David Braben's Elite Dangerous highlights all that's bad about Kickstarter

There is a little buzz around the announcement of David Braben's latest Elite Dangerous, but don't go rushing for your credit cards just yet, in amongst the self praise and incomplete account of the genesis, rise and fall of Elite as a brand is the launch date of March 2014. 

Simply put there is no reason to pony up in advance for a project from one of the old gen of ego driven developers.

I can't stand this sort of use of kickstarter where without any tech, a screen shot of a mock up of a title is used to take your money and hold it for an indefinite period, promising a release date by which time the design teams delicate egos will have imploded, or you can get the game in a Steam,Desura or humble bundle. 


Take a look at Brabens record, Elite deserved praise in the good old days but that was a team effort, that team does not exist any more and all the sequels were disasters. Go try them out and see for yourself, I mostly boot them up to see if anyone has managed to release a working patch ...

A true sequel to Elite has been promised for almost a decade, there are pages of full of Edge magazine extolling Elites 4th coming .. it never happened. The due date for this new  Elite project is 2014, if you are good with people holding on to your money for that amount of time then great. 

But consider, would you pay your favourite band up front for their next album 2 years in advance or with an indefinite release date? What do you mean you never pay for your downloads?

The gaming industry is in a far more mature state today than it was at the time of Elites first coming. There is a high turn over of coding teams, which filters out the egomaniac developers .The likes of Braben and our hero Molyneux come from a time of promising the world or universe to gamers, looking for sales on the wings of long past faded success and almost always failing to deliver. I have no trust that Elite Dangerous will be the game claimed or delivered on time.. take a look at the delays on Frontier and Frontier II, as well as considering Elite 4 which Dangerous is has been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever was ..


Kickstarter for me is a place to back trust, I trust Doublefine, I trust Palmer Luckey and the coders behind Nexus TJI.  I just don't trust Braben to deliver .. far easier to wait for the game to release and get it on Steam, Desura, PSN, XBox live or IOS/Android..

If Elite Dangerous is a AAA multiformat game it will need considerably more funding than the current kickstarter run , especially if it is going to launch as far off as March 2014.. by which time Republicans and Democrats will be campaigning for 2016 ...

For a space trading sim to have sustained funding for a period of 2 or more years just does not seem possible. Elite is a great brand , but it has been wrecked by the Svengali behind it. Now if Ego Soft were handling coding and design.....

Lastly consider how many alternatives there are to Elite , whilst Bell and Braben were arguing , the competition caught up and superseded them . This is what is wrong with much of the games development world , developers are more notable for who they are and their ego fits than the games they inevitably fail to deliver letting down  both developers and gamers in the process. 

If there is no Elite in 2014 , who cares we have a couple of decades of games from Ego Soft ,Volition ,the brothers Roberts, Lucasfilm et al and lately the indie coders on Steam, Desura and of course iOS and Android.

For all these reasons and more I will pass on funding Braben`s latest.. you get my money when the code is finished and the game runs bug free.. 

this content is © and originated from thegameveda http://the-games-veda.blogspot.com/  if you are reading it from any other site that has not provided a link back it has been leached