You may have heard about this...Double Fine Productions (Tim Schafer's company - he of Full Throttle, Grim Fandango etc), in the past responsible for the amazing Psychonauts, has tried to pitch a traditional 2D adventure game to publishers for years and never got any response. So, they decided to take a different route: they apppealed to fans and sympathizers to provide small financial contributions, so that they may reach their total of 400.000 dollar they needed to make such a game (since it's a 2D adventure it's cheap, for a game).

They put up their in the hopes to get 400.000 in a month. What happened instead is they cleared 400.000 in 8 hours, reached a million in 24 hours and are now, 3-4 days in, sitting at around 1.800.000 dollar. And there's about 30 days to go stilll...naturally, the donation speed will not pick up much now, probably just become less and less, but it's still a remarkable result.

You gotta see the relative importance of this: a company says "we want to make this game that no publisher wants to take a risk on" and reaches out to the fans, and they respond en masse, financing the (small) game in a matter of hours. Naturally, the financers get a copy of the finished game and some other shit if they gave a LOT of money, but since the only thing they know so far is that it's gonna be a 2d adventure game and that it's made by Schafer and co, that's more of a promise than a real preorder. Does this open the door for a few supposedly "dead" genres? I'm talking some TBS games, adventures, and (for most of us here) isometric party-based RPG's in the sense of the old Infinity Engine. The reason they don't exist is not because there's no crowd there, it's because publishers don't want to take any risks on them.

But this cuts out the publishers alltogether. There's been rumours now of Chris Avellone (of Planescape: Torment fame) and Obsidian considering putting up a kickstarter for a project like that, following the instant success of the Double Fine game. I don't want to OVERstate the importance of this event, since even 2 million is not a lot of money and a long way from an 'average' budget to make a game, and there are some sidenotes here (like, if this wasn't Schafer or Avellone, no one would care), but even so...no publisher telling them to cut shit because it's "too risky" or "doesn't fit the market audience", no artifical time constraints ("gotta hit the christmas period") and almost complete creative freedom. Could this be a thing in the future?

I guess we'll only really know once they start crowdsourcing money for bigger projects - like around the 10-20 million mark. The fact that the big rush on the Double Fine kickstarter is over could be due to a general loss of momentum, but also because people just go "we're way over the 400k mark already, not gonna give money too now". It's hard to tell. But it's really cool that the internet is financing games, instead of some leech publisher who only wants uninspired sequel CoD 53 to make sure it sells.

The Kickstarter is nearing 2 million.

I love the idea, but wouldn't personally sink money into a project unless I really, really agreed with it. And figured it had a good chance of happening without someone absconding to Brazil.

Dammit Satis, there you go ruining my plans again .

Peltz: the game.
Kickstarter goal: as much money as possible.
Project: The most awesome anything you ever wanted. Anyone putting in money gets three.

Haha, well I doubt shooting for this kind of money is viable for unknowns with plans as vague as this (Schafer's, not Peltz'), but for game developers with name and claim I think it can work just fine. I mean really, Schafer owns his own game development company and is a fairly well-known figure in the gaming community. Chances that he'll go "we'll just make a flash game that takes a week of work" with the money or let alone run off into the sunset cackling are minimal. And even if he does, the vast majority of backers will lose what, 10-15 dollars at most? And his entire name and company will be ruined forever. Let's assume those people crazy enough to back 100-1000 dollars are already crazy rich as it is, haha.

No I think this could very well become an important trend for game devs interested in making games that no big publisher seems to be interested in funding anymore. I think most people who are willing to put money down for an old-school game (cause no one will make it anymore) are also the type of people who aren't very interested in fancy next-gen graphics. Needless to say, with an experienced development team, making a game that doesn't need to have great graphics doesn't have to take long or be very expensive (because most of the costs are in wages anyway). So a few million can be more than enough for something like that.

I wonder if a company like Obsidian would announce a similar kickstarter project (let's assume with more promises than the Double Fine one) and put, say, 4 million as a goal instead of 400k. I'm sure a lot of people who went "oh they're already at 400k" on the DF one just figured they'd keep their money. I think there is still room for this to grow. The DF kickstarter grew to almost 2.100.000 in a day after hitting 2 million, and still 20 days to go or so.

Chris Fargo gonna try and kickstart a Wasteland sequel.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012- ... and-sequel

How about Baldur's Gate 3?

Yea, that would be playing russian roulet with an uzi.

8 days to go and it's at 2.400.000. 2 million dollar over the budget they originally asked haha! Kudos to him. The Wasteland 2 one is starting very soon, so let's wait and see how succesful that one is then.

The kickstart finished at...

3 million and 336 thousand dollars.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/667 ... -adventure



That is crazy given that they only asked for 400k initially. And now Wasteland 2's kickstarter is easily surpassing its mark within less than 2 days too - I'll make a thread about that. I think this may become an entirely viable way to fund games that are somewhere between true indie and smaller companies (with established names) that don't want or can't make huge gazillion dollar budgets.