BTW - the developers got NOTHING in profit from the first one, Ubisoft paid $200k to let us finish it, then sold 300k of units - and somehow said they made no money...YEAH RIGHT ! DD
DD, hope you don't mind me asking here as a follow up (and to anyone interested and listening) - do you know of any startups or individuals interested in doing social gaming, preferably in Texas? I work in the gaming industry as well. I joined a Chinese social gaming startup in its incubation 2.5 yrs ago where I took lead role on all international products. We're moving to IPO now and I'm looking to head back to the US in my exit. Although social games have quite a few new hurdles and no longer have the environment nor first comer advantage they had early on, I have some ideas where I think I can reproduce large scale success. In these upcoming months, I'll continue to reach out to gaming programmers in my home state of Texas and see if there's enough pieces to really make something happen.
DD already touched on this a bit, but... Video game resale by 3rd party vendors are not the only way to get affordable games. I don't think I've purchased a used video game in a LONG time, yet the majority of titles I've purchased in the last few years have probably been under $20 (or even less). Steam and other forms of digital distribution have proven that (or just waiting 6-12 months for the BOMBAs, thanks to Amazon and other retailers). I think by not supporting this project (or perhaps more generally, Kickstarter projects in general), you're kind of supporting higher prices for games actually. Not to say there aren't other reasons for supporting video game resale by 3rd parties, but affordable games aren't one of them IMO. Of course, publishers haven't always made it clear that DD would allow for cheaper games (see games selling for $60 over DD), but that should change over time (already has to some degree). (Also, publisher greed generally has much more to do with game prices than developer greed IMO).