I think they are joining up while the window is open so they can be full-fledged developers for free. If they wait, they'd have to pay $15/month to just be apprentice developers.
A lot of gaming developers/designers are out of work and getting a real job has become quite competitive. Working on anything industry related looks better on the resume than just having time off between projects. Essentially, this is a LinkedIn profile filler.
That are all good suggestion for a fresh team that's up to date on their options. Brad&Co with their 90s approach would have failed at it even if someone had told them about, just like they failed to register on major forums for their kickstarter until told so, failed to get in touch with reddit until told so, and so on.
I am sure you could get 800k to fund a game similar to EQ. I am also sure that showing up with a trainwreck of a kickstarter with nothing decent to show and giving every objective person who looks at your game the feeling that you are really half assing it is not a good recipe for success no matter what type of game you are trying to make.
I actually just finished typing and sending a 1667 word email to Ben about where I think they made mistakes and what they should have done instead. Unless they can show us their plan I personally don't think they will be able to raise much more than $200,000 on their private website; they'll probably get about $100,000 or so in the first month from the true believers and maybe another $100,000 or so over the next couple month before the money drys up and they are back pretty much where they started. Ben did kind of dodge the question on whether or not they had investors and said that the any investors that they do or not have would have to choose to reveal themselves. The fact that they are adding more team members seems to indicate that they might have found that mythical angel investor; or maybe they are really that ignorant and are doubling down assuming they will still get the money.
I agree with you but some on this forum are never going to agree with this. I think people confuse nostalgia for 'wanting another EQ'. Most of the people playing either EQ progression servers or even P1999 are playing for simply nostalgia reasons. That lasts all of a month at most, tops and then they move on. It again goes to the question 'how big of a pool is there really?' How many of those that would be potentially into something like this would only be due to nostalgia, which in turn wouldn't last long anyway?
SOTA did a ton right in regards to Kickstarter, but the main thing is they slowly built up on their known audience, and Garriott invested in his project and hired a bunch of tech people <note, not 9 game 'designers'>. They made their design document known and made their case for a 3D spiritual successor to Ultima from day one in a very professional and consistent manner.
Given how much larger and more rabid the EQ -> WOW fanbase is and the fact there is such a larger pool of donations that theoretically should be availabe, a successor to Everquest is a slam dunk if the KS is done right. Kingdom Come is a great example, and it's an even more niche audience.
If I were out of work, I'd join. At least it's something else to put on a resume.
Saw your bullets. They know all that stuff. Privately they had to decide why the ks was failing. Was it no interest in the game or other reasons? They decided other reasons, things like a bad ks(launch and content) VG drama, people not wanting to pledge to a KS, etc. personally I think they are right. Gamers are a forgiven bunch, and will still try a game if the word of mouth is there. I personally wanted them to try another KS once they got farther along and use some of the rerolled folks as a focus group.
This would currently require that every single registered person on their private website donate a minimum of ~200.00 each. I would guess that less than 75% of the registered users will turn into paid users. I highly doubt they'll get even close to that 100,000. They need to regroup, do some actual work and make a new Kickstarter. That private website funding is going to be the kiss of death for a lot of people.
