khaight
Sentinel
I'm not sure I agree, but it may be a question of what 'AAA' means. I don't think Kickstarter is likely to fund games with the cinematic look and professional voice-acting of, say, Mass Effect. If looking and sounding that good is a requirement for a 'AAA' game, then Kickstarter isn't playing in that sandbox. Games like that have budgets of tens of millions of dollars -- at the high end budgets go over a hundred million. And those costs are the reason why we don't see niche AAA games: for games that expensive to be profitable they have to sell a very large number of copies, which means they can't be restricted to niche appeal. It's Lowest Common Denominator all the way, baby!
What I see Kickstarter doing is revitalizing the mid-range -- call them 'AA' games. We had the giant, LCD 'AAA' games, and we had small indie games produced by a few people, but there was very little in the middle. Kickstarter provides a funding mechanism for games that are too large for the 'three guys in a garage working part time' development model but too niche to be attractive to the AAA publishers. And as someone with niche RPG tastes, I think that's fantastic.
Kickstarter's impact on AAA gaming is likely to be indirect: brain drain. A really talented game developer given a choice between the AAA approach and the garage indie approach is likely to choose AAA. But add Kickstarter AA to the mix and I suspect a noticeable number of the really good people would prefer that to AAA because it gives them more control over their own destiny and lets them work on projects for which they feel true passion. What happens to the quality of AAA games, such as they are, when increasingly the best developers prefer not to work on them because they have a better alternative?
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