The Kickstarter Revolution... That Isn't?

Recent Kickstarter campaigns for high profile game projects by Tim Schafer and Brian Fargo have received a huge amount of attention and seem to promise an alternate way of raising the funds to make games that people actually want to play, free from publishers. Does this really herald a new, democratic means of making games, unshackled from the filtering effects of publishers' business models or their (limited) notions of what sells? Although undeniably interesting, and even exciting, there are some things that should be kept in mind.

For one, these Kickstarter efforts wouldn't have been so successful if it weren't for both the name recognition and the novelty involved. They're getting a lot of attention from sites that normally would never acknowledge a Kickstarter campaign because they were unprecedented - "Hey, weird, these big-name developers are having to turn to Kickstarter to fund sequels to beloved games!" Without that substantial amount of attention, I don't see them doing a fraction as well, which means if a similarly well-known developer were to try something like this in six months or a year when this is old hat, I'm not sure if they could generate this kind of money. For a game developer who isn't well known with a string of 100K+ selling games under their belt, Kickstarter isn't going to get them very far. An unknown developer with a great idea and a good pitch? I imagine they'll do about as well as they have been doing on Kickstarter - they'll be lucky to get enough funds to pay a couple developers for a few months. (Though having at least some working game tech helps.) Any new attention paid to Kickstarter will be balanced out by all the new would-be developers that will flood the site hoping for funds.

Also, whatever other reservations publishers had with these game ideas, a primary stumbling block was that they were too small for most publishers to be bothered with. These are both relatively simple, fairly retro, low-budget sorts of games. Publishers probably looked at the $400k that Shafer was after, imagined a similarly sized profit, and dismissed it as a rounding error on the revenue from the latest episode of their AAA FPS franchise. I imagine that the attention and effort that a publisher has to put into overseeing a $400k game and a $40 million game aren't that different, so there's not a lot of incentive to invest in small game projects. That small budget worked in their favor on Kickstarter, however. $400k may be larger than what Kickstarter normally comes up with, but it was obviously achievable. If Shafer had been asking for $4 or $5 million for a Grim Fandango sequel, I wonder if he'd even have reached the $3 million mark. So Kickstarter is, at best, for top developers, a way of funding games that are too big to be self-funded, but too small to interest a publisher. Which means a game that's less retro, or is technically complex, particularly large or generally ambitious? Forget it. "Interstellar Marines" is often mentioned as a crowd-funded, relatively straightforward FPS, but reportage by Ars Technica suggests that their real funding is via traditional means, with "crowdfunding" not being nearly sufficient to pay for production, instead being used to prove that the game has a potential market.

In many ways the way that people like Notch and Amanda Hocking have leveraged social media to replace (and even exceed) the benefits they'd get from traditional publishers (with products that wouldn't even interest a publisher) seems to be a more significant change. Granted, they are extreme outliers, and it doesn't address the funding issue (so without the benefit of a day job/the Swedish welfare state, that's still an issue), but it shows that publishers aren't necessary for projects of a certain type & scale to return revenue that allows for sustainable, continuing production of work. Without that possibility Kickstarter wouldn't necessarily be that useful. Kickstarter right now feels like the wobbly beginnings of a change in game funding, rather than anything being turned on its head.

There's also the potential for an anti-Kickstarter backlash. And by "potential for" I mean "inevitability of." Most games in development during normal circumstances don't see release. Kickstarter games have been in a good position to avoid this as they're simple and sometimes mostly finished by the time they're funded. As more complex and ambitious games get funded, it becomes increasingly likely that a game will be unable to be completed and hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of development money will go down the drain. The shitstorm that will be the result will surely make people quite wary of contributing their funds to future crowdsourced projects. Enough failures could be the death knell of that funding model.

That said, the Kickstarter page for Wasteland 2 is fascinating in and of itself - they've apparently managed to not only secure Steam as a distributor (and for playing their future beta, even!) without even having started production, but it's interesting that the $50 boxed package with map is almost twice as popular as the $30 digital offer (even the $100 package, which has yet more physical goodies, is more popular than the $30 one). Developers take note - people want maps and trinkets!

To further complicate things, Makezine put a post up on their blog about the move to legalize crowdfunded investments. In it, they rather suggest that the basic strategy that developers use on Kickstarter of pre-selling a game to fund it might technically fall afoul of California's (rather broadly applied) securities laws… oops!