The Shadowrun release is particularly interesting, because it gives some paradoxical insights into making games on Kickstarter budgets. What most surprised me about the release is just how little they managed to get out of the budget of $2m. John Ree's Liege Kickstarter has just finished and he made just over $80k and is very pleased with that. But, although that is a tiny fraction of SRR's total, it was actually 5x what he was asking for. So will Liege and many other smaller kickstarters, if they ever see the light of day, have 20x fewer features (whatever that may mean) than SRR?
We haven't seen much quality from Kickstarter yet, but other games such as Operations Conquistador (whether you like it or not, it's not really my cup of tea as is) and some promising betas (Eisenwald, Xenonauts etc.), suggest that it's possible to do a lot more with much less money than projects such as Shadowrun achieve. There is a curious stepping in the games industry whereby as companies get bigger they need larger and larger budgets, but they are able to achieve exponentially less with them.
We haven't seen much quality from Kickstarter yet, but other games such as Operations Conquistador (whether you like it or not, it's not really my cup of tea as is) and some promising betas (Eisenwald, Xenonauts etc.), suggest that it's possible to do a lot more with much less money than projects such as Shadowrun achieve. There is a curious stepping in the games industry whereby as companies get bigger they need larger and larger budgets, but they are able to achieve exponentially less with them.