Exactly three weeks have passed since Liam was forced to take a step back and left GamingOnLinux's destiny in our hands. Luckily the community's response was great and the site has continued at a good articles-per-day pace. But there's one part of GOL that is struggling to carry on: as some of you already realized, it's been a long while since the last The Funding Crowd article.
Many factors have forced us into this situation, most notably lack of time -- as is usually the case. All this began as almost a one man's effort (yours truly, with Speedster's invaluable help), until my free time was severely reduced and I had no other option than looking for more help or let The Funding Crowd die. I obviously chose the former, and this is how TFC became a crowdsourced column: s_d and scaine joined TFC family, and helped make it to 37 issues.
But now... lack of time strikes again: s_d left the boat some time ago to take care of other obligations and the rest of the team's schedules are stretched way beyond the point where regularly producing a crowdfunding article is feasible.
And here we are, willing to continue with the show but without the means to do so. Every single issue of the crowdsourced era's final paragraph included a plea for volunteers, but nobody ever stepped forward. Well, sadly this time it's for real: The Funding Crowd Needs You! We either get some new contributors or else this is the end, finito, kaputt.
So it's now all up to you, crowdfunding enthusiast. We really count on you to keep The Funding Crowd...
Anybody interested can let us know here in the comments or by private message: to Speedster, to scaine, or to mundtdefems. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Many factors have forced us into this situation, most notably lack of time -- as is usually the case. All this began as almost a one man's effort (yours truly, with Speedster's invaluable help), until my free time was severely reduced and I had no other option than looking for more help or let The Funding Crowd die. I obviously chose the former, and this is how TFC became a crowdsourced column: s_d and scaine joined TFC family, and helped make it to 37 issues.
But now... lack of time strikes again: s_d left the boat some time ago to take care of other obligations and the rest of the team's schedules are stretched way beyond the point where regularly producing a crowdfunding article is feasible.
And here we are, willing to continue with the show but without the means to do so. Every single issue of the crowdsourced era's final paragraph included a plea for volunteers, but nobody ever stepped forward. Well, sadly this time it's for real: The Funding Crowd Needs You! We either get some new contributors or else this is the end, finito, kaputt.
So it's now all up to you, crowdfunding enthusiast. We really count on you to keep The Funding Crowd...
Anybody interested can let us know here in the comments or by private message: to Speedster, to scaine, or to mundtdefems. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Really? I never noticed that before. I'm pretty up to date on point-and-click adventure and platformer campaigns and wouldn't mind helping out in one way or another.
While I'm not funding, I'd appreciate reading about point-and-click adventures to come for Linux.
(As I'm supposed to as a German. ;o) )
While I enjoy the funding crowd articles, I don't enjoy looking up crowdfunding games so much to put together an entire article about them, and you guys always made a massive article each issue! xD I do hope it continues on and some other people with interested and time steps in though!
if you get people send links for it :D
so you can write about it :)
Doing the searches for new game projects is definitely much more primitive than it ought to be, but that's only one aspect to putting out a Funding Crowd issue. Often one or two of us do most of the searching, and "nominate" projects that look potentially of interest and don't have ridiculous stretch goals for Linux support, ideally giving a one-line summary for each game (genre, perhaps a well-known dev on the team...) Then other team members can poke through the list and pick which projects they find interesting enough to read up on & write about. If the list is too unappealing, the issue will just get pushed back a bit until some interesting ones turn up.
We can sure use more people who are willing to write up one-or-two paragraph mini-reviews on projects they find intriguing! Even just a couple more people writing up a couple projects apiece should do the trick for a decent sized article. I would say that's our biggest need right now, since normally Munt or I can scrape up a selection of new projects with Linux support. Scaine is an excellent writer who doesn't have time to keep covering all the new projects, and I can rarely manage to do more writing than report on "What Happened".
We use a GoL maintained WIKI to write the article, then it gets published by Munts when we agree that it's ready.
This isn't a huge commitment, but as Speedster notes, I do most of the writing now that Munts is deep into his post-graduate and I just find it difficult to write up 5 or 6 projects by myself every couple of weeks.
If you volunteer, all that really happens is that you'll get an email/private message inviting you to the WIKI and any projects you cover will be hugely appreciated.
I must confess I wasn't expecting you to volunteer to help, being one of the most prolific article contributors of this new GOL era, but you're certainly welcome to the team!
Speedster and scaine have already done an excellent job explaining what does a TFC article entail, so I've got very little to add to it. If anything, I must agree with stan's first comment that browsing new gaming projects in KS and IGG is not the most user friendly of experiences. However Kickstarter allows you to sort campaigns by their release date, so if you remember your last connection date you can easily pick it up from where you left it (at least that's how I do it). Indiegogo is way messier though, as it only has the option of showing the campaigns that launched during the last 7 days (and it doesn't distinguish between videogames and other kind of games).
Anyway, this arduous job is usually done by me (or at least it used to be... I hope to get up to date soon :S: ), so volunteers shouldn't bother to look for new projects as the interesting ones would already be pre-selected as candidates in the corresponding wiki page.
Interesting suggestion. I guess some screenshots won't hurt and they can contribute to diminish the wall-of-textiness of previous articles that could drive some readership away.
Well, I enjoy writing and I can use the practice to improve on my English writing skills. I also only post 2-3 release articles a week, and have plenty of time left for work, family and gaming on the side. ;)
They did. :) I made a rough draft for my first assignment yesterday and try to get it touched up and posted today. I take it scaine will also be going over it to give the writing a consistent feel before it's published?
Seriously though, I don't think crowdfunding and pre-ordering are even similar things. In many cases, a crowdfunding campaign is the only hope for a game of ever being finished and released. But even when the campaign is successful there's always a certain amount of implicit risk of failure that must be taken into account -- mostly because these devs are usually just beginning their careers. So backing a crowdfunding campaign cannot be seen as a discounted pre-order, but as a way of increasing the chances of a proto-game to become a reality. At least that's how I see it.
PS: Of course, I too get angry when e.g. some of those devs don't stick to their word and neglect a promised Linux version of their game.