How Long Before the Kickstarter Bubble Bursts?

An opinion piece at Gamasutra takes a look at the recent success of Kickstarter campaigns for video game projects — Double Fine's adventure game and a sequel to Wasteland each raised around $3 million. Hundreds of other projects have sprung up, hoping to replicate that success — but will it last? From the article: "I am convinced that Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine know how to deliver a game (mostly) on time and (mostly) on budget. Brian Fargo too. Is that true for all 314 of the current Kickstarter projects? What about the projects which get started but never finished? If publishers like LucasArts can cancel games that are almost finished or like Codemasters can pay for a game it never saw, what certainty do pledgers have that the game that they have paid for will ever see the light of day? We are still in the early days of our Kickstarter relationship, the early days of falling in love. Everything our partner does is wonderful. We gloss over the risks, we ignore the downsides, because the glory of falling in love is everything. I think we have about six months left of that period. Towards the end of this year, some Kickstarter projects are going to start slipping. Some will see their teams collapse amidst bicker recriminations. Some pledgers are going to start getting very angry."

Comments

Insist on Free Projects Developed in the Open

[zotz]

Insist on Free Projects Developed in the Open

That way, if things don't quite pan out, the assets may still be useful or someone else may be able to finish things up.

all the best,

drew

Re:No bubble.

[Anubis IV]

Agreed. About the only thing I can see is someone else coming along to steal Kickstarter's thunder, but the idea behind Kickstarter isn't going anywhere in the foreseeable future. It may suffer some setbacks among the people who don't understand the difference between what Kickstarter does and making a pre-order on Amazon if there are higher-profile failures or scams, but there are many people (myself included) who are interested in funding these sorts of projects and understand the risks therein, and we're not going away. If anything, the number of people who "get it" is increasing.

might burst, but has been going on for a while

[Trepidity]

The general funding model has been successful for at least a bit longer than Kickstarter in particular has been around, so it's not a completely new thing. Therefore I have a little more confidence in its longevity, though it could always still turn out to be a slightly longer flash in the pan, of course.

One early proposal was John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier's Street Performer Protocol (1998), describing basically the same collect-funds-until-threshold model.

One successful effort I know of from ten years ago was Einstürzende Neubauten, a cult-popular German industrial/avant-garde band, which left their label and focused on crowdfunding starting in 2001. In 2002, they raised around $70,000 to record an album despite using a pretty unorganized system, and repeated that several times. There have been some others since then as well before Kickstarter centralized them, such as David Lynch's effort.