So I've been refreshing the Double Fine Kickstarter page probably six times a day since last week, which is a stupid amount of time to spend watching a number go up, but here we are. As of this morning it's crossed $2 million. Two million dollars. For a point-and-click adventure game that hasn't been designed yet, from a guy (Tim Schafer) who hasn't made one of those in like a decade. They asked for $400,000 and blew past it in under 24 hours back on the 8th, and it hasn't slowed down since.
I backed at the $15 tier the first night, mostly out of nostalgia for Grim Fandango and a weird sense that I should be part of whatever this turns out to be. I dont even know if the game will be good. Nobody does, thats the whole point, theyre building it in public with a documentary crew filming the process. But watching the pledge count climb past what actual venture-funded startups raise in a seed round has been the most interesting thing to watch online in months. Every gaming site I read has been running some version of "is this the future of funding games" and I think the honest answer is: for a handful of beloved studios with built-in nostalgia audiences, sure, maybe. For everyone else, probably not, but thats fine, this one experiment doesnt have to generalize to mean something.
What I keep coming back to is how weird it is that a platform launched not even three years ago for funding pottery projects and short films is suddenly moving numbers like this. I remember using Kickstarter in 2010 to back a friend's zine and feeling like I was tossing $20 into a well. Now its apparently capable of funding an entire studio's next project before a single line of design doc exists. Feels like a hinge moment even if I cant fully articulate why yet.
On a less fun note
The other big story eating up my RSS reader this month has been the Path mess. If you missed it: a developer named Arun Thampi noticed that Path, the "personal network" app that's been getting a lot of buzz, was silently uploading his entire iPhone address book to their servers on first launch. Not asking. Not a checkbox. Just quietly hoovering up names, phone numbers, and emails of everyone in his contacts and sending it to Path's backend. He posted about it, the tech press picked it up within hours, and Path's CEO Dave Morin ended up apologizing and pushing an update that deletes the collected data and actually asks permission now.
Heres my small rant about this, because I have one. Everybody's been acting shocked, shocked, that an app was doing this, but this has apparently been standard practice on iOS for years and nobody bothered to check because Apple's App Store review process doesn't actually audit what data gets sent off-device once you tap "allow" on something unrelated. Which, if youve been paying attention to how casually these permission dialogs get worded, shouldnt surprise anyone. Im not defending Path here, uploading someone's entire address book without so much as a heads-up is genuinely bad behavior and they deserved the backlash. But the interesting part isnt Path, its that congress apparently sent a letter to Tim Cook about it this week asking exactly which other apps do the same thing. I'd bet real money the answer is "quite a few," and Id also bet most of us wont find out which ones until the next scandal.
Anyway. Between watching a video game turn into a small financial phenomenon and watching an app quietly get caught reading everyone's phone contacts, its been a decent reminder that the stuff we install without thinking twice is doing more than we assume, and also that sometimes crowds of strangers will fund something purely because they liked a cartoon adventure game twenty years ago. Both things can be true. I dont have a neat lesson to wrap this up with, Im just going to go check the Kickstarter page again. Probably went up another ten grand while I was typing this.