before!)

 

People seem to, in my experience, be under some strange impression that if you give developers more money, more work will magically get done. While the rate of progress probably can be expressed as a function of funding, the reality is that it's still a quickly diminishing return after a certain cut-off.

And, as OP's article said (which was surprisingly a semi-intelligent article from IGN for once), if you give devs enough money, they're going to expand the project. And giving them more money doesn't magically make them work faster. An expanded project takes more time. There is no magic game machine where money goes in, game comes out, and more money makes it go faster.

That said, Starbound is progressing VERY quickly, despite what some people seem to think. If I were a consultant, I'd tell management that the game is well ahead of what should be expected. Truth is, Chucklefish is just kind of (really) bad at estimates. Terraria was made in, what? 4 months? Granted, when you really examine it, Terraria is technically a very small game. There are few enemies, few areas, and fewer game mechanics. Also consider that, when it was released, Terraria was about 1/3 the game it is now. Coming from that, though, I could see why Tiy would give the entirely unrealistic estimate he originally gave way back when. Starbound, however, is a MUCH larger game than that. It's got more significantly more content and more mechanics. Not only that, the team is working toward and insane amount of detail and polish. This is the kind of game that takes fully-staffed professional development teams well over a year to get to a working state. The fact that this small team has gotten so much done is a testament to how fast they're actually working.

 

That is my thought to, most people are miffed because they figured that the devs said 2013 which meant year end without funds thus ~1.8 mill should speed it up too like only half that. Now I think some people are made because it looks like an end of the year beta and thus development must not have sped up, though as I stated in another thread, the money has sped up the release just not as everyone (even the devs) expected. Unfortunately it is hard to tell how much it has been sped up since we do not know the release date for if the all had to go to work then come home and code the game in their free time. I agree it is progressing very quickly, just not as quick as anyone figured it would.

 

I dont have a problem with specifik people - nor the general complaints there is here - this was actually more meant as a thought on what problems we might cause with the overfunding, complains etc I get why people want to see a release, the faster, the better, we're all here because the game looks appealing to us. As the article mentions, this wave of crowd funding and indie publishers can and will have some down sides to it. And i fear that the hype is making more people expect more from the game then it was intended to be

This wasn't meant to be a beta discusion, just the aspect of community pressure and funding most likely have an effect on beta and final release

Excatly - and just the funding itself imbraces this perspective too - since more money opens up new features ingame that would otherwise have been left out or released in a later update (Pets, collectibles etc.) So in reality, however fast starbound is progression - it will take longer then if we, as a community, didn't fund to the last goal - most likely pushing the final release even further away by making the funding as huge as it is

And yes, terraria is a really good excample - it was released as a small, not widely funded game, that was updated alot further afterwards, since the release and sale of the game created the funding for further updates. So maybe, just maybe, the crowdfunding has "made" the release as big as if we didn't fund it as widely as we have done already - at the cost of a little later release date? And that in itself is controversial - cause the later release could easily make the hype surrounding the game even bigger, making people expect something that a relatively new gamestudio couldnt live up to (no critisism of Chucklefish, Starbound or creators etc. intended here)

 

There's a saying that any manager of engineers should know: "Double an experienced engineers estimate but triple the inexperienced engineer's estimate."

If people continue to invest in kickstarter or crowd funding projects, they should learn it too.