Is tower defense dead? Thread

Hi guys,

we recently launched our Kickstarter campaign for Empires in Ruins, our game that merges turn based strategy, empire management and tower defense gameplay.
We noticed one thing, a lot of people, as soon as they read "tower defense", they start rantings like "oh, and you even need money for a tower defense" or "naa, it will be just another clone".

Several time they don't even check the contents or the video, they just leave the page or don't even get to it only because of the "tower defense" words.

We think we have a novel take on TD, but is the TD genre so spoiled by clones and boring ones that it is dead in the heart of the people?

This is our attempt at proving that wrong, but fighting against this prejudices it really feels even more difficult than we expected
Kickstarter.com

If you have any feedback, you are more than welcome!
H from H&R

Hey Hogan,

I just did a trailer and learned a lot about what works and doesn't work. Your idea seems novel enough, but your video isn't strong enough. If your only going to a video showing off your game it needs to pop and grab peoples attention every step of the way. That might be harder for some games than others, but you'll have to get creative about how your going to do that.

Here are some good examples:

Hyper Light Drifter

Planetary Annihilation

My game - Outland 17

Another thing you can do is cut the video down to about 30 seconds and then walk people through your game, who you are and how the money will help.

Moonhunters

Banner Saga

Best of luck to you man.

Thanks Grenade, your point makes sense indeed. We definitely made an endless list of presentation mistakes in terms of video structure/length and presentation. That at least we got from the KS

We will bring it till the end, then we will undergo a strong reorganization of the team to face the lack of funds, but part of that is 100% the entrance in the team of a PR guy. We proved that we are technical people, not really much into marketing or PR

But thanks for the advice man, it was good indeed!

Cheers

H

I think everything's dead, gamers are fed up with clones of games, especially older generations of gamers who played everything there is to play during past decade or so. I know I'm like that. Just few days ago I downloaded some platformer demo and after 10 minutes I uninstalled it while thinking that it's yet another platformer and I played hundreds of those up until now, starting with Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner back on ZX Spectrum. Gamers now seek something that is truly original. What would that be is a million dollar question.

What you say makes absolutely sense to me (in our own way we are trying to do something that steps out of the traditional path), but talking about genres (it's unavoidable to have product categorized in genres one way or another), I had this strong feeling, that there is quite some "hate" for TD games.

I agree, there are thousands of clones, and even I that I was always a huge fan, didn't find any good one since a long while.

But from multiple feedback that I got, someone didn´t even check the game, dropped a comment "oh no another TD game, not my thing" and only after, If i managed to talk them into checking what i was offer, then they changed their mind. But that means that there is a strong prejudice against the genre, doesn't it?

Yes I know, I've read what you wrote and gamers are pretty anxious to find something that would interest them so they move away even on the smallest hint of something that doesn't interest them. Browsing through thousands of titles just makes them more anxious and annoyed. I myself avoid whenever someone mentions tower defense and even reversed tower defense, I just don't want to know what that is, it's probably a tower defense all over again. And why would I waste my short remainder of life playing same or similar game over and over again or waste my time replying here to you.

There were times when casual games were very popular, now everyone just avoids games that mention casual in it, at least players who seek depth and complexity, even though there are casual games that are deep and challenging.

At the same time, when we submit our games to some portal, their system expects us to categorize our game, so even if we made something truly unique and original from top to bottom, we're still forced to pick a category.