We have all heard the stories about the half-million dollar Kickstarted projects that either failed miserably or took the money and ran. We have probably all played at least one project that after multiple delays released being completely underwhelming, falling short of expectations. The gaming community has understandably grown skeptical of the entire system, and gaming journalists have all but begun completely ignoring the platform as a whole. But is this really fair? We're demonizing an entire platform and are robbing talented developers of a chance to ever prove themselves because we as consumers made poor decisions on which projects to back and got burned as a result. Despite its obvious shortcomings, the crowd-funded model for indie games still remains an extremely strong driving force of innovation in the gaming industry, one whose importance and benefit cannot be overemphasized.
Full disclosure: Elysian Shadows is a Kickstarted project, and I obviously have a huge stake in the platform. We would not be here today without it, and I certainly would not be sitting here sipping my morning coffee, working on my dream game, and typing this blog post for you instead of being at work at a boring old desk job if it weren't for crowd-funding. Despite my obvious self-interest in the platform, I am hoping you, gentle reader, can see past this and will judge this blog post by the merit of its content, making your own educated decisions using that prefrontal lobe that is far too often underutilized in today's gaming culture...
The biggest and most important role of crowd-funded indie games today is as a driving force of innovation in an otherwise stagnant industry. Today's AAA games are multimillion dollar endeavors with teams of hundreds of developers. As a direct result of the growing development costs, development studios are having to be more and more conservative with their products. They can't afford to take the risks they used to take by creating unique, innovative games as a gamble, hoping they will pay off rather than flopping miserably. Instead they are opting to take the safe road now, creating sequel after sequel, milking the shit out of their products with DLC and expansions, because they know they are at least guaranteed some level of profit return with this business model. As a result, we are stuck with a stagnant industry of giants, (understandably) too afraid to try anything new and innovative as they did in the days of yore.
So where is the innovation coming from in today's age? It's coming from indie games. We indie developers are the ones who are willing to pour our hearts and souls into unique and interesting projects with absolutely no guarantee that our blood, sweat, and tears will ever pay off. For us this is a labor of love, not a business with shareholders to answer to. This is where crowd-funding comes into play. It allows us indie developers to present ideas to you, the gamers, the players, the people who actually consume these products to be judged. You are the ones now with the power to facilitate change in the industry by supporting these indie projects that would otherwise never be able to get off the ground without a gigantic sum of money or some huge corporate connection. You as a Kickstarter backer are the one injecting a potent dose of creativity into the stagnant pool of "safe" games and sequels.
Crowd-funding is a beautiful thing, because it allows any person anywhere a chance at funding a game based solely on the merit of their creative vision rather than by the size of their wallet or the number of industry connections they have. It's pure and untainted by corporate interests. These are games generally developed by gamers for gamers.
Yes, there are undeniable risks inherent to this kind of platform, but it is a your responsibility as a backer to research the feasibility of the projects and to genuinely assess the experience of the teams before backing. Years ago, anybody with a half-way polished Kickstarter page would get press promotion from massive gaming sites just because the platform was novel and new. These sites then encouraged thousands of backers like us to back these products, as we assumed they had done their research before such promotion. However, many times this was not the case, and we as gamers wound up paying the price when these Kickstarters failed to deliver.
And what was the result of this? Instead of stepping up and taking responsibility for their poor judgement or condemning the developers actually responsible for the failed projects, the gaming press as a whole decided to shun the entire platform. Because of this, it's even harder for honest, hardworking indie developers with genuinely good ideas to get funded, because we've cultivated a culture of crowd-funding skeptics and haters. As a result, the people who are actually paying the price for this are these indie developers who never wronged the gamers at all, and who are only guilty of Kickstarting two years too late to be in the limelight. The indirect result? You as the gamer are the one suffering, missing out on what could potentially be an industry-changing indie game. It's very possible that the next Minecraft could have been crowd-funded had we not been so eager to turn our backs to the platform...
As a recently Kickstarted developer who is eternally grateful to the backers who believed in my creative vision and who would honestly rather die than fail these people, I implore you to give crowd-funding your reverence and respect. Do your research. Back projects with a high probability of success. Change the gaming industry for the better.
