So I was going to write about something else tonight (a follow-up on that whole SOPA mess, which I promise is still coming) but I got sucked into refreshing a Kickstarter page for like the fortieth time this week and figured I might as well just write about that instead.
If you havent heard about the Double Fine thing yet, catch up. Tim Schafer, the guy behind Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, put up a Kickstarter on February 8th asking for $400,000 to make an old-school point-and-click adventure game. No publisher, no platform holder telling him what the game has to be, just "give us money and well make the game we want to make, and you get to watch us make it." They hit the goal in eight hours. Eight hours. By the next day they were past a million. Last I checked tonight it was sitting somewhere north of a million and a half, maybe closer to two million by the time anyone reads this, and the campaign doesnt even close until mid-March. Almost 50,000 people have thrown money at a video game that doesnt exist yet, based on nothing but a two-minute video and a track record.
I dont think I can overstate how weird this is if youve been paying attention to how games get funded for the past decade or so. Adventure games are supposedly dead, everyone will tell you that, publishers wont touch them, too niche, too old-fashioned, kids these days want Call of Duty. And yet here are tens of thousands of people, mostly not kids at all probably (Ill admit Im one of the ones who pledged, and Im not exactly a kid), putting down actual money for the genre publishers said was finished. It kind of makes the whole "market research" thing publishers do look a little silly. Turns out you dont need a focus group if you just ask the people who actually want the thing.
Funny timing too, because barely two and a half weeks ago Facebook filed its S-1 with the SEC, this huge stack of paperwork saying hey, we want to raise five billion dollars and were worth something like 75 to 100 billion dollars, take our word for it. Two totally different ends of the same idea. One is "give us money on the promise of a return," dressed up in bankers and lawyers and a stock ticker (theyre going with FB, which, fine, I guess thats the obvious choice). The other is "give us money because you want this thing to exist and youll get the thing itself, eventually, maybe with some extras." I know which one Id rather read the fine print on. Actually I havent read either set of fine print, lets be honest, nobody reads the Kickstarter terms either, we just click the button.
What I keep coming back to is that Kickstarter has been around since 2009 and this isnt even close to its first big success, but this one feels different in scale. Its not some art project or a neat gadget for a few thousand dollars. Its a full game production, with an actual studio behind it, hiring people specifically because the money showed up. Double Fine brought on a documentary crew (2 Player Productions, if you want to look them up) to film the whole development process for backers, which honestly might end up being more interesting than the game itself. Ive watched three of the videos already at work when I should have been doing literally anything else.
My one gripe, and its a small one: the stretch goals thing is going to get out of hand. Every time the total creeps up another notch someone announces a new platform or a new feature, and at some point that stops being generosity and starts being a slightly manipulative way to keep the number climbing. I dont think Double Fine is doing anything cynical here, they seem genuinely stunned by all this, but I guarantee you by summer some other studio is going to run this exact playbook with a lot less charm behind it.
Anyway. If this keeps going the way it looks like its going, "just Kickstart it" is going to become an actual sentence people say out loud about actual products, not just as a joke. I did not expect that to be a thing I typed in February of 2012 but here we are.