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[General Article] Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen: Did Pantheon Suffer Kickstarter Burnout?
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Recently the Kickstarter campaign for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen failed to reach their $800,000 goal. In fact they barely made it to the half way point. Being run by Brad McQuaid, one of the original creators of Everquest many in the community assumed it would easily reach the funding goal. As the 40 day campaign began to wear on whispers in forums spoke not of what a terrible idea Pantheon was, but that something much more serious was behind the slow growth in funding: Kickstarter fatigue. Are gamers, particularly MMO players, burned out on the Kickstarter model?
Read more of Shannon Doyle's Did Pantheon Suffer Kickstarter Burnout?
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Comments
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Kickstarter burnout is the same as MMO burnout...
It has more to do with sub-par products than it does with changing trends.
That's certainly a p art of it. I also didn't see it marketed much on major MMO sites. It also didn't have many obvious big new ideas to point to and try. It was mostly going to be a scaled down version of Vanguard. Which is great, but doesn't capture the imagination as much as Camelot Unchained did with their housing and The Depths.
I honestly don't think it has anything to do with Kickstarter burnout. This has more to do with no one trusting Brad McQuaid to deliver a working product based on nothing but a vague outline that, quite frankly, sounds kinda boring. Ooooo, a fantasy mmo you say? There are hardly any of those!
He had plenty of money to get Vanguard up and running and look what a POS that shipped as. Then instead of fixing it up, he just sells it and left it flopping on the beach like a dying fish. Ya, !@#$ you McQuaid. Fool me once.. etc. I'll believe it when I see it on this one.
Ya, nice try but no.
Kingdom Come go 3x their goal and finished Feb 20, days before Pantheon.
As for interest in Brad's "vision", only 3000 people bought in to it. That is a nothing number when it comes to video games, esp. MMOs. Whatever other numbers the zealots throw around ($400k, top 8%) mean nothing next to that 3000.
Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?
Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things.
Combination of Fantasy MMO saturation and Brad being about as trustworthy as a drug addict imo.
Find all the faults you like with kickstarter the site, but keep in mind that crowd funding itself is not the problem. It is a valid way to shed the disease that is publishers and get some decent games.
No, it suffered from a "controversial" member of the team (your mileage may vary) and a campaign that didn't have a lot of info and throughout the campaign we would see lore stuff.
You have to show people "more" you have to get them excited.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
My issue with it overall was simply that there were too many mights, maybes, probablies.. we arn't sure.. see how it goes. While I wouldn't go so far as to say they were making it up as they went along (the information was too consistent to suggest that) I did feel that it was more like someone telling me their idea for a game over Skype then someone trying to sell a game. I also didn't like the way they slowly released information. That's the sort of thing you do to build hype - Very few people want to go back a dozen times to try and find something that interests them. The market is far too saturated to be putting that much effort into a game so far from completion.
I don't know about others but for myself personally, if I see a game that may interest me posted somewhere I'll check it out and read the info but I can't say I'll go back and check it multiple times to try and sell it to myself.
No, I do not think that is the case. I think that everyone are so fed up with all the "promises" that you often hear, combined with just a short gameplay video. Also, with a new company and a new title, it may be a success or a total fail, that I think most of us consider. It's not like they are doing a sequel to a fantastic game, but rather something new and risky.
But the reason to why I didn't back this project, is because of everything I have heard about Brad, wether it is true or not, plus the late release date. Nothing against him, but from what I have heard, he has messed up a lot at SOE. Also, it takes very long time to create a game, but that is the reason why I don't want to back up a project that early on. I rather wait and see how they build up the rollercoaster, before I take a ride in it!
I am the Arch-fiend, the Despoiler of Worlds, and by my hands shall the false Emperor fall.
Join us at: https://www.maturemindedgamers.com
More like, people are starting to wise up, and not throw free money at every bad KS idea that comes down the pike.
Nothing new? No decent plan to actually get the thing made? Lot of fuzzy promises?
It should have failed, and did.
I wouldn't equate what happaned with Pantheon with "Kickstarter burnout". I'd equate it with normal use of Kickstarter. There are alot of projects on Kickstarter and people are going to apply a high level of scrutiny about which ones they provide a donation.
Whether you like it or not, whether you think it fair or not, there are alot of people who are going to be skeptical about Pantheon precisely because who is making it. When I heard "Brad McQuaid", I immediately said no need to look further...no way in heck am I going to give them any money up front. There are not a few people who will have the same reaction as I.
There may or may not be such a thing as "Kickstarter burnout" but you really can't use Pantheon as a bell-weather for it.... it has problems that are uniquely it's own which have absolutely nothing to do with whether people are burnt out on KS or not.
I'm sorry, but blaming Pantheon's lack of success on Kickstarter is fairly ridiculous. People aren't sick of Kickstarter, people are sick of developers taking advantage of them through Kickstarter. Pantheon's Kickstarter video was poorly done and didn't really make me want to back the game.
Pantheon's Kickstarter also didn't really give many details. It was only about a quarter into the Kickstarter when more information was brought forth. The fact that Brian said somewhere (forgot where, think it was a random article) to go look at their website for more info made me scratch my head. Why not just have all the info on the Kickstarter, I thought that was what Kickstarter was for? That plus the fact that the info that was released on sites like MMORPG.com was just about the races and not the mechanics of the game also made me hesitate to back the game. I pretty much had no clue what kind of game Pantheon was.
Added to the fact that the money was only going to pay for office space... $800k... (That is some pretty expensive office space) I doubt a lot of people wanted to pay for someone to rent office space.
So, no, Pantheon didn't fail because people are sick of Kickstarter. Pantheon failed because its Kickstarter was managed poorly, plain and simple. I had a strong hunch that Pantheon wouldn't do well with its Kickstarter when its stretch goals included crafting and PvP... I mean come on, if there's a way to kill someone's enthusiasm for wanting to spend money on a Kickstarter it has never been so fast for me as seeing Pantheon's stretch goals.
Smile
That was my biggest issue as well overall. Plus the fact that after previous stigma, whether ill or well deserved, it would have been nice for the pitch to have more substance. With the amount of MMOs that have disappointed recently, I think I'm past the point of absolute blind faith.
I really felt this whole thing was like trying to sell someone a cheese sandwich to people who already have lunch plans.
None of the ideas were new or exciting.
" This is something you eat for lunch and is made of bread and cheese.... aren't you excited?! "
" Inside the sandwich is... you better be sitting down... cheese!! Aren't you excited ?! "
" We know you want it, so here you go.... It will have bread included!!! Aren't you excited ?! "
I would like to encourage Brad to drop this idea and make something people actually really want, this is something people only want in theory. Eq1 was fun like the 80's was fun, nice to look back at and laugh about, but I don't want to do it again.
I just don't think Pantheon had that imaginative spark that the likes of other successful kickstarted projects had.
Comparably, if we look at the Macquaid factor, Camelot Unchained shouldn't have funded either. But it did, because CSG not only dwelled on oldschool nostalgia but also mixed in some interesting creative nuances.
Pantheon just came off as simply another attempt at EQ and Vanguard. Camelot Unchained felt like CSG wanted to not only deliver another DAOC but also wanted to throw in some interesting new layers into the mix.
There's so many kickstarters going on already that people who are willing to put some money in them propably has already met their quota. We need games out of kickstarter now, I doubt the people who use kickstarter are willing to put money on multiple products when nothing is released yet.
Is there even a single mmorpg out of kickstarter yet? I havent heard of any at least. Also I agree with too little info on Pantheon, I visited their kickstarter page just out of curiosity and it's very hard to tell what kind of game precisely they are going to create. StarCitizen for example was a lot more easy to figure out right from the start.
You apparently didn't read the article as the article is actually pretty much blaming Pantheon's failure on "Kickstarter-burnout." Although games that have well run Kickstarters and actual ideas and concepts that haven't been done before or are shown in videos, don't seem to have this new and terrible affliction known as "Kickstarter-burnout."
Games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Star Citizen seemed to have done pretty okay and they both had great Kickstarters with plenty of information and alpha footage, and they seemed to do well... Huh, I wonder if there is a connection...
Smile
This is incorrect, the "masses" didn't know about it because it wasn't managed or marketed very well, that was a mistake that Brad and the team admitted, they had never done a KS campaign before and tried to model it off of Star Citizen and they got it wrong, they admitted it, they took on board critism and advice and they are now trying to make up for that on their website, which is going ahead nicely.
But to say that only 3000 were crazy about it is just wrong, not enough people knew about it to even try to put a fair estimate on those numbers, and of those 3000, they were able to raise $460k, which is an average of $153.33 pledge each, that is pretty high for a KS and pretty impressive for only 3000 people, imagine if the team had of marketed the KS properly and brought more to the table...it probably would've got it's $800k plus most likely most of the stretch goals.
But the fact of the matter is, they didn't run the campaign properly, it didn't have enough to showcase and it wasn't advertised as widely as it should have been, they did give it a real go and got much better as time went on but it should of all been prepared properly before the KS launched in the first place, they know that now.
This game will get made and it is already picking up speed again now on their official Dev site with donations and pledges going live a few days ago. So I have re-pledged and am joining in on the fun and pretty awesome community over at https://www.pantheonrotf.com/members/home where a ton of loyal old school gamers and talking up a storm with the Devs and entire team, throwing around some pretty good idea's around, there is lot's of communication and I am genuinly liking what I am seeing at the moment.
If anyone is interested they should head on over and check it out and see what the community is helping the Devs with.