It has now become a standard headline: X, maker of Y seeks funding on Kickstarter. I do understand that some people have become tired of those news and argue that crowdfunding for games is a bubble that is just waiting to burst. The fact that crowdfunded games are often far away from release and some projects are conceived as cash-grabs doesn't help at all of course.
I have been backing game projects even before the the Double Fine Adventure boom and I'm still not tired of it. On contrary, I still consider myself as a crowdfunding addict but there are some rules when and why I back projects:

Amaze me

Kickstarting "old and forgotten genres" has become a trope and I don't like it when projects are simply described as oldschool RPG/adventure/etc. without actually showing why the makers think their respective genre is worth investing in. I backed many adventures and also some RPGs that you could consider old-school, but I back them because I want such games to be made, not because they are old-school.
I can't deny that I backed some projects because a videogame legend wants to go back to his roots (see Double Fine Adventure, Broken Sword 5, Moebius, Dreamfall chapters, Project Eternity, Elite, Star Citizen, Godus) but for me that is mostly about making the point that I want to see more games like that again and I'm excited by the project itself. I haven't backed any of the "high profile" projects like Torment lately, especially as they often reach their goal in no time anyway. I generally prefer to support small teams with innovative projects. Those projects might not even be in a genre I usually play, but there are a few project creators that convinced me to pledge anyway as I'm intrigued enough to give the final product a try (notable projects: FTL, Sportsfriends, Meriwether, Unwritten).

Convince me that you can pull it off

Even with all the criticism about the old men ruining Kickstarter, you can't deny that big names like Schafer, Fargo and co. boost the confidence in a project. We know that they made great games in the past, so they might manage to do it again. It's a bit harder for newcomers but there are many ways to convice me that they can pull it off nontheless. An easy way is to make a quasi-sequel to a student project or an other freeware title. Both Octodad and Distance have freeware predecessors which showed a lot of potential, so I didn't hesitate a moment to support both projects. Most new teams don't have the luxury of building on a strong foundation like that, so I need some clear indications that they can manage to deliver on the promises. I usually don't doubt that any team can manage to make a match 3 puzzler, but they will have a hard time to amaze me with that (see point 1). I like new and innovative gameplay concepts but I need to have a good idea if those concepts actually work as a game. Some prototype gameplay or even a playable prototype help a lot to open my purse.

Be transparent

Indie games have been made before there was a feasible crowdfunding option, so I really want to know why you can't fund the game in any other way. I'm fine with projects that just want some funding for the final stretch (and probably the PR that comes with a KS campaign) such as Giana and Strike Suit Zero, but I usually don't go above the discounted preorder level as I don't think that they truly need my money. I absolutely don't mind when the KS money goes to paying wages. There has been some backlash about that lately which I don't fully understand. I just want to know what the money is for.

Offer reasonable reward tiers

That is a bit a tricky point as I usually don't back a game for a reward, I back it because I want to see the game made. Still, if you want me to go above the "get the finished game" level you must offer something compelling. I absolutely don't care about most of the physical goodies even if I do have to admit that the Double Fine and FTL posters are neat. What I certainly don't want is real game content exclusive for backers of higher tiers. My preferred goodie is my name in the credits or even my appearance as character in a game.

It is very exciting to see how the crowdfunding of games has changed and how it will change in the future. There will be some negative developments no doubt but I'm very positive about the development and I'm thrilled to experience such a dramatic change in the industry and being a part of it.

I'm pleasantly suprised about the release of several puzzle platformers lately, but it seems like they are not noticed by many around here. If Braid and Limbo have proven one thing it is that puzzle platformers have a pretty big large potential audience, but apart from those two, most of the new releases usually slip under the radar of most gamers. Toki Tori and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom were positively received in the press, but it seemed to me that most gamers didn't care.

The ones that lead me to write this post are The Adventures of Shuggy, originally released back in 2011 on XBLA and Escape Goat, also originally released on XBLA. Both have been released for PC just recently with little fanfare, which is just too bad. After playing through both of them, I can highly recommend the two to almost anyone with just a little bit of patience.

With the recent release of Gateways and Thomas Was Alone, I hope that more gamers give puzzle platformers a chance so that more of them will be released in the future.

I have realized that my profile got some visits lately, so first of all a big thank you for your interest ;).

Seeing this, it made me realize that it might make sense to blog more frequently to offer something to those visitors. So expect some new blog posts soon.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was really about to get into gaming via the new PC my father bought.
After trying the games he bought, I started to get informed about the new releases myself. In late 1999 I bought my fist gaming magazine. At the same time, I started buying used games at a shop in the nearest city and I also liked to install and try demos from game magazine discs.

Very soon it became clear to my father that it was not the optimal solution to have me tinkering around his PC which he also used for many things. I should mention that I had the 386 25 MHz machine in my room at this point, as we had the "policy" of handing down the obsolete PCs to my brothers room and then to my room. It was nice to have this PC all for myself so I could play the ****c PC games (Prince of Persia being my favorite) and I also learned a lot about computers this way (MS DOS commands anyone?), but it was not enough for me anymore.

It took only a few months until my father bought me a cheap used PC for my birthday. It was a 333 MHz Celeron with 128 MB RAM and a Riva 128 GPU. Not the best PC around, but it was a nice start. Over time I upgraded this machine with a 400 MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM and a Savage4 GPU which was later upgraded to a GeForce 2 MX. This way, I learned about the basics of building PCs. I also got the chance of playing some new games, and when the newest games did not run anymore on this machine, I started catching up on some older titles which were very cheap at this time. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Red Faction (after getting the GeForce 2) were the last new titles I got for this system.

The same machine was also used in the first LAN party I attended at a friends house. We only played Empire Earth in the beginning, but we expanded to other games in no time. I might go into this tradition which we cultivate to this day in a separate post.

In late 2002, I finally bought a contemporary machine for the first time (2.53 GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 TI-4200), marking the beginning of a long period of owning a decent gaming machine I'm still in. The first game I got for this system was No One Lives Forever 2, nice choice I guess.

Right now I own a Core2Quad Q6600 @3GHz, 4 GB RAM and a Radeon 5850, the GPU being the newest component by far. I guess this closes the chapter about how I got into PC gaming. I think I have to go into when and how I got into console gaming later on.

That's it. After 7 years on Gamespot I finally started my blog.

As a first entry I might give some background about myself so that you know what kind of gamer I am, so this might get a bit longer ;)

Right now I'm doing my PhD in virology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. So I have no ties to the gaming industry myself apart from being a passionate gamer.

When I think back, I started to play games more seriously only in 1999. Before that, I was exposed to games from time to time, but strangely I never tried to get into gaming myself. We had a PC at home very early on and when we got a 386 25 MHz machine with some games on it, it was the first time when I really played a game for a longer session. The adventure Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (by Lucasfilm, now LucasArts) was the most interesting game on this machine and is probably partly responsible for my ongoing interest in ****c adventure games.

At the same time, this was also the initial impulse for me to become mainly a PC gamer. This direction was strengthend when my father decided to buy a state of the art machine in early 1999 (state of the art as in 400 MHz CPU with a 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000). He actually made sure that my brother and I have something to play and bought SimCity 3000, the Riven and Myst collectors edition, Fifa99 and Tomb Raider with the machine. A pretty broad and nice selection of games if you ask me.

This was pretty much the beginning as a real gamer for me, but it got much better soon...