Kickstarter — Aries (FPSMMORPG)

I for one am very interested in crowd sourced funding for video games (and other projects). After the hugely successful KickStarter campaign from Double Fine, I think a lot of independent developers have awakened to the possibilities of having the game paid for by the end user rather than some publishing organization. The benefits of such a technique are numerous and I won't go in too much depth right now, but the biggest merit is that the developer is able to maintain autonomous creative control over the final product.

Many of the projects on kickstarter are very small in scope and only ask for a modest amount of money, perhaps a few thousand dollars. Occasionally there is a project that I come across that appears to fundamentally defeat the purpose of kickstarter in my mind. The Future of First Person Shooters- Aries (FPSMMORPG) by Derrick Smith — Kickstarter: is one such project in my mind. It comes from a guy who is "a recent graduate at University of Phoenix with [a] BA in Business Development specifically in Organization and Innovation." He also "use to play football" so he must know his stuff.

Regardless of his qualifications as a businessman, this particular project is already "pre-funded." I get the impression that they really just want to collect some of the free money available on KickStarter and aren't doing something that is truly crowd-funded like Double Fine Adventure. Obviously they are within their rights to start the project and see what interest they get. I think the numbers speak louder than I can about the interest in this particular FPSMMORPGWTFBBQ game of videos. As of the time of this writing, there are 64 hours to go and they have 15 backers for a total of $950 of their $275,000 goal. If you are reading this post, I implore you to not support this project and put your money somewhere that they actually need it. Aries will eventually happen or not and I don't believe any kick-starter money will have an affect on whether they complete the game or whether it will be any good at all.

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