Another Kickstarter project has popped up this time by the guys of Obsidian! They call it Project Eternity.
Obsidian Entertainment and our legendary game designers Chris Avellone, Tim Cain, and Josh Sawyer are excited to bring you a new role-playing game for the PC. Project Eternity (working title) pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past: Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment.
Project Eternity aims to recapture the magic, imagination, depth, and nostalgia of classic RPGs that we enjoyed making - and playing. At Obsidian, we have the people responsible for many of those classic games and we want to bring those games back… and that’s why we’re here - we need your help to make it a reality!
They want 2.2 million to do the Linux version, they are already over funded so either way the game will happen but you need to dig deeg again if you want it on Linux, considering it has 30 days to go it's quite likely this one will come.
Sad to see another one have Linux as a stretch goal and not an initial goal. The fact that they will do it if they get the money they want is good though, better than nothing i say but still pretty insane...
Still, better than nothing, they'll probably reach it anyway.
We've already had four (and more) huge games funded via Kickstarter and they all included Linux support either as soon as people asked for it or put it as a stretch goal close to Mac support. And they usually asked for about 5%-10% more funding to include that.
What Obsidian did is dick move: They got an enormous amount of money, they said they'll consider cross-platform. They decide to add Mac for an extra 0.5 million (again, no idea what the Hell they need that much for), and then they had the nerve to go and put Linux support for double the funding they asked for! What, do they need to buy a licence or something...? Not only that, but it turns out they tied supporting the platform with adding a new faction, another class and a new in-game companion. So the question is 'What does the money I'm giving for Linux support have to do with this extra content?'
So yeah, thanks but no thanks. Sometimes you just have to put the foot down and simply say 'No, I will not allow to be treated this way. Change it, than we'll see'
You could wait until say it comes out officially when released and buy it then since that would be perfectly normal.
My personal opinion is it is rather excessive but it's the only option we have for the game so we need to roll with it for now, or just go support other better projects that have Linux on release or Linux as a much smaller stretch goal.
Seems to be more of a we want more money gig. They're doing the Mac version at 1.6 already, what do they need the other .6 for?You guys need to understand that they are not asking for 600k to do the Linux port, they simply have put it farther in their priorities list (their reasons is theirs). If you watch closely, you should see that their previous goals don't state "Taking vacations to be ready for the Linux port".
I also hate this trend for putting Linux conversions as a stretch goal on Kickstarter, they are acting as though we have to beg them for Linux games.I'm with you here, but they can't really do otherwise if they don't see supporting Linux as a priority for their game. (Which I can understand)
Ideally, they would have separate campaigns to fund the ports, but all in all it's better to have everything happen in the same kickstarter.
I made a few lengthy posts in the Linux thread on the Steam forums about why this trend of unrealistic stretch goals and stretch goals in general for cross platform support are likely to breed unhealthy perceptions and behaviours. If anybody's interested they can [URL='http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=32832464#post32832464']read them[/URL].
One thing I would like to highlight (as an example of unhealthy behaviour) is that there's [URL='http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60178-why-are-resources-being-spent-on-a-linux-version/']a thread[/URL] on the Project Eternity forums made by people who feel that Linux support is a waste of the the project's funds - an attitude that would be much less likely to have existed if Linux support were added to the project directly rather than associated with a stretch goal.
At the end of the day, I think there's more benefit to either adding Linux support to the primary target, or just adding Linux support to the project after the minimum value that the developers feel they need to be able to support Linux is met (and not confirm it beforehand). This way, people on all platforms are aiming for the same things with regards to stretch goals, which creates better community synergy, and promotes equality.
In fact, our experience with Unity so far has made us confident enough that we have decided to remove Linux support from the stretch goals and just commit to providing a Linux version right here and now!(Unity is the engine they'll use, not Ubuntu's desktop. Can be confusing...)
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