Tim Schafer is a legend within the game designers community. Although his video games are not massive commercial successes, they are critically acclaimed. In particular his use of level design for gameplay elements and well written dialogue make his work an example to follow for budding game designers.
Sadly his works, while received critically and with a loyal fanbase, they do not always gain the huge commercial success that is expected in the games industry with its low margins for error. The games industry is highly competitive, and one failed project is often enough to cripple or bankrupt an entire publisher or development house.
Despite having a cult like status, his games fail to have the broad appeal needed. Instead we are left with the repetitive cycle of design-by-committee generic video games.
Failing to convince publishers to fund his next project, Schafer and his studio Double Fine, have decided to try Kickstarter.
Crowd-sourced fundraising sites like Kickstarter have been an incredible boon to the independent development community. They democratize the process by allowing consumers to support the games they want to see developed and give the developers the freedom to experiment, take risks, and design without anyone else compromising their vision. It’s the kind of creative luxury that most major, established studios simply can’t afford. At least, not until now.
In 24 hours, they have raised $800,000 from 20,000 backers. Schafer has solved his problem of having to fight publishers for his creative vision, by cutting out publishers altogether. Schafer wants to make an old school adventure game and in the process has raised one of the highest grossing projects ever on Kickstarter.
Louis C. K. did a similar thing in December by offering his stand-up acts for $5 through his website. By cutting out the middle men, he was able to offer the act direct to his fans at lost cost. Louis said it was his experiment into whether to believe this talk of internet crowd-funded works- and it worked! He raised $500,00 in four days with a profit of $200,000.
These two events really do show that fans do appreciate the work of artists. When they know their money is going directly to fund their work, they enjoy being able to facilitate artists rather than feeding the wallets of corporations.
When Louis C. K. was raising funds for his crowd-funded venture, his work (like most media) was uploaded to The Pirate Bay. The uploader however, left a note of apology for ripping his work without paying any funds. Many comments were left on this torrent, berating the uploader, angry that he did not pay for Louis’ work – these are people who serially pirate works everyday without any guilt or second thought!
yea its the new one yea i kinda feel bad putting it here but people like louis ck gotta realize without torrents and the net he wouldnt be anywhere bc honestly louis i know ur here and i know u mite be mad at me but u gotta realize not everyone has paypal , not everyone has credit cards, some people use net lounges, some have barely money for food, art = comedy should be shared with the mass , and Believe me u can judge the popularity more from the torrent downloads then the paypal sales, also if people like it , its easier to buy on there ipad/ipod or personal/work computers…more buzz = more fales
Hope you understand louie
sorry
Here is the difference. The majority of people are generally good decent human beings. When they purchase a movie or other creative media, they realise that very little of that supply chain goes towards the artist they appreciate. People are not stupid.
Crowd funding is simply the modern version of the centuries old system of patronage. Technology has greatly enabled and facilitated its existence in this more modern form.
The Statue of Liberty began with a sculptors idea. Frédéric Bartholdi presented the idea and went around society to solicit funds. Not raising enough, the project was in danger of being cancelled.
Joseph Pulitzer began a fundraising drive to raise funds. After five months of daily calls to donate to the statue fund, on August 11, 1885, the World announced that $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors, and that 80 percent of the total had been received in sums of less than one dollar.
One of the earliest examples of crowd-funding. Crowd-funding has always existed. Technology has just made it possible on a larger scale.
Fantastic article! And wow … I had not known that about the Statue of Liberty.
In the U.S. regulation to allow equity-based crowdfunding ( Democratizing Access to Capital Act in the Senate) is currently stalled, though insiders are seeing it possibly pass in March of this year.
Though it brings down the hurdles to raising funds in exchange for equity by a large margin, there still are enough restrictions that the solo individual entrepreneur will likely still not be eligible.
That’s why there still will be room for solutions involving Bitcoin (including GLBSE, Open Transactions, & others not yet conceptualized).
I love all those crazy guys, Tim Schafer, Ron Gilbert, David Fox, Brian Moriarty, Steve Purcell, for all their dedication, spirit, humour, heart and soul.
Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, Loom, Monkey Island, Day Of The Tentacle, Full Throttle, Sam & Max are such unique and outstanding creations that they transcend time and space.
But I don’t exactly get the connection to Bitcoin?
Well, let’s say you’re an indie studio of 15 deorevpels, right? So let’s say everyone makes $50,000 a year. That means you need $750 000 just to bring food to the table for a year. Usually, with a team of 15 people you might make your game in 1-3 years. Kickstarter is a way to start your project, it’s usually not enough to make a game.That’s not counting the software, hardware, licensing, assets, marketing and other costs. Kickstarter can do just that Kickstart, and indeed, a lot of games on Kickstarter are there to collect around $200,000 just so they can prove to the publisher that people want their game.Another thing is people judge your game. Obviously, the success depends on a lot of things, like previous games (in Double Fine’s case) and marketing. But I feel like a lot of gaming sites that do share Kickstarter projects (the *ahem* better ones), award innovation in the projects.In any case, a cool stylised indie game with innovative mechanics is probably going to get more money than a mediocre MMS.I also think that they’re more motivated, because they’ve got their players’ money in their hands. They’re not working for a faceless corporation who is going to pay them anyways, they’re working for their own audience, one of the most satisfying and without doubt the most horrifying people to work for because if you fuck up, if you throw away your players’ money they will rip you apart. X developer makes shitty game after fans collected $1,000,000 is a headline any gaming journalist is excited about.People also aren’t likely to pledge money to a game if the developer didn’t provide them with a lot of screen-shots and videos. So it’s hard to collect enough money based on a scam. (unless you’re using CGI, but then you need to make ~10-20 minutes of CGI content and at that point you might as well make the rest of the game).Apart from the possible scam, I don’t see it as a problem. In fact it’s a nice alternative way to fund your game. Certainly, one Kickstarter scam isn’t going to ruin the industry, and you can’t say it’s bad so many games get picked up by larger publishers and/or created because of Kickstarter. And that is good.Sorry for the huge unconnected mess this comment appears to be. Indolence is my only excuse.
Natural Selection 2 by the indie Unknown Worlds also got most of its funding this way. Though not on Kickstarter and not even an assurance contract. But I mean through their reputation gained by the success of Natural Selection 1, the Half-Life mod, gamers were confident enough to pre-order the game even before there was an alpha version!
We hope to bring the same thing to bitcoin (http://www.bitcoinstarter.com). Grant it Kickstarter could implement bitcoin into their system we wanted something dedicated to it. We’ve been working on this for like 8 months on small budget
so it’s taking a long time but we are almost there!
So we could fund our own moonbase then.
According to http://www.kickstarter.com/start “Amazon (our payments processor) also charges credit card processing fees that generally work out to 3-5%.” So if Tim would have received donations in BTC instead of using Amazon, he could have saved $40,000! Sites like Kickstarter seem like a natural application for Bitcoin.
People are speculating that the game might be bad, which is why they’re caeinllcng it.They had a demo. Everything worked so nicely. It wasn’t just a cutscene and then done, and Bethesda isn’t exactly broke since Skyrim. I think they can afford to iron out any errors they’re coming across.I’m sure the game isn’t cancelled, but if it is, I have nothing to look forward to after ME3 s ending DLC until TES VI.Please don’t let it be cancelled
I think a lot of people feel the same way that Torrent uploader did. People do generally want to support the artist, just sometimes they can’t for whatever reason. Or they want to support the artist, but not the publisher.
Just for that section I want to give this more than one G+ +1.
Crowd funding ist a big issue for Bitcoin, because
a) from websites like Kickstarter we know, that the concept works
b) it seems a more promising investment model as gbse, or islamic bank of bitcoin because as long as there is no bitcoin police anyone can just run away with your money, so why not donate it in the first place.
This is the main issue of the bitcoin economy – how do we deal with fraud?
Classical concepts of investment will not work with bitcoins (my opinion),
as long as bitcoin users interact via the net.
c) crowd funding could speed up the technical development of bitcoin, by
funding technical developments that a majority of users need
d) the demand for a crowdfunding platform is real, as it can be seen
on the bitcointalk forum, a lot of users want to donate to projects
but there is no coordination
Conclusion: we need a kickstarter platform for bitcoin now!