With Double Fine reaching $2 million on kickstarter as of today, the question arrises if this is not a viable way of financing future projects. The concept is simple, the amount of money put in allows the developer to make the game according to the demand, ensuring that developing costs don’t topple the profit. Is this actually a viable option for production companies with a low budget?

Needless to say Double Fine’s recent success has spawned many other Indie game companies to get into kickstarter and most of them are reaching their pledge or even over-exceeding it. In my opinion we’re looking at a trend that’s going to be over sooner than we think if not used properly.

First of all we have to look at the factors which came into play with Tim Schafer’s gamble. Kickstarter has been around since 2008 funding a diversity of projects, though the website claims to have a funding rate of 44 percent, leaving half of the projects launched to date unsuccessful. What made Schafer’s project so much different? Many would call it blind luck but I’d say it’s much more than that. The history of Double Fine has shown quality in every project from the start, amongst most of the titles are considered classics.

Furthermore the entire development team simply has personality, if you look at their pledge video on kickstarter or even the updates on the project, you realise you’re not investing into a game but a personality, a brand. The unofficial rewards for donors they’ve implemented on their homepage is proof that they know this, offering things like a “Picture of Ron Gilbert smiling” for $30,000 and for five thousand dollars more an “Undoctored picture of Ron Gilbert smiling”.

On paper it seems almost obvious that a public call for funding like this would be an utter success, but how does this transfer to others? Simply said, Double Fine has a huge advantage over other big name developers, they can make Adventure games, nobody else makes which require more creative input than big budget graphics or costly resources alike. So if lets say Call of Duty was to open up a kickstarter project, there’d definitely be a fan base to support it, but they’d never come nowhere near the money they actually need. That is why (you can go over to kickstarter and see it for yourself) most of the games popping up right now on the site are Adventure games or RPGs. In the long run I don’t believe Indie game production will be able to profit from this, due to their lack of publicity, which at the moment is coming from Double Fine’s Underdog story.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe this was a one-shot idea which will never repeat to such a success, one must simply grasp the fact that there are more factors which play a part in this funding concept. People are giving their money to an idea before actually having an actual product, for this to happen, as with Double Fine, we need a fan base that believes in the quality through previous success, even better, value in the image which is being sold.

A prime example is Majong’s “make a game in 60 hours” project. Together with Humble Bundle, the development team plans to raise money for charity by creating a game within one weekend. The entire event is live streamed and the contents of the game are voted by the community. If they reach a certain goal, Notch, the head of the company, plans to shave off his beard. Here we see all these factors again, Mojang’s light hearted style and the fact that the money collected will be donated, is an idea many people would like to associated themselves with. The teams background, namely their creation of Minecraft, has given them a widespread reputation of quality through simplicity and community feedback. Because of this, creating a game in 60 hours, dependant on what the public votes for suddenly doesn’t seem so far fetched.

I believe that if done right, even big name titles could work with this idea, if they have the proper fan support behind them. A title which I think would successfully pull this off is Mega Man Legends 3. The project was scrapped for “a lack of community input”. In Capcom’s opinion the game wouldn’t have legs and not bring in the money they were hoping for. By opening the title to public funding, all the fans signing petitions and starting Facebook groups could prove the games profitability through donations and their willingness to back the game.

What it boils down to is that the consumer has direct input into the project they are investing in. They are part of the creation and practically buying into the image. Video-game branding has never been so important.

 

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