One of last year’s biggest surprises was Divinity: Original Sin, a Kickstarted role-playing game with a unique co-op system that blew Kirk away and took home a coveted spot on our GOTY list. Today, the folks behind Original Sin have announced a sequel.
Developer Larian Studios have yet to share details on Divinity: Original Sin II — I guess it’s a sequel to Divine Divinity‘s prequel — but they are doing one cool thing: In preparation for the Kickstarter campaign, which they will launch on August 26, they’re crowdsourcing ideas for rewards. So if you want to go bug them for (the chance to buy) a nice hoodie or a strategy guide, you can go to their forums and get it done.
Comments
11 responses to “Divinity: Original Sin II Announced, Will Be On Kickstarter Soon”
I’m saying this out of ignorance but I would have thought they’d have made enough money from the first to fund the sequel. >_>
I literally just clicked this article to comment that. Kickstarter is meant for up and coming studios who can’t fund their own work…. Not for studios that made a crap ton of money from their first kick starter and would rather use crowd sourced funds than the profit they made from the first one to fund another…. Pretty big cop out if you ask me.
Kickstarter really is the ultimate scam when it’s used like this imo… No risk to them of losing their own money and they get to get funds to make the game + get the profit. Such a joke…
I kind of half-agree.
Yes, the general purpose of Kickstarter is for small start ups, but the overall idea is capital raising. Before embarking on large projects, businesses will usually looks for investors or contributors who want to buy in and help them raise capital for that venture – even well established businesses. And Kickstarter is kind of becoming just another way to do that.
Now, this doesn’t mean that it’s “fair” to other start ups. But that’s kind of a soft point. I think what will be more telling at the end of this is how much they get for the sequel through KS versus how much they got for the original. If people don’t like it, they won’t contribute.
This doesn’t mean that they won’t proceed if they don’t make their KS goal either. It’s probably just another arm of their capital raising efforts, and if it falls short, they’re probably not in dire straits and will be able to continue anyway. And then those customers who didn’t feel comfortable helping on the KS can just buy the game normally.
thats kind of the point of making a product mate if all your getting is the money to cover development then your not growing the business nor paying for its future.
Kickstarter helped them launch the first game and fund extra development.
The 2nd kickstarter will help them build the 2nd game. I dont see the issue of
a trusted development team avoiding larger investors who would dictate their games development, instead the players will have a say, dont want it made? then don’t back it, simple.
It may have been set up that way originally, but Kickstarter has become just another method of getting funding.
If you donate on Kickstarter, you get the game anyway. It’s basically financing the game with pre-orders and often the game ends up cheaper if you buy on Kickstarter.
Except if they don’t complete the game you get nothing. But they still have your money.
I guess part of the issue here is that we don’t know how much profit they made on the last title (do we?), or how much the next game is going to cost to produce. I’m led to believe that games cost a LOT of money to develop so perhaps there simply wasn’t enough profit to pay for a sequel.
It could also be that they are trying to avoid signing for a Publishing company. I’ve heard other Dev teams justifying their Kickstarter scheme’s by stating that they want to self publish because publishers actually have a fairly large say in the direction of the game, and the Dev team wants to retain complete creative control over their title. Once you add the cost of the development and publishing of their game, there is little wonder they are looking for community dollars…
IE: Obsidian Entertainment with Pillars of Eternity.
Yeah, I bought 2 copies of the original so the missus and I could play together… I’m fine with the kickstarter if you get the full game when it’s released, but I don’t pre-order much any more as I don’t believe the practice is beneficial to the consumer, so I wont be contributing. I can understand the devs not wanting to get invloved with an external publisher, but I figure I contributed enough by buying 2 copies of the final release.
This is one of those hot debates around developers using KS to fund their games despite being a profitable business (look at CoolMiniorNot in the boardgame scene).
I don’t necessarily have an issue with them doing it… the platform is there and if you can use it as a kind of ‘pre-order’ system, or a way to include extras that your initial production budget doesn’t allow for, then why wouldn’t you.
The only problem I see is that the platform itself is being swamped by bigger companies with the initial budgets to put some serious gloss and initial development into a KS project, where genuine indy devs don’t. True, the spirit of the platform is for those indies, but how can an idea or a simple prototype compete with actual components/demos/gloss? Makes me feel a little sorry for the little guys.