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On Monday, November 19, the Star Citizen Kickstarter closed after a month of availability. Star Citizen is a space simulator PC title created by Chris Roberts, developer of Wing Commander, and his company, the Cloud Imperium Games Corporation. Wing Commander is a highly-acclaimed game published in 1990, and its popularity was so great that it spawned half a dozen sequels and a movie release starring Freddy Prinze Jr. (so the results were mostly good). After Roberts left Origin Games (original publisher of Wing Commander), he founded Cloud Imperium Games Co. with the intention of returning to the Wing Commander universe and releasing a spiritual sequel to his beloved creation. On October 10, 2012, he announced Star Citizen, the new game set in the WC universe. Nine days later, a Kickstarter project to fund this game was announced. Word got around. A month later, the Kickstarter closed. The goal of the Kickstarter drive was to raise $500,000 dollars to fund the game’s development.
As of closing, Star Citizen had nearly 35,000 backers and raised about SIX. MILLION. DOLLARS.
But Star Citizen is just one of several games that have gathered massive crowdfunded resources over the past year (though it now holds the record). One of the first Kickstarter-funded games to receive ridiculous amounts of money was Double Fine Adventure, a rather nondescript title from Double Fine Studios and it’s lead designer, Tim Schafer, creator of cult-classics Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. Double Fine Adventure raised 3.3 million dollars, eclipsing it’s original goal by 2.9 million. Shadowrun Returns, a new chapter in the Shadowrun series, which began as a pen-and-paper RPG, raised 1.8 million dollars to create a Mac/PC/tablet game. Obsidian Games, developers of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2, Kickstarted a “party-based computer RPG set in a new fantasy world” (never heard that one before) to the tune of 3.9 million dollars. Wasteland 2, a sequel to Fallout-precursor and post-apocalyptic tactical RPG Wasteland, raised 2.9 million dollars to fund their creative endeavors. Even some indie games, such as FTL, a recently acclaimed space-simulation roguelike, and The Banner Saga, a gorgeously-animated strategy RPG, have raised funds many times what they expected.
Great. Can we stop talking about Kickstarter and video games now?
Don’t get me wrong: using Kickstarter to finance new and/or exciting video game titles is a great idea. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from our media overlords during the past few years, it’s that new intellectual property is not highly valued. In 2012, despite the emergence of new AAA IPs such as Dishonored, the biggest games of the year were mostly sequels: Final Fantasy XIII-2, Torchlight 2, Borderlands 2, Resident Evil 6, Max Payne 3, Halo 4, Assassin’s Creed 3… the list goes on and on. And this trend shows no signs of stopping, as the anticipated titles of 2013 are ones like Tomb Raider, Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, DmC, and Bioshock Infinite - sequels and reboots all. With the attention of the video game industry focused on tried-and-true IPs, most innovation will come from the indie development scene, where the biggest problem is money. So, in that respect, Kickstarter is a revolution for video game development. Instead of Marketing Directors being the only influence on what titles are published, gamer fans give money directly to the games they want to play. This doesn’t only yield new IPs, but the return of older ones that may have never seen a resurgence without the aid of dedicated fans and intrigued newcomers. Kickstarter helps gamers to play what they want to play, and, hopefully, this will eventually force game publishers to note these trends and start developing games based on crowdfunding trends.
But, despite its usefulness, there’s nothing novel about Kickstarter anymore. Huge names in game development have already made use of the site, from Tim Schafer to Chris Roberts to Peter Molyneux, the creator behind Populus, Black & White, and Fable, who announced that his new game, Godus, would get its initial funding from Kickstarter. Literally millions of dollars have been donated to various gaming projects, and more and more projects pop up every day. So guess what? This is no longer news. At the beginning of the year, sure. We were seeing a brand new trend in gaming: a developer placing a bet that people would enjoy their brain child, then attempting to cash their chips online. And it worked. It was new, it was interesting, it was unique. But now so many people have funded so many projects with so much money that we shouldn’t be reporting about every one as if it were the first. This may be the future of investment in games, perhaps even investment in the arts as a whole. But it’s not a surprise. Okay, so the one that trumps Star Citizen‘s record sum will be worth mentioning, but, overall, it’s time switch our focus when it comes to Kickstarter.
What we need to do is to stop discussing the beginnings of Kickstarted projects and discuss the ends instead. Since a Kickstarted project is now about as common as any game in development (hyperbole, but you get the picture), I don’t really care which is which. Gamers rarely consider the source of the funding for their favorite games, at least as far as I can tell. We’re more interested in playing the games. So when a game has a legendary, record-breaking, Kickstarted pool ‘o’ money, I want to hear about how that money is being spent. At this point, the games that have been Kickstarted for millions (Double Fine Adventure, Star Citizen, etc.) don’t have playable alphas or in-game footage, much less packaged games. Obviously, a game that requires that much money is going to spend a long time in development (something I appreciate as a programmer), but it’s that journey that should be discussed rather than the funding itself. Certain studios are already on top of this; the Double Fine Adventure development blog documents the creation of the game, showing the investors the progress made on their investment. On the other hand, after the Haunts: The Manse Macabre Kickstarter earned over a quarter of a million dollars, the development studio fell apart, leaving their backers in the cold. Which sucks, but it’s more gripping than writing about the growth of Project Whatever on Kickstarter. These are the interesting stories now: who keeps their backers best informed, what is the status of these games, what do we have to look forward to, and how might these developers fail? You know, like with most games.
I don’t want to know about the beginnings of Kickstarters anymore. I don’t need to see them as headlines on gaming news sites. If a project demands my attention, I would expect the people who want the money to make me aware – after all, I am their target demographic. Let’s start focusing instead on the real story instead. Not how a game got funded, but where it is in development and when it will hit stores. Kickstarter was a paradigm shift in 2012, but we should concentrate on results rather than the method of funding. Instead of wondering about who will Kickstart something next, let’s ask what Kickstarted games will look like when finished, how they will be different from other games, and which audiences will appreciate them the most. The story of the money was interesting, but now let’s look more closely at the story of game that it’s buying.
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You can read all this and more at the N3rd Dimension.
