Kickstarter, an online international funding platform for a variety of creative projects, has recently seen a burst of growth from one particular interest group: gamers. Trading pre-orders or incentives for funding, it allows supporters to act as collective publishers, which developers claim allow them absolute creative control rarely seen working through traditional publishing houses. Despite the unprecedented tens of millions poured into projects over the past year, Kickstarter may not be the wave of the future, as some herald it to be.
First brought into the public eye last March by Tim Schafer and Double Fine Production, it accumulated over $3 million – 834 percent of their set goal – in support of a vaguely defined return to the point-and-click adventure genre; the crowd-sourcing vessel has shown its ability to produce serious amounts of money. However, that $3 million, which can hypothetically produce a high-ceiling retro adventure game, is nowhere near comparable to the budgets driving triple-A games. This must temper our expectations.
Still, these levels of funding are realistic for developers wishing to break the triple-A mold, who would benefit from an independent route of funding and publication. Backing this conceit are hundreds of successfully funded games to date.
Kickstarter’s strengths are effectively promoting the successes facilitated by the site and burying the majority of projects that fail to meet their goal and receive zero funding. Notably, the bulk of the most successful Kickstarter projects come from developers with meaningful experience, projects resurrecting games or series and games selling themselves off nostalgia. None of this is wholly unexpected or negative, but it does suggest that the Kickstarter platform may vet games in a very similar fashion to the publishers it allows developers to escape, just with an altered set of standards.
What donors, myself included, don’t often realize about the system is just how similar their position is to legitimate business investors. A donor puts his money behind an idea with the promise of a return. If his fundraising goal isn’t met, money is returned and there’s no investor loss beyond the failure of the project. However, once funded, the quality of the product, its direction – without investor oversight – and its existence whatsoever is left in question without any real protection.
Products thus far produced by the service have been relative successes, and the service had a great deal of its popular reputation hinging on perhaps the highest profile game to be released yet in Faster Than Light, a spaceship management simulator which to investors’, and again my, glee delivered on its promises. However, doubts have been shed on the service’s most funded project to date, OUYA, a console meant to provide an open-source gaming platform for your television, which brought in over $8.5 million with much critical speculation as to its feasibility and game support. A large scale failure from a project such as this may cast doubt into the still-flowing stream of supports.
This is not to say the Kickstarter avenue is without its place in the market. Long dead genres and games odd enough or possibly ambitious enough to frighten traditional investors or publishers can test their mettle directly with the gaming public rather than via boardroom speculation. There’s perhaps no better gauge of interest in a concept than people simply putting their money where their mouths are. Whether an interesting blip in industry history, or a long-term side-note attached to interesting games for long to come, Kickstarter allows gamers to direct the present and future of game development in an earlier and more interesting fashion than ever before.
