Technology

I do care. I cared so much that I was a games journo for over 5 years. I love gaming. Always have always will.

I'm well over 50. My first gaming devices predate the 2600. Calling this predatory is hyperbole. People are not paying now to play later. They are paying now to play a title in development. That's not the future of gaming. This is the present. Diabolo 6's bs isn't really an apt example. I can give you a much better, more relevant and apt example: Watframe. Warframe used exactly the same funding model as SC and was nowhere near complete for almost a decade - people still played it to the point that it successfully ran its own convention over multiple years. Now it's feature complete and has dropped multiple addons and expansions. Would that have happened without audience financial participation? I don't think so. Hell, no studios of scale or pubs believed in it and Dark Sector had to be so heavily bastardised to fit with the FPS warshooter trend to even get published. If Digital Extremes didn't shift models to crowd funding they would have died. Cloud Imperium are making a very specific game for a very specific audience and they are smart to sell directly to that audience. That money has no negative impact on you and has a positive net effect on the industry - lots of people are being employed across different nations and lots of others are also earning money in audience participation (bloggers, influencers, convention staff etc).

This is the present for this niche audience but if it becomes a way for more games of greater variety to reach the audiences that will pay for the specific experiences they want while being able to avoid all the bs associated with seasonal trends and ridiculous short shelf lives leading to crazily overreaching copy protection and awful cycles of boom/bust hire/fire/studio closure I'm all for it.