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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."
Might see a drop off, and a leveling off, but a bubble burst?
That implies there's a bubble. Direct financing of projects is the future, not a fad.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
One of the things that makes this sort of funding different is that a vast majority of pledgers are contributing very modest sums of money. Can you really get pissed off if you lose $50 in a venture? For a lot of people this sort of funding gives them the chance to participate in something they would otherwise have never got an opportunity to be involved in. I think that what we will see is a refinement of the system and people maybe being a little more selective and those who are seeking funding becoming more professional. I do believe that in some form or another it is here to stay.
Does anyone want to start a Kickstarter project to replace Kickstarter?
Kickstarter would never lie to us. Kickstarter wouldn't hit us or cheat. Kickstarter is complex and brooding, and sometimes it has trouble expressing it's emotions is all...
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to ice this bruise. I accidentally fell into the door.
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
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
A while ago I started developing an indie Elite-like game (yes, it runs on Linux...). I'm funding it out of my personal savings (scary...) but I've had Kickstarter recommended to me by a number of people as a funding alternative. I know very little about it. The indie oriented spirit of the place looked nice enough. I've seen other projects in the genre I'm developing that aren't as far along as mine raise significant funding on Kickstarter, but I've held off because of a few things that are unclear to me. For one, if I funded the development of my project in this way, what happens if something prevents the project from being completed? The Kickstarter info says there is no guarantee that a finished product will be produced, so nominally "nothing happens", but there are large risks involved with developing an indie game with its own custom engine from scratch. Many start, few succeed. I think I would find it quite ethically difficult to live with if I accepted people's money to make something, and for whatever reason wasn't able to complete the project to my or their satisfaction. Even if it is only a small amount from each person, I'd end up feeling pretty miserable if they paid it expecting a finished project which never came to pass. I was never able to find any info about whether a mechanism exists to return funding if projects cannot be completed.
... projects were successful to begin with. There is a lot of negative gamer sentiment that many beloved older games and genre's stopped being produced by big publishers because the publishers deemed they were 'dead' or they just wouldn't yield the kinds of profits they want to keep shareholders happy.
It doesn't help that many modern games have been butchered (in terms of functionality, LAN, etc) or chained to DRM and always online connections.
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 $70,000 to record an album despite using a pretty unorganized system, and repeated that several times. There have been some others since then as well before Kickstarter centralized them, such as David Lynch's effort.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Some people do not ascribe a monetary value to every action they make. For instance, the other day I gave money to a charity. My ROI is 0%, but I still enjoyed doing it.
Bottom line is, Kickstarter isn't a storefront. If you're going to pledge money to a project, don't drop more on it than you're comfortable giving away to a school fundraiser, or a local charity.
Look, I may not know these people personally - but I think Brian Fargo's resume speaks for itself, as does Jordan Weisman's. I may not know who Matthew Davis or Justin Ma are, but I can see (and so did the IGF) that they have a really great start on a game. If any of them don't deliver, it's going to be because something happened and they couldn't, not because they scammed thousands of people.
The only people who'll get bit by Kickstarter are the ones who don't do enough due dilligence on the projects they're backing; a Kickstarter with no prototype, no vision and no developer pedigree just isn't going to go anywhere.
That's what ended up nearly happening with Nekro and the Hardcore Tactical Whatever by the way - they almost failed, because they lacked at least one of the three and the other two weren't present enough to make up for it. Nekro has a great vision, but they don't have much of a prototype and its developers just don't have the pedigree; if it wasn't for TotalBiscuit, the project probably wouldn't have happened. The Hardcore Tactical Whatever had no vision and no prototype, even though it had some of the developers of Rainbow 6 behind it.
Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns, on the other hand, all have great developer pedigrees and awesome visions; it's okay that they don't have prototypes, because we all know that Tim Schafer, Brian Fargo and Jordan Weisman can come up with great games - and if they don't, it'll be because development is a bitch (and at least on Double Fine's part, it'll all be on film!)