For more reasons than one:
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,2584.msg89413.html#msg89413
Gareth:
"There's another factor you're forgetting. It's easier to sell people on a dream of a thing, than the thing itself. It's easier for Brian Fargo to sell you your idea of what Wasteland 2
could be, rather than what it
will be. Because, while it's still a concept, it's easy to imagine it as the best possible version of what it could be.
When you give people a
tangible product, then comes the criticism, and the possibility of disappointment. In fact, it's
inevitable that some people will be disappointed, especially if they've hyped themselves into a frenzy beforehand. You're never going to make everyone happy with the finished product. But the dream...well, everyone has their own dream, and in that dream it looks so great...
I'm really excited for Dishonoured. But will it match my expectations, when I finally play it?
What will Wasteland 2 actually be like? Maybe the combat will be cludgy. Maybe the skill system will feel unbalanced. Maybe some people will find combat too hard, or not challenging enough. Maybe you won't like the writing. Maybe the text on the UI will be too small. Maybe you'll have video card issues that result in crashes to the desktop regularly. Maybe it just won't feel fun, in some subtle way. Who knows? But right now, people aren't making purchasing decisions on KS based around evaluating how the game
actually plays, hands on, but how they
imagine it
could play.
You don't have to worry about that when you're selling someone on the potential of an idea. This is why demos have gone out of vogue in the mainstream, and they prefer to just use hype videos and push incentives on people to buy-before-they-try.
We're in an interesting phase, with Kickstarter. None of these game projects have delivered anything tangible yet. So there's no experience of disappointment, no build-up of cynicism, no caution. Just exuberance and unbridled hope. When the mainstream industry shows videos that look cool, we're cautious. We've been burned before. We take a "wait and see" approach. We hold back until the demo, or see what other players report. We remember past games that seemed promising but turned out to be duds.
Until some of these KS projects actually deliver, we're all still in dream land here.
AoD is in a different position. It's not floating in the clouds of ideal imagination. It's not saying "hey, here's the current build of the game but remember, it's still a WIP and we're still gonna add lots of stuff!" They're saying "This is it. This is what we built. This represents the final gameplay, we hope you like it enough to buy."
I remember a time when AoD generated that same unreserved enthusiasm amoungst old-school fans, especially on places like the Codex. That changed when they actually, you know, gave people the product to play with. Some people still love it, no doubt, but that unreserved enthusiasm doesn't tend to survive contact with reality."
