I gladly gave them my money. There are a few guys in this industry that I will gladly just throw my money at, no mater what. Even if I don't think I'll truly enjoy their next project (that isn't the case, here - I'm sure I'll love it). The gaming industry needs people like Tim and I'm going to make sure that I do my part to support what he does.
@Pop said:
Tim said that a game selling 40.000 copies is a flop, but all those 40.000 ppl didn't donate just 15$ some donated 100 1000 etc. so some ppl bought the game 100 times xD, also this thing is crazy and doesn't kickstarter take a part of this?
To clarify a couple things. First, these aren't donations. These are people paying for things. They just don't get the product, yet. This is a company saying "so, we want to make this thing, but we don't have a business case to justify the investment of money and resources to do it" and then saying "but if we can get enough people to buy the game ahead of time -- to give us the funds to make the game for them -- we can totally do it". That's the entire point of Kickstarter, frankly. It's to generate capital to produce something that people want enough to pay for it ahead of time.
Second, 40,000 is obviously enough to support a game. You'll notice that more than 40,000 of the current 45,000 backers chipped in only $15 or $30 (for the game or the game plus HD version of the documentary). However, 40,000 buyers after the fact would not be enough to justify making and publishing the game. After everyone took their cut (including the publisher, who would take easily 50% of the money from every copy sold), you would need hundreds of thousands to justify the project.
When you cut out the middle-men, you can suddenly make a solid living with a much smaller audience. Google around for an essay (I forget who it was written by) called "1,00 True Fans". The premise is that you don't need to cater to everyone. If you can find 1,000 true fans of your work and cater just to their specific wants to the point that they're willing to give you $100/yr, you can make a solid living. This is why things like Trent Reznor giving albums away digitally, but then selling huge collector's packages with autographs and all sorts of goodies for $300 works. Because the smaller group of "true fans" will be eager to spend their money in support.
The beauty of this is that games like this and studios like Double Fine can appeal directly to the fans of a genre or franchise and say "look, there probably aren't enough people to buy this for a publisher to give us the greenlight on making it, but if enough of you support us by pre-ordering a copy and maybe throwing us a few extra bucks for cool goodies like posters and autographs and handmade artwork, we can afford it". That $1.6m goes a LOT farther when it all goes to the developers. It allows things to be made that never otherwise could. I don't know if this would ever be applied to a huge AAA game. I don't think it could and I don't think it would. But it's perfect for keeping games alive that don't have a guaranteed million seller market built in.
And, yes, Kickstarter takes 5% and VISA takes 3-5% for payment processing. That's fine. You're unlikely to find any way on earth that you could just put up a page and process transactions for less than that on your own. You're generally looking at 5% to 12% of every transaction, if you go it on your own. Plus, you wouldn't have the "escrow" type functionality that Kickstarter offers (allowing all funds to be returned if the goal isn't met). There is an additional "expense" to take into account here, too. Attrition. Something like 10% of all backers end up not following through. They cancel before the final day or on the final day, something is wrong with their credit card and the transaction can't go through. At worst, you're probably looking at their current $1.7m turning into about $1.4m. Pretty reasonable.
Of course, a couple million is still pretty low. The average game costs $20m. Most of Double Fine's recent games had a budget of $1.5-$3m. But the difference - again - is that this is all going straight to the developers and they're making a game that is much cheaper to produce. They're not making Costume Quest or Trenched, here. They're making a point-and-click adventure. This budget surpasses their previous point-and-clicks by two or three times (adjusted for inflation, I believe).
Anyway, the important thing for people to remember is that kickstarter funding isn't donating. It isn't investing. It's just saying "I believe in this project and I want this product and I'm willing to put my money down today so you can fund the project and bring me the product tomorrow". And all the nice little extras are there to entice higher bidding amounts. When else are you going to get a chance to buy your own character in a game from a beloved developer or buy a piece of custom artwork from the artists behind it?
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