Kickstarter Video Games

Kickstarter Won't Fund Your Indie Video Game - Here's Why Game Developers Are Using It Anyway

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It’s been five years since Kickstarter first exploded onto the scene, quickly raising obscene amounts of money for a host of independent video games. In 2013, games like Shroud of the Avatar, Divinity: Original Sin and Mighty No. 9 raised millions of dollars each, funded through explosive pledges from the crowdfunding website.

But of the 16 million-dollar projects since Kickstarter’s inception, less than a third of them have been released, and 20% are expected to fail. In 2014, total dollars were up, but growth was down, as gaming fans invest fewer additional dollars into projects. Most importantly, there was not a single million-dollar game Kickstarter funded last year. It would seem that the days of the fully funded up-front Kickstarters are numbered, as the platform enters a new phase in its social utility.

So what happened?

There are several theories. For one, the novelty has worn off. Gamers have already made their first pledge — for further pledges, they’ll need a better reason than just trying something new. Secondly, after some early successes, there are now many more game projects, drawing potential backers’ money in more directions. In 2010, there were 11,130 launched projects in all categories, 3,910 of which were funded. In 2014, there were 22,000 funded projects (6 times as many!), where about 34% are games — meaning in 2014, there were more gaming Kickstarters than there were total funded projects in 2010.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, projects often deliver low-quality projects or otherwise outright fail — and backers know that now. For instance, Planetary Annihilation raised $2.2 million in 2012, but upon its release this fall, received a Metacritic score in the low 60s. It's entirely possible that savvy people are withholding money from projects that would have previously been funded and failed.

And finally, competitors like Steam and Indiegogo are offering alternate platforms for crowdfunding. Some industrious developers are even hosting their own crowdfunding, such as RSI with Star Citizen, which broke the mold and raised a few million dollars on Kickstarter, only to build a website which would receive over $55 million in pledges (thus avoiding paying Kickstarter’s 10% cut).

And yet all of this still amounts to a pittance of dollars in video game terms.

Since its inception, Kickstarter has raised $250 million for game development (for context, that’s roughly 20% of all the pledges on the site). To compare, Activision Blizzard launched its record-breaking Destiny announcing that its investment will approach $500 million over the coming years. Once more, for comparison, we’re talking about roughly 4,500 games equaling, in pure financial terms, half of a single game.

But while dollars to games is radically different, this is the reason Kickstarter remains so important. Kickstarter, as a platform, allows for alternative business models, which actually means alternative games. Whereas AAA games like Destiny are trapped in an arms race of polygon and pixel counts, increased through dollar spending on graphic artists, engineers and — most of all — marketing campaigns, smaller titles are forced to battle on a shoestring budget in the arena of gameplay innovation and community management.

In order to take the pulse of the platform, I spoke with a few creators of three separate Kickstarter campaigns this year, each of which used the platform to a different degree and for a different reason.

Tanya Short is a game developer whose four-person indie studio Kitfox Games recently succeeded in raising 178,986$ for their upcoming Moon Hunters. Tanya works with me at Concordia University’s Technoculture, Art and Games Lab in Montreal, Canada, and she had several interesting tidbits of information and anecdotes to share with me.

Firstly, despite Kickstarter allowing for a different set of games development, there remain a multitude of possible games that cannot be funded because they cannot attract investment. Short explains that Moon Hunters has beautiful pixel art and a compelling twist which involves creating your own mythology in-game. It has gameplay footage and descriptors that make it clear what kind of gameplay players can expect (in this case, it‘s an action RPG). This kind of title promises something that people can get excited about and want to drop dollars on. If Kitfox had wanted to make a comedic game in a new genre paradigm, though, the same feat of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars would never had happened. This is in large part due to player-investor expectations. The average player doesn’t know how much it costs to develop a game, what kind of promises make sense or what kinds of hypothetical gameplay will work.

Short and her team asked for 45,000$, but that’s far less than they’ll have to put toward the game. To start, 4,500$ will go to Kickstarter. Another 5,000$ will go to backer rewards in the form of swag. Of course, a large sum will go to taxes. And, after all that, it still took several thousand dollars in salaried labour to produce the Kickstarter campaign, which Short argues is about as much work as a game launch. All in all, this funding might give them an extra month of work on the game.