stasis
Latest
Crowdfund Bookie, December 2013: Squeaking by
The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the month and produces pretty charts for you to look at. As the weeks go by, the video game crowdfunding space appears to be under a shift of sorts. December 2013 saw the second-lowest total amount of dollars raised by gaming projects ($2,331,061) in the last seven months, since we began tracking such data. Unlike September 2013's $2,211,975 raised, backers in December managed to fund 40 projects, the second-highest number of successful projects in, again, the past seven months. December 2013 is the first month in which crowdfunded projects failed to raise $1 million over the top of their combined project goals, toppling the combined goal amount by $568,518. While it still seems like a lot of extra money, that averages out to $14,213 in extra dollars for each of the 40 crowdfunders last month. The trends we've tracked to this point indicated that crowdfunding was especially a boon for creators to reach stretch goals to bring games to additional platforms. Therefore, December's numbers go against the grain, showing that money spread out a bit more evenly across more projects. Whether that has anything to do with the holiday season is unclear. Head past the break to see the month's breakdown by genre as well as a list of December's top five-earning games.
EVE Evolved: Making EVE beautiful
When it was released back in 2003, EVE Online was one of the most visually impressive games on the market. Over the coming years, the graphics aged gracefully next to competitors on the market and all seemed well. Nonetheless, CCP were not content to let their flagship game's graphics eventually go out of date. In true CCP style, they developed a long-term staged delivery plan for the complete overhaul of the game's graphics. The first stage of delivery came with the Trinity expansion, in which a premium client was launched with incredible high resolution ship models. This was just the first stage in a plan to keep EVE graphically ahead of any competitors. In this technical article, I look at the science of making EVE beautiful and examine CCP's plans for the future.
