Well I mean Star Citizen is sitting at over $300M and it's still in Alpha whereas Ashes of Creation is nowhere near that budget or development time and is at pretty much the same point of development, Star Wars: The Old Republic was around the $200M mark along with Elder Scrolls Online. Then you have Final Fantasy XIV which was well over $100M but they had to go back to the drawing board shut down and start over cause the game was broken, same can be said of Amazon's New World they went back to the drawing board at one point and made sweeping changes. I think it's safe to say that with crowdfunding it can be hit or miss much like with actual big budget game studios. But I agree with you, chances are only one will likely be finished at least to the standard that they said it would be to begin with. When it comes to AoC the game developer Steven Sharif has been pretty transparent with the games development I believe, especially when comparing it to something like Chronicles of Elyria which is the biggest crowdfund disaster that comes to mind within this model. There are still regular cosmetic items on sale just like with Star Citizen and other projects which is a hotly debatable approach within the games community. I think when it comes to crowdfunding one of the biggest issues as you mentioned is time, when you get involved in a project from such early stages it is difficult to maintain interest especially when prior to this new business model we'd be used to turnarounds from announcement to release in approx a year perhaps a little more. But what we'd never see was that games like GTAV took 3 years with a experienced team of over 1k employees, Skyrim took 6 years and Fallout about 7 years and all three games coming from established AAA studios with decades of experience at that level. I do hope however that we see a quality MMO (fingers crossed for ashes of creation) within the next couple of years, it's definitely a gamble with a lot of wishing behind it lol!
Star Citizen has probably soured many people on kickstarters. Who knows if the game will ever be finished? Or maybe a state of perpetual unfinishedness is what it is. Out of all the games I have seen on kickstarter, AoC is the one I most hope to see come to fruition. The dualclassing system and the building of your area to get better dungeons is something that could really be beneficial to an MMO.
Star Citizen will likely no get out of money anytime soon considering they're earning a million dollars every 6 days or so. Ashes of Creation looks good so far (visually) thanks to the artists and Unreal doing its job as usual. I think they don't have much of the world created yet (they've spent some time developing the BR Apocalypse) but it's slowly progressing.
Looks interesting and very ambitious. It appears there is evidence that this project is actually progressing well. It goes into the "probably will eventually come out" category
