[Jatsie]

I very much like the system of crowd funding games, as it cuts out a lot of the middle men.

If you think about how you would traditionally get a game, there was a very long chain going from developer to the end consumer. The developer needs an initial budget to produce the game, then once it's coded they need a way to distribute it, so hundreds of thousands of copies have to be printed onto physical media, along with manufacturing boxes and manuals, then these copies of the games have to be shipped to brick and mortar stores where the end consumer finally buys it. This chain gets very expensive very quickly, and at each step along the way people want to take their own profit, so by the time the consumer gets their game they're paying a lot, and only a fraction is going back to the developer. In this sort of scenario the publisher plays an important role, but as they are the ones taking the financial risk their influence gradually becomes disproportionate, and stifles the developers.

With crowd funding you can liberate the developer by cutting out the publisher and creating a direct relationship between the developer and the consumer. The developer has a creative vision, a cost estimate, and sells it directly to the consumer. If the consumers approve of it they back it with their money, and eventually receive the end product via inexpensive digital distribution methods. It's more cost effective, and it places a degree of control into the hands of the consumer, as they get to choose what they'd like to fund the development of. It's a stark contrast between risk-averse publishers forcing developers to make only the games which they believe will sell, and leaving the consumer with the only choice of either buying it or not.

The only potential downside is that it does shift the risk onto the consumer. When you go out and spend £40 on the latest PS3 release you've probably read a review first, so even though you're giving away a good chunk of that money to a publisher, in exchange you already know whether the game will be good or not. When you back a Kickstarter for £10 you have no idea whether that end product will be any good at all, and you're going to have to wait several months to find out. For many people though the difference in price and confidence in known figures is enough for them to take that risk.

Personally, I'm all in favour of it. It's a little disheartening to spend so many years out in the dark, waiting for people to make the sort of games you want to buy, but only ever hearing that it's not considered financially viable. Now we have an opportunity to ignore the naysayers, and not have to give them a single penny in order to finance the production of games we want.


On the general topic of fatigue, I always feel a little sad after a campaign ends and the hype dies down, only to make way for the realisation of a 2013 release date for all these games. There's such a deluge of Kickstarter campaigns going on at the moment, sometimes I can't help but feel I'd just like to be able to sit back and enjoy the spoils of one project, before going forward and backing a handful more.