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Kickstarted video game project Haunts gets mothballed

31 points by HarveyKandola 14y ago

waterlesscloud 14y ago
"In his blogpost, Mr Dakan apologised for how Haunts has turned out and pledged to refund any backer who wanted their money back out of his own pocket." Well, at least he's saying he'll do the right thing about it.
- masklinn 14y ago
  No, that is not "the right thing", there's absolutely nothing right about doing that. It's good natured and nice of him, but in the grand scheme of things if it's anything that anything is "a terrible idea".
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    It's not right to give the people who backed him their money back? What.
    - kevingadd 14y ago
      Kickstarter isn't a store. When you back a project you're investing in potential. The project failing to get completed doesn't mean you deserve your money back. In this case, he spent the money on what he said he'd spend it on (building the game) so it's kind of insane for him to offer to refund backers their original investment. It undermines the principles behind Kickstarter. On the other hand, it is unclear how backer rewards figure into the picture. Maybe he feels that since a copy of the finished game was listed as a backer reward, he owes people a refund for being unable to deliver that reward?
      - Karunamon 14y ago
        >it's kind of insane for him to offer to refund backers their original investment. It undermines the principles behind Kickstarter. Doing something nice now considered "insane" and "undermining kickstarter's principles". Oooookay then.
        Lewisham 14y ago
        It continues bolstering the idea that Kickstarter is a store and not a prospective revenue builder. It creates expectations for others to follow suit if their projects go similarly. It is a bad idea that comes from a nice place.
        Karunamon 14y ago
        Anyone who has that idea is frankly, stupid. Kickstarter is quite upfront about what they are, what they do, and what your expectations should be. I do not see how failing to cater to people who can't understand basic concepts undermines anything, or how it makes it any less of a nice gesture.
        Apocryphon 14y ago
        And what's wrong with expecting others to be responsible and to be prepared to repay the funders if it goes wrong?
        kevingadd 14y ago
        That is not how investment in business ventures or projects works. It's not a zero-sum game. Sometimes things don't work out and there's no value to return to the investor. It's called risk.
        masklinn 14y ago
        1. that it's got nothing to do with responsibility 2. that the money should be gone (in trying to get the project done) and if they can refund funders they had no reason to crowdfund to start with and 3. that it's a completely different set of expectations. Again, kickstarter is not a store. And it's not a bank either. If somebody with an idea wants a loan, he checks in with a bank not a crowdfunding site.
    - masklinn 14y ago
      It definitely isn't "the right thing": kickstarter isn't a store where you buy a product, it's a funding platform for projects. That means the project may fail, and as a backer you must understand that: you're a grantor or patron, not a customer. There may be reasons and justifications to refund backers (or even just good-heartedness), but short of a knowingly fraudulent project I do not think it can ever be "the right thing". And I say that having put about a month of income into various crowdfunding projects (on kickstarters and other crowdfunding sites) so far: they got me excited, I'd like them to succeed, but I fully expect that some will fail (entirely) and others will yield turds or will fail to live up to expectations.
      - waterlesscloud 14y ago
        I understand your position, and it's fine as far as it goes. But consider the long run for the guy behind this. Say he wants to run another project down the road. He has the negative of having failed, but he has the positive of offering people's money back. Which in most people's mind would mitigate the failure to some degree. Does that change your view that it can never be the right thing? The backers and the project leader benefit from his stance. What makes it wrong?
    - timwiseman 14y ago
      I see Masklinn's point, but I also agree with you. Fundamentally, kickstarter is much like patronage. You may wind up getting something fantastic by backing, but you are taking on a high level of risk of getting either nothing or something very bad. All backers need to understand this, and the only obligation (morally, I'm not even sure this could be enforced legally) is to put in a good faith effort. With that said, I'm also comfortable saying that someone who is going beyond their obligations to make things as right as they can is doing the right thing. This is the right thing in terms of his reputation, in terms of people backing him the next time he uses kickstarter, and it is morally right in the sense that it is a good beyond what he had to do.
austinlyons 14y ago
why don't they just open source it?
- erre 14y ago
  From the latest update: """A lot of you have mentioned that we should open source everything if worse comes to worse. In fact, the code is already open, but if we cannot pull together to make this a retail product, we will absolutely fully open source everything, content and code and turn it over to the community. Actually, at some point we’d like to do that no matter what, even after a retail release (however many years later, when it makes fiscal sense). But right now the code is under the same modified BSD license as the Go programming language and the contents are all Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike."""
  - erre 14y ago
    Besides, I should point out that the project owners haven't abandoned it yet. They are trying to find ways to make it happen.
    - EastCoastLA 14y ago
      That can be a slippery slope, because with more money and time, they can keep finding ways to "make it happen." When is the line drawn? Maybe the should publicly state a date to release the project to the people if they cannot complete the project.
      - jivatmanx 14y ago
        Yep, think Duke Nukem Forever.
  - austinlyons 14y ago
    oh thanks, I hadn't seen that. I think it would make more fiscal sense to open source it now and get it finished rather than let it sit, reimburse backers and then open source it.
EastCoastLA 14y ago
It would nice to see all crowd source projects have a clause that if the project fails or is mothballed, then the project code and assets are released open source. Haunts: The Manse Macabre and all assets could be place on github for the users to continue.
- austinlyons 14y ago
  I agree. For all the people wanting to learn/practice Go, finishing Haunts would be a great opportunity
OoTheNigerian 14y ago
Here's a proper and more holistic overview. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-manse-macabre/posts/331425 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-ma...
Titanous 14y ago
The source code for the game (Go/Lua) is already on GitHub: https://github.com/runningwild/haunts https://github.com/runningwild/haunts
- fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
  I had no interest in this game so far, but now I will try to run this. Open sourcing almost any project is to programmers, like blood in the water is to sharks :)
wvenable 14y ago
$28,739 isn't a lot of money to hire programmers to work over any reasonable amount of time. This hardly seems surprising.
- timwiseman 14y ago
  You have a point, but remember that he had substantial work on the game finished before he turned to kickstarter, so he wasn't trying to make a whole game on $28K. Also, unless somehow agreed otherwise the creators still keep copyright in things funded through kickstarter, so he could promise perecentage of future returns along with immediate payment (it's not clear from the article that he did, but he certainly could have.)
  - technotony 14y ago
    Offering financial returns would be against kickstarter terms of service (and possibly illegal depending how it was structured).
    - timwiseman 14y ago
      I apologize if it wasn't clear: He could offer a percentage of profits to his employees/contract coders that work on making this in addition to their salaries/contract pay. He could not offer financial returns to the kickstarter backers. That would definitely violate the terms of service (though I don't see a way it would be otherwise illegal, assuming no fraud or deliberate money laundering was involved.)
- goostavos 14y ago
  That's what jumped out at me, too. Considering, the fact that 28k isn't even an acceptable yearly salary for one employee, trying to fund a small team on that minuscule amount seems.. odd. It's not entirely surprising that the engineers left to go back to jobs that pay a livable wage.
b0rsuk 14y ago
Label them (those who left) as quitters without ethics or loyalty and make sure it comes up high in google searches. Do you think it would work ? I know potential employers google my name.
- RobotCaleb 14y ago
  That seems rather rash. Do I think it would work what? Do you have a goal other than attempting to destroy someone's career?
  - hnal943 14y ago
    I think it would work if the goal was to never attract another programer to your company again.
- eternalban 14y ago
  You really need to amend that suggestion with "I am not a lawyer" ...
- sejje 14y ago
  Maybe I'm not understanding properly, but the article said one programmer was hired for 1 year by the project. He served his year, and now is done. He opted not to continue. What is his sin?
- elliottcarlson 14y ago
  We don't know the circumstances behind this - if the employer is hard to work with, perhaps unreasonable at times - then it is in someones best interest to quit. We don't know the whole story so we can't judge either side.
- king_jester 14y ago
  Last time I checked, when you are hired for pay to write software, you aren't obligated to finish when things go sour just because of "loyalty".
goldfeld 14y ago
I don't mean to bash the guy, but when it comes to small software projects on a shoestring, that seem more like a side project than a stable income, I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself. It's not that he could have kept the ball rolling the hard way, all by himself (though he could, had he been the lead programmer instead of placing that weight on a volatile hire), it's more about the morale in knowing the biggest stakeholder is also knee deep in the guts of the game. It does wonders to programmer employees, and might not have ended up with them quitting so early on. I've been noticing this trend on Kickstarter that more and more people seem to be coming up with coding projects and then waiting on the money to solve their core problem: getting the project coded, since they can't code themselves. I don't know if it's good or bad, it's definitely good that designers can bootstrap a coding project this way, but then coding is becoming increasingly easier that I'd rather see these people learn to do it and then bring their full vision into a product. Otherwise they deny software projects their biggest advantage; that they can be done on the side with no resources but your own time, which you are more than happy to spend doing that wonderful hobby which is bulding things and seeing them work.
- timwiseman 14y ago
  I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself I'm of mixed feelings. As a programmer and DBA myself, I would certainly find it good for the project lead to at least have programming experience so they really understood the process. But you can be "knee deep in the guts of the game" in more ways than programming. A competent writer, level designer, or graphics artist are as deep in a game as the programmers, just in different ways. I would be extremely hesitant to back anyone who was just a "visionary" or "idea man", but I would happily support someone who had created a detailed script, level designs, and a thorough project organization plan and now needed programmers to turn that highly detailed set of requirements into code.
  - goldfeld 14y ago
    As much as I agree with you on other parts being as much important, I wasn't necessarily meaning an artistically accomplished project, as long as an MVP could be put out. And unless Mr. Dakan is writer, game designer and graphic artist all-in-one, there seems to be the case that the project was mothballed because of a lack of coding, not of any of those other things. In the end, average-quality work on all these other fronts is much more easily replaced or makeshifted than code, even if poor code. Without a programmer who can make progress, even if not maintainable in the future, the project halts, as it has. Or it has to resign to being a board game, a story or a graphic novel, and not an interactive digital game. Meanwhile, a sufficiently creative coder who is the project lead can probably come up with placeholders for everything else. Or call upon the community. People seem to be far more eager to offer game design and writing ideas than to jump in and code. You could even outsource parts of design on marketplaces like 99designs. Code isn't easily outsourced, one must have a whole understanding of it, or at least of each component, and there's always the (mostly exacerbated) fear of being copied.

31 points by HarveyKandola 14y ago

"In his blogpost, Mr Dakan apologised for how Haunts has turned out and pledged to refund any backer who wanted their money back out of his own pocket." Well, at least he's saying he'll do the right thing about it.

masklinn 14y ago
No, that is not "the right thing", there's absolutely nothing right about doing that. It's good natured and nice of him, but in the grand scheme of things if it's anything that anything is "a terrible idea".
- Karunamon 14y ago
  It's not right to give the people who backed him their money back? What.
  - kevingadd 14y ago
    Kickstarter isn't a store. When you back a project you're investing in potential. The project failing to get completed doesn't mean you deserve your money back. In this case, he spent the money on what he said he'd spend it on (building the game) so it's kind of insane for him to offer to refund backers their original investment. It undermines the principles behind Kickstarter. On the other hand, it is unclear how backer rewards figure into the picture. Maybe he feels that since a copy of the finished game was listed as a backer reward, he owes people a refund for being unable to deliver that reward?
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      >it's kind of insane for him to offer to refund backers their original investment. It undermines the principles behind Kickstarter. Doing something nice now considered "insane" and "undermining kickstarter's principles". Oooookay then.
      - Lewisham 14y ago
        It continues bolstering the idea that Kickstarter is a store and not a prospective revenue builder. It creates expectations for others to follow suit if their projects go similarly. It is a bad idea that comes from a nice place.
        Karunamon 14y ago
        Anyone who has that idea is frankly, stupid. Kickstarter is quite upfront about what they are, what they do, and what your expectations should be. I do not see how failing to cater to people who can't understand basic concepts undermines anything, or how it makes it any less of a nice gesture.
        Apocryphon 14y ago
        And what's wrong with expecting others to be responsible and to be prepared to repay the funders if it goes wrong?
        kevingadd 14y ago
        That is not how investment in business ventures or projects works. It's not a zero-sum game. Sometimes things don't work out and there's no value to return to the investor. It's called risk.
        masklinn 14y ago
        1. that it's got nothing to do with responsibility 2. that the money should be gone (in trying to get the project done) and if they can refund funders they had no reason to crowdfund to start with and 3. that it's a completely different set of expectations. Again, kickstarter is not a store. And it's not a bank either. If somebody with an idea wants a loan, he checks in with a bank not a crowdfunding site.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    It definitely isn't "the right thing": kickstarter isn't a store where you buy a product, it's a funding platform for projects. That means the project may fail, and as a backer you must understand that: you're a grantor or patron, not a customer. There may be reasons and justifications to refund backers (or even just good-heartedness), but short of a knowingly fraudulent project I do not think it can ever be "the right thing". And I say that having put about a month of income into various crowdfunding projects (on kickstarters and other crowdfunding sites) so far: they got me excited, I'd like them to succeed, but I fully expect that some will fail (entirely) and others will yield turds or will fail to live up to expectations.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      I understand your position, and it's fine as far as it goes. But consider the long run for the guy behind this. Say he wants to run another project down the road. He has the negative of having failed, but he has the positive of offering people's money back. Which in most people's mind would mitigate the failure to some degree. Does that change your view that it can never be the right thing? The backers and the project leader benefit from his stance. What makes it wrong?
  - timwiseman 14y ago
    I see Masklinn's point, but I also agree with you. Fundamentally, kickstarter is much like patronage. You may wind up getting something fantastic by backing, but you are taking on a high level of risk of getting either nothing or something very bad. All backers need to understand this, and the only obligation (morally, I'm not even sure this could be enforced legally) is to put in a good faith effort. With that said, I'm also comfortable saying that someone who is going beyond their obligations to make things as right as they can is doing the right thing. This is the right thing in terms of his reputation, in terms of people backing him the next time he uses kickstarter, and it is morally right in the sense that it is a good beyond what he had to do.

austinlyons 14y ago

why don't they just open source it?

erre 14y ago
From the latest update: """A lot of you have mentioned that we should open source everything if worse comes to worse. In fact, the code is already open, but if we cannot pull together to make this a retail product, we will absolutely fully open source everything, content and code and turn it over to the community. Actually, at some point we’d like to do that no matter what, even after a retail release (however many years later, when it makes fiscal sense). But right now the code is under the same modified BSD license as the Go programming language and the contents are all Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike."""
- erre 14y ago
  Besides, I should point out that the project owners haven't abandoned it yet. They are trying to find ways to make it happen.
  - EastCoastLA 14y ago
    That can be a slippery slope, because with more money and time, they can keep finding ways to "make it happen." When is the line drawn? Maybe the should publicly state a date to release the project to the people if they cannot complete the project.
    - jivatmanx 14y ago
      Yep, think Duke Nukem Forever.
- austinlyons 14y ago
  oh thanks, I hadn't seen that. I think it would make more fiscal sense to open source it now and get it finished rather than let it sit, reimburse backers and then open source it.

EastCoastLA 14y ago

It would nice to see all crowd source projects have a clause that if the project fails or is mothballed, then the project code and assets are released open source. Haunts: The Manse Macabre and all assets could be place on github for the users to continue.

austinlyons 14y ago
I agree. For all the people wanting to learn/practice Go, finishing Haunts would be a great opportunity

OoTheNigerian 14y ago

Here's a proper and more holistic overview. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-manse-macabre/posts/331425 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-ma...

Titanous 14y ago

The source code for the game (Go/Lua) is already on GitHub: https://github.com/runningwild/haunts https://github.com/runningwild/haunts

fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
I had no interest in this game so far, but now I will try to run this. Open sourcing almost any project is to programmers, like blood in the water is to sharks :)

wvenable 14y ago

$28,739 isn't a lot of money to hire programmers to work over any reasonable amount of time. This hardly seems surprising.

timwiseman 14y ago
You have a point, but remember that he had substantial work on the game finished before he turned to kickstarter, so he wasn't trying to make a whole game on $28K. Also, unless somehow agreed otherwise the creators still keep copyright in things funded through kickstarter, so he could promise perecentage of future returns along with immediate payment (it's not clear from the article that he did, but he certainly could have.)
- technotony 14y ago
  Offering financial returns would be against kickstarter terms of service (and possibly illegal depending how it was structured).
  - timwiseman 14y ago
    I apologize if it wasn't clear: He could offer a percentage of profits to his employees/contract coders that work on making this in addition to their salaries/contract pay. He could not offer financial returns to the kickstarter backers. That would definitely violate the terms of service (though I don't see a way it would be otherwise illegal, assuming no fraud or deliberate money laundering was involved.)
goostavos 14y ago
That's what jumped out at me, too. Considering, the fact that 28k isn't even an acceptable yearly salary for one employee, trying to fund a small team on that minuscule amount seems.. odd. It's not entirely surprising that the engineers left to go back to jobs that pay a livable wage.

b0rsuk 14y ago

Label them (those who left) as quitters without ethics or loyalty and make sure it comes up high in google searches. Do you think it would work ? I know potential employers google my name.

RobotCaleb 14y ago
That seems rather rash. Do I think it would work what? Do you have a goal other than attempting to destroy someone's career?
- hnal943 14y ago
  I think it would work if the goal was to never attract another programer to your company again.
eternalban 14y ago
You really need to amend that suggestion with "I am not a lawyer" ...
sejje 14y ago
Maybe I'm not understanding properly, but the article said one programmer was hired for 1 year by the project. He served his year, and now is done. He opted not to continue. What is his sin?
elliottcarlson 14y ago
We don't know the circumstances behind this - if the employer is hard to work with, perhaps unreasonable at times - then it is in someones best interest to quit. We don't know the whole story so we can't judge either side.
king_jester 14y ago
Last time I checked, when you are hired for pay to write software, you aren't obligated to finish when things go sour just because of "loyalty".

goldfeld 14y ago

I don't mean to bash the guy, but when it comes to small software projects on a shoestring, that seem more like a side project than a stable income, I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself. It's not that he could have kept the ball rolling the hard way, all by himself (though he could, had he been the lead programmer instead of placing that weight on a volatile hire), it's more about the morale in knowing the biggest stakeholder is also knee deep in the guts of the game. It does wonders to programmer employees, and might not have ended up with them quitting so early on. I've been noticing this trend on Kickstarter that more and more people seem to be coming up with coding projects and then waiting on the money to solve their core problem: getting the project coded, since they can't code themselves. I don't know if it's good or bad, it's definitely good that designers can bootstrap a coding project this way, but then coding is becoming increasingly easier that I'd rather see these people learn to do it and then bring their full vision into a product. Otherwise they deny software projects their biggest advantage; that they can be done on the side with no resources but your own time, which you are more than happy to spend doing that wonderful hobby which is bulding things and seeing them work.

timwiseman 14y ago
I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself I'm of mixed feelings. As a programmer and DBA myself, I would certainly find it good for the project lead to at least have programming experience so they really understood the process. But you can be "knee deep in the guts of the game" in more ways than programming. A competent writer, level designer, or graphics artist are as deep in a game as the programmers, just in different ways. I would be extremely hesitant to back anyone who was just a "visionary" or "idea man", but I would happily support someone who had created a detailed script, level designs, and a thorough project organization plan and now needed programmers to turn that highly detailed set of requirements into code.
- goldfeld 14y ago
  As much as I agree with you on other parts being as much important, I wasn't necessarily meaning an artistically accomplished project, as long as an MVP could be put out. And unless Mr. Dakan is writer, game designer and graphic artist all-in-one, there seems to be the case that the project was mothballed because of a lack of coding, not of any of those other things. In the end, average-quality work on all these other fronts is much more easily replaced or makeshifted than code, even if poor code. Without a programmer who can make progress, even if not maintainable in the future, the project halts, as it has. Or it has to resign to being a board game, a story or a graphic novel, and not an interactive digital game. Meanwhile, a sufficiently creative coder who is the project lead can probably come up with placeholders for everything else. Or call upon the community. People seem to be far more eager to offer game design and writing ideas than to jump in and code. You could even outsource parts of design on marketplaces like 99designs. Code isn't easily outsourced, one must have a whole understanding of it, or at least of each component, and there's always the (mostly exacerbated) fear of being copied.