Quote:
Originally Posted by
Espair 
Well, I hope these consumer funded games are worth the pre-order price, because published games as they are now certainly are not. It does sound odd to preorder a game that has not started or just started being developed. People are putting a lot of faith in these developers to make a game of decent quality.
Lets hope that these developers dont take advantage of the situation, market these games to be developed, take our "pre-order" pledge money for profits and make a crappy game.
Yup, that's a big risk in choosing to pledge for a game, which is why it isn't a good idea to pledge just because a game concept looks cool. You need more assurances than that.
In this case, I pledged for two reasons in addition to the game concept being of interest: 1) The person in charge of the development (Chris Roberts) has the experience and knowledge required to successfully lead the development of a game, and has a track record of producing quality products. 2) We got to see a tech demo that proves the developers are capable of doing what they promise, so rather than the starting point for crowd funding being a cool sounding idea, it is a working miniature version of the game they plan to make.
In the end, I think the worst case scenario for this game is that they run into problems developing the persistent online universe aspect of it, and instead can only deliver the wing commander style singleplayer campaign with multiplayer dogfighting. Even if that's the case, I'll have no regrets for pledging because we haven't had a game like that released in over ten years. However, the way things are going so far, it appears like we'll be getting the online universe too.
