The pseudonyms and cartoons for all the developers is somewhat concerning, as a naturally suspicious person. I've been happy when I funded game projects by known successful teams (UberEnt, Garriott), but I'd be reluctant to fund someone who didn't have a track record or a real identity.
(I just noticed if you dig into their FB page and such, you see stills from French TV interviews they did, so it's a bit less concerning, but still bad marketing IMO.)
You are conflating "celebrity" and "somebody who is likely to deliver and not waste your backing money." As someone doing a Kickstarter fairly soon, this is an issue I'm working to alleviate, but not with cute pseudonyms.
I mean, WTF is this (from their Kickstarter page):
Why should you trust us? The fate of our company and
its team depends on the success of this game.
Well, of course, but that doesn't do anything to substantiate why they should trust the project owners. The project owners might be complete idiots laying their company on the line for something they can't do, what reason has been given to think they can do it?
Betting on people with a track record or demonstrable ability to finish a game is only smart.
I think part of it in this team's case could be a language issue (their native language seems to be French, and there's a lot more content in French elsewhere; it just isn't translated or updated for the KS)
You don't have to be Richard Garriott to be credible. Why even mention the guy? The only way you can be him is if you have decades of published games, it's not useful advice for people who are relatively unknown.
You don't have to be Garriott to be credible, but he is credible. Because he has a track record. If they do have a track record of building quality projects (and they say they do), they aren't substantiating it. See the problem?
I don't have a shipped-product track record, so I'm going to have a playable vertical slice--not a complete game, not narrative-based, but a demonstration that our features are already working, that our game isn't just hype, and what we need a Kickstarter for is assets and content creation. Because I understand people do and should laugh at projects that handwave this stuff.
Echo this 100%. I am in the same boat. Anybody can put up pretty pictures. If the project fails, it brings disrepute to the whole indie gamedev community. Life is already too hard.
Life is incredibly easy for indie game devs today. There are markets; it's reasonably transparent; and you have insanely good tools available for free or cheap (Unity 3D for goodness' sake -- in 1997 we paid $5k to rent a rudimentary 3d game engine to build an alpha demo, and it was C++ or go f--k yourself. Serious engines cost six figures plus a significant percentage of back end. Something not nearly as good as Blender cost $5000/seat in 2005.)
Because of this, competition is fierce. But competition is fierce for web developers too, and we all seem to be doing OK.
Suck it up, build a playable alpha, and then look for funding.
Two: it's much harder for a game developer than a web developer. (I do both.) Game development is much, much more like doing a soup-to-nuts startup than it is "a web developer", the demand is in aggregate much lower than the supply, and with entire segments of the market you can't even seriously playtest something for viability until you've basically built the damn thing. (So if you don't care much about the social space or something easily done with a tool like Unity, I hope you like sunk costs.) I'm going to have spent over a full year building out a vertical slice of this game and I can do so because I both enjoy the genre and have that kind of time and money to throw around.
There is no good way to compare "a web developer" and an indie game developer and you should kind of be embarrassed for trying to light up the guy you replied to when you haven't the foggiest.
Indie game development is like starting your own rock band. It's a hit-driven business. If you aren't doing it for fun then do something else. And it's easier to make games and make money from them today than at any time in the past. If you fail, it's because your game sucked or you were insufficiently lucky. The odds are against you, but hey, you can always make a living as a web developer.
I say this as someone who has developed and released multiple games soup-to-nuts and works as a web developer.
Windows/Mac/Linux, for now. Using libgdx on the JVM, so Android and iOS (via RoboVM) are pretty easy, but I'm using Rhino for a scripting layer and that might not play so nicely with RoboVM or Dalvik.
I will fund a pseudonymous celebrity, or a pseudonym with a track record. I will fund a non-celebrity with no track record IFF the project is interesting, credible, and the team shows both a sufficient investment to date that I don't think it's a "scam", and understanding of the upcoming challenges so they'll finish it.
The pseudonyms and cartoons for all the developers is somewhat concerning, as a naturally suspicious person. I've been happy when I funded game projects by known successful teams (UberEnt, Garriott), but I'd be reluctant to fund someone who didn't have a track record or a real identity.
(I just noticed if you dig into their FB page and such, you see stills from French TV interviews they did, so it's a bit less concerning, but still bad marketing IMO.)