Yooka-Laylee is a game that I have been waiting on since the 3-D platformer shifted away from commercially viable genre and towards marketing tie-in. I have always had a soft spot for Banjo-Kazooie. I even played the XBLA versions of the first two games just to make sure it wasn’t just the nostalgia factor. The marketing that Playtonic Games did for the game was exactly what I wanted to see and hear from a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie. They had the colorful worlds, similar art style and even staff members that were in key positions on those previous games. I had never backed a crowdfunding campaign before but it seemed like this would be the one for me. However I didn’t back it and it hit its goal just fine without me.

The reason I chose not to back the project, and why I haven’t backed others in the past, was that I assumed that others would back it. In social psychology this phenomenon is known as diffusion of responsibility. In the simplest terms it is the assumption that the other members of the group will take action and therefore I do not need to. While the most famous examples are often of bystanders witnessing a crime or emergency and choosing not to assist (the bystander effect) it can occur in any group decision.

I find this concept particularly interesting for Kickstarter especially when looking at projects that barely made or didn’t reach their funding goals. Of these one sticks out in my mind: Harmonix’s revival of Amplitude. The anecdotal evidence suggested there was widespread excitement and support for the project. Almost every major gaming website or news outlet ran stories on the campaign and the buzz on social media was strong as well. If you were just going off of the amount of publicity and buzz when first announced it would have made you believe this was going to easily reach its goal. In the end it took an almost unbelievable push on the final day to get funded.

The Amplitude case is interesting because of its success. Assuming potential backers were aware of the hype surrounding the game an argument can be made that additional people who would have backed the project decided not to because they assumed with all the hype they would not be needed. This then creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. The potential backers see a struggling campaign that will probably fail and don’t feel any incentive to fund it. The interesting part is that in the end it did succeed which would suggest that some backers started out assuming others would fund it. They were then presented with a languishing campaign with little reason to believe it would succeed and only right before it failed did they choose to support it. Certainly Harmonix’s media push at the end influenced some but there are also likely other interesting psychological factors at play.

I am not a psychologist but it seems like there is a lot of potentially interesting information locked away in crowdfunding campaigns as they are in many ways social experiments playing out in the real world. While you can crowdfund anything, even scientific research, I found very little research on the phenomenon of crowdfunding itself. If crowdfunding continues to grow as a viable option this kind of research into why campaigns succeed and fail becomes more valuable. Having that insight could be the difference between realizing a dream and going back to the drawing board.