Quote:
Originally Posted by Kurufinwe
Honestly, if you know a publisher that only takes a 10% cut on a game's sales, you should tell companies about them, because I'm sure they'd all love to work with them. 10% is very, very reasonable.
5% for Amazon payments is pretty standard. Paypal's fees are 2.9% + $0.30, which on a $15 transaction (the majority of the Kickstarter pledges) amounts to 4.9% — and they have extra charges for international payments.
And 5% for Kickstarter is also reasonable. They offer a platform, a reputation (you're not giving your credit card number to some seedy, unknown website), tools to manage your relationship with the backers[1], ways for people having backed other projects to discover new ones, and, since the success of DFA, a very recognizable "brand" for gamers. 5% for all that doesn't strike me as unreasonable, at least for a small-ish project (obviously, if you have a $200m budget, 5% of that for a webpage and some social tools might be a bit much).
[1] Jane Jensen says on her Kickstarter page: "Why use Kickstarter? We needed help managing our CSG members. Can you imagine sending builds to 10,000+ different emails? Kickstarter manages all that for us, so we can easily run a campaign drive and post updates as often as we like." |
I guess this is where I don't see it. In my opinion the money donated is to help the developer make the game not for them to publish one. Seems as we are always hearing developers postponing and/or canceling promising adventure games because they lack the funds to finish it, not to publish it so the 10% for a publisher shouldn't make it into the equation although I respect your thought. There isn't any guarantee that after taking the funds and making a game that the developer doesn't have a publisher market it.
I actually see the Kickstarter fees as high. Now if their fees were based on the Goal to be funded and stop there then I may be able to swallow it a bit more but still find it hard. Take the Double Fine project, I think their original funding Goal was somewhere around $300,000, (I can't remember exactly) if Kickstarters fees stopped at the successful Goal ($15,000) the game developers would have gotten $150,000 more of the generously donated money to create the game we want. One hundred and fifty thousand would certainly help in making a great game. After all, Kickstarter isn't doing anything more that I can see once the Goal is reached so why not give all of the rest of our money to the developer.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that Kickstarter is a bad thing or trying to influence anyone into rethinking donating, quite the opposite. It is all about choices and the more we have the more games may be funded. I just think that for the sake of discussion there may be an idea out there that can get more of those none game donations to the developer where we intended them to go and not into others pockets.
