Site policy change!

Hey gang! It’s been a while since I last had time to post about new games here on IndieRPGs.com. The reasons are myriad–life is busy, I’m hunkering down to develop a new game, blah blah blah–but more than that, it’s that one of my own past decisions about this site has become incompatible with my increasingly limited free time.

At some point early in this site’s history, I decided to implement a policy against posting about speculative games–that is, about games with a planned (or current and ongoing) crowdfunding campaign, whose continued development depended upon them successfully obtaining said funding.

My reasons were good: I didn’t want to litter this site with loads of games that were destined to end up crashing upon the rocky shoals of Kickstarter Island and sinking to the depths, never to be seen or heard from again.

The problem, of course, is that in the years since I came up with this policy, crowdfunding has become positively ubiquitous. Few developers will tell me if they’re planning a future Kickstarter up-front, even if they are–and of those that do, literally no one volunteers information about what will happen if said crowdfunding campaign fails.

This has come to mean that I end up having to do detective work before each post, emailing the developers and waiting hours (or days!) before a reply comes in with the necessary info. By this point, my window for posting about the game will have passed. Granted, I was able to make this process work with my schedule in the past, but I’ve simply acquired too many demands on my time to put up with it now.

So, I have a simple solution: I’m just not going to check up on that stuff anymore! I’m betting that your desire to hear about new and upcoming indie RPGs isn’t wholly contingent on the particulars of crowdfunding. I’m making it easier for myself to post updates on this site, and you can therefore expect to start seeing those show up again beginning today.

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3 Comments »

 
  • BarryB says:

    Welcome back! Glad you’ve returned. I had fears that you had been kidnapped by Russians, whom, as everybody seems to believe nowadays, are responsible for everything from worn car tires to failed Kickstarter game efforts.

  • Dave says:

    I am a huge supporter of video game crowdfunding and I want to see the RPGs I back succeed. I always recommend that those indie RPG devs contact indierpgs.com

    Unfortunately most gaming news site tend to ignore projects that aren’t from already famous developers, while the indies that actually desperately need the funds in order to complete the game cannot get any exposure. This exacerbates the problem where the relatively big name developers like inXile and Obsidian get thousands of backers when the really small studios have to scrap their project if they don’t get funded (or have to cut a lot of features that would improve the game)… And several thousand dollars may be a drop in the bucket to large studios but could make such a huge positive impact on the small developers who are just starting out.

    TL; DR: Good move!

  • Craig Stern says:

    Thanks guys! 🙂

 

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