Anyone know how to get in touch with Chris Roberts?

The CIC has been reporting for the past year that Mr. Roberts is certainly up to something. I don't think there is really a need to prod him. He's made it clear he wants to revisit WC.

I think everyone's "aware" of Kickstarter by now, but someone who's got a proven track record of marshalling tens of millions of dollars per project (for movies even moreso than games), taking initernet donations really doesn't strike me as his thing. It's a novel concept at first, but with everyone and their grandma popping up Kickstaters now, there's only so much money that people want to give away. I wouldn't be surprised if that bubble burst before too long.

That's how it's supposed to work, and the program is surfing high off that novelty right now. There certainly are a lot of small groups making big money on Kickstarter. But just like in the real world with bank loans, some of these ideas won't pan out and some of these companies will simply go bankrupt before they deliver a product. That's why people are turning to Kickstarter... if they had a sure thing and a solid business case, they could pursue conventional funding up front. There'll certainly be exceptions and great successes via Kickstarter, but I think a lot of people are going to look back in a few years and realize that donating to all these 'causes' was a bit naive.

It takes more than financing to make a game. For a big time ensemble like Chris Roberts/EA, financing isn't necessarily among the biggest issues they face. And if it is, it's because he wants $40 million to make a AAA title, not $800,000 to fund a small independent studio.

Mmm, I don't know. Obviously, in many cases people are putting their game up on Kickstarter because it's a simple way to finance a small product right now, what with all the enthusiasm - but there is more to it. Kickstarter is also a good publicity machine, because it's a very convincing way of demonstrating that there is an audience for your product. If a hundred thousand people donate for your game, you know there's at least ten, twenty times more people out there who will be willing to buy the game when it's done. In an age where publishers have to be more wary than ever of new titles, where sales of less than 1 million are failure, and sales of 1-2 million are considered modest at best, you really have to work hard to convince the publishers to put their money behind you. If, while you're at it, you can essentially run a huge free advertising campaign for your game - that's pretty excellent.

So, I think Kickstarter will have its use even for big, $40 million productions - it's just that people have to figure out how to use it. Obviously, you can't just go and ask for $40 million, you'd fail in an embarassing way.

It's not free money - you actually have to promise quite a bit to get it. Apart from all the bonus stuff that people have come to expect, you're also giving people copies of the game, which means that all this "free money" in fact comes from pre-orders sold at a lower price than the final retail price. So... is it better to promise someone 20% of your income in exchange for his money... or to voluntarily give up 20% of your income in exchange for someone's money? Logic dictates that this adds up to the same thing .

Again, with the exception of small projects that can be entirely funded through Kickstarter (~1-2 million dollars max), the money you get out of Kickstarter is entirely irrelevant. What matters is how many people are interested, how quickly they became interested, and what can be determined about your overall potential market based on this information.

Chris Roberts never, ever owned the rights to Wing Commander. Right from the start, the series was owned by Origin, and when Origin was sold to EA, all its intellectual properties were included. Remember, Chris Roberts didn't actually consider Wing Commander to be "his baby". At the time, it was just another game he was making. He never expected it to become the game people would associate him with, so it probably never occured to him to negotiate with his bosses to retain any kind of IP rights - not that he would have had any chance of winning such negotiations, because the game was quite an expensive one, and it was entirely financed by Origin.

That said, given all the little bits of info we've had over the past year or two about Chris Roberts, we can safely assume that he currently has a license from EA to develop a Wing Commander game.

Yeah, when Origin was sold to EA they talked about holding on to the rights... maybe for a nanosecond, but basically EA wasn't interested in Origin if it didn't also come with the IPs... Namely Wing Commander and Ultima. I think Chris tried to get the rights When he left EA/Origin but best they could do was that he got the rights for film and television.

Hello,
I stay in touch with Chris Roberts and I can mention Kickstarter. My guess is that it's not something he's interested in; if anything, the thing that impresses me about Chris' ambitions is that they're as big as they were in 1996, rather than reformatted to match the modern game development landscape. He wants thirty million dollars to do a big Wing Commander game and he's not settling for mobile games or Facebook games or whatever like most of his contemporaries moved on to.

Yes, but Chris Roberts doesn't own Wing Commander. Electronic Arts would be responsible for licensing an RPG. Chris Roberts has a deal to develop a game (and he has certain TV rights left over from 1999) but he doesn't control the whole IP.