I’ve deleted 5 cut and paste Kickstarter posts off the owV forums in the past two weeks. I don’t even pause anymore. Quick scan. Delete. Goodbye. I roll my eyes whenever it turns out that an email I open isn’t trying to excite me or interest me in a game but raise awareness of a Kickstarter project. But still, they come. So I’ve made a graph. Hopefully it’ll make things clear to a few folks.

You see, the thing is, I get excited about games but I can’t, no matter how worthy or grand a project is, get excited about funding games. I don’t give a fuck. I know it’s a necessary evil in some cases and I’m certainly not anti-Kickstarter but I don’t want to write about Kickstarter projects. I want to write about games. I can only assume that a good tenth of the mail I receive for owV right now is more interested in scalping money from people than in exciting them about games. I say this because the descriptions, the pictures or whatever, they’re entirely secondary to the point that HERE IS A THING ON KICKSTARTER ASKING FOR MONEY.

Fuck that noise. But y’know, it certainly goes some way to explaining why a lot of Kickstarter game projects fall on their arse when there’s more effort expended in a Kickstarter page asking for money than there is on stuff getting people excited or interested in the game itself.

I’m not going to say I’m never going to put a Kickstarter project on the front of owV, or let one onto the forums because that’s silly, but I am going to say that astroturfing forums with a cut and paste begging letter, no matter how well/ineptly you try and disguise its intention (“post if you’ve got any questions!”) is never going to endear a project to anyone. And I will say that if you feel your Kickstarter project is of more interest to me than any of the myriad of things I could be posting about that already exist, you’re probably not really thinking this through.

I want to talk about games. I want to talk about what makes a game great (or not so great). Funding is business. And I’m not in the business of business writing.

Show me the games. Talk about your game. Because that’s the one thing you have that can get people excited and it’s your best shot at getting any publicity.