Daniel Gardner

Fair enough. Ultimately, the main problem is that TUG the promise captured my imagination, my heart, and my wallet, while TUG the game inherited my cash, but has yet to earn the other two. The visual appeal of the game has, in my opinion, fallen well short of the concept art. The game engine struggles far more than I feel it should to deliver the quality of visuals that it does (one of my primary complaints about Minecraft). The in-world crafting system feels awkward and unreliable (from what I've seen, by the way, I approve of Vintage Story's use of templates to strike a balance between immersion and user-friendliness). I'd be far more patient in waiting for the promised content to be delivered if I felt the game was a solid foundation upon which to build it, but at this point I sadly don't.

Crowd-sourcing is a way to disrupt the natural order of things and get paid by the general public for work you haven't yet done. It works by making promises and building trust that you will get the work done and deliver on said promises. Making games is hard; believe me when I say I understand that. Normally, making a decent survival game with multiplayer and mod support would be a praiseworthy achievement. I'm not here to be negative or disruptive. I'm here because this project has my interest and I wish to see it succeed. I'm offering my opinion as someone who hasn't yet bought the game and can't afford to buy every game of interest, which I suspect can be said of most of your potential market.

Two somewhat related games I've bought on impulse then wound up regretting are TUG and GRAV. TUG seduced me with amazing concept art and Kickstarter promises that I should have known better than to believe, but I bought in anyhow on the slim ray of hope that they would somehow deliver. They didn't. Something about the music and visuals of the first GRAV promo I watched grabbed me hard and refused to let go (same with No Man's Sky, but I thankfully dodged that bullet), but where I'm the the kid in the sandbox actually building a castle, most of the people playing GRAV seem to be the kids who come over and kick it down. Toxic community aside, it was also too much grind without enough creative options to hold my interest.

Minecraft is still the 800-pound gorilla of the voxel sandbox genre for one reason: community. People don't play Minecraft for its inefficient engine or difficult mod support, they play it despite these things because it's what everyone is already playing and there's a large enough fan base to motivate a few talented modders to overcome the barrier and produce impressive mods. Minecraft has a huge financial advantage as the game that popularized the genre. They could get away with the prices they asked because they had no competition to speak of. If you hope to have any chance whatsoever of surviving where so many others have failed, I strongly suspect that raising the barrier of entry and thereby stunting the growth of your fledgling community is not the correct decision for long-term growth. I am of the opinion that the barrier of entry should be reduced, if not removed entirely, while providing a way for users who have both the means and the motivation to donate more to do so. The more users who are willing to take a risk on your entry price (and to be honest, even $9 is too big a risk for me; I've been burned too many times), the more friends and family they will want to share the game with, assuming they find it worth sharing.