Shovel Knight Kickstarter a Rousing Success
By now you have probably heard about Shovel Knight and its Kickstarter: the game is to be a pixelated love letter to 8-bit games, made by ex-Wayforward Studios staff. They’re some good people, and folks love classic games, so the chance to help support a new 8-bit game really caught the internet’s attention. Yacht Club Games asked for $75,000 to complete the game and has completed the Kickstarter with a massive $311,502. They’ve added tons of bonuses and stretch goals to the project and have met every single one. If you still want to pledge or pre-order the game, you can do so via PayPal. The game is set to release this winter. However, it still needs to be voted up on Steam Greenlight to get on the digital distribution service.
Let me take a quick moment to talk about Greenlight, while we’re here, ok? I love Valve and all that they do for the gaming community, but Greenlight needs some serious work right now. Currently, anyone new who wants a game on Steam (anyone at all, unless you’re a big name) has to go through the Greenlight. Users voting up their favorite games to get on Steam sounds like a good idea, but in practice what happens is dumb kids choose Minecraft rip-offs and bad parodies of real games to vote up. While Valve sorts out these occurrences, it slows down the process immensely and even a wildly successful Kickstarter game like Shovel Knight has difficulty getting up to the top spot. I’m not sure what the solution will be, but something does need to be done to make the whole process smoother and more sensible.