Call of duty: gaming's responsibility to Kickstarter (Wired UK)

Can the current Kickstarter boom continue and will the presence of established businesses affect our willingness to offer up our cash?

As Kickstarter's reputation for swiftly bankrolling projects grows, it's no surprise that established games companies and industry veterans have been sitting up and taking note. As a result, the site has been gradually filling up with games pitches from old hands tapping into the crowdfunding zeitgeist for better or worse. But the famous and financially secure need to start building a sense of community and nurturing smaller projects if they don't want the funding and the good will to dry up as quickly as it arrived.

The basic premise of Kickstarter is that it offers a platform for individuals or businesses to seek donations of varying amounts, some attached to particular rewards, in order to fund a project. The specific benefits of the system when it comes to games vary from project to project but generally can be divided into three categories: raising capital, particularly for games it would be hard to fund through conventional means; the capacity for using the platform and its reward scheme for marketing and pre-ordering; and engendering good will amongst your target audience through dialogue and through the donors' own sense of philanthropy.

But the arrival of big business threatens to upset that arrangement in a significant way. The platform operates on a largely good faith basis and good faith is not a natural bedfellow for big business. As per the site's terms of use (Kickstarter declined to be interviewed for this piece) the creators of projects are offering backers the chance to enter into a contract with them. But "Kickstarter is not a party to that agreement between the Backer and Project Creator. All dealings are solely between Users."

In terms of accountability, "Kickstarter does not guarantee projects or investigate a creator's ability to complete their project. On Kickstarter, backers (you!) ultimately decide the validity and worthiness of a project by whether they decide to fund it." It's an honour system, albeit one with an underpinning of basic legal obligation. The transactional elements are then complemented by further layers of interaction.

"It feels more personal than a business transaction -- even just practically," says Holly Gramazio of games company Hide&Seek, who are attempting to fund a digital iteration of their Tiny Games project on the site. "You can see who's backed you, what their questions are, where they came to the project from, all that. It gives you a stronger sense of who they are as people rather than as numbers, which can be a useful focus."

Generally speaking, when the creator is an unknown asking for several thousand pounds, the community focus appears to be on showing support for innovation or ambition. When the amounts increase and a recognisable -- and often wealthy -- game personality or company is involved the focus shifts, though the amounts being requested are still nowhere close to the tens of millions demanded by a triple-A title in a traditional funding model.

One example is Ultima-creator Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar campaign. Garriott asked for $1 million on Kickstarter. He also spent $30 million on a trip to space in 2008. The two facts are separate -- one relates to personal wealth and the other is business financing. But, despite that and despite the Shroud of the Avatar FAQ saying Garriott has invested millions of his own already, the question "Why are you asking for our money to fund this game?" persists and gnaws at the culture of good will which is Kickstarter's lifeblood. Despite the criticism Garriott's project exceeded its initial target swiftly (it is currently 128 percent funded with 8 days left to run), but other Kickstarters with famous figures attached have not been so bombastically successful. Peter Molyneux's Godus project only came in ?75,000 over target -- a 17 percent excess -- while Elite: Dangerous managed a 26 percent funding bonus. Others have failed entirely or been cancelled as with Gas Powered Games' Wildman.

There's also the fact that Kickstarter is young enough and game development times long enough that we are only now beginning to be able to gauge whether companies will make good on their promises. Rogue-like spaceship sim FTL is one such success story, and Double Fine's game -- the recently named Broken Age -- appears to be well on the path to completion but the realisation or failure of myriad other gaming projects will have repercussions in terms of cynicism and good will amongst backers.

Brian Fargo, founder of development studio Interplay and now inXile, is no stranger to successful Kickstarter projects. Wasteland 2 achieved more than triple its funding target in 2012, while Torment: Tides of Numenera became the first Kickstarter to raise $1 million in just six hours.

"Other than pitching Wasteland to publishers there were no other routes to raise money for these games," says Fargo. "Investors typically look to put their money into a business idea and not a product idea so that was a closed channel." Hence Kickstarter. "The instant I saw a large funding on Kickstarter I knew that this could be my calling," says Fargo, and looking at the numbers it's hard to disagree. "As I travelled the globe I was consistently asked about [previous games] Wasteland and Torment and whether there would be sequels."

This comment acknowledges Kickstarter's predilection for nostalgia but also nods to the basic business sense which leads backers to support projects by someone with a proven track record. In Fargo's case this takes the form of a long history making games but, in terms of what will lead an unknown developer seeking a few thousand pounds for their first project to become a recognisable figure putting out the online equivalent of a flatcap capable of holding several million dollars, credibility is key. You succeed in you first project and that feeds into whether you're trusted with a bigger sum or a more expansive concept.

Chaining projects together also has the advantage that feedback and lessons from one can inform the next. So, going back to Fargo's projects, how did the experience from the first Kickstarter influence the second? "We kept a log of everything we learned from Wasteland that we would apply for our next Kickstarter," Fargo says. "[They] ranged from ending our campaign at a reasonable time (not at 5am on a Tuesday for example), repeating information as much as possible, planning out our stretch goals and assets to release post-launch and more."

This interconnected approach, where the effects of a project ripple outward, affecting audience perceptions, informing marketing and reward strategies, and helping businesses to grow in scope is not unique to Fargo or inXile as Robin Clarke, Digital Marketing Manager at AppyNation attests. Supersonic Software (one of the AppyNation Studios) ran a Kickstarter to fund the World's Biggest Wordsearch. The project failed to reach its ?5,000 goal, however, as Clarke says, "We do plan to go down the crowdfunding route again in future, if appropriate, and will definitely be taking lessons [from this project] on board."

But joining the dots between your own Kickstarters is very different to encouraging a wider sense of community and a business ecosystem. That's where Kicking It Forward, Fargo's reinvestment initiative, comes in. "I set up [Kicking It Forward] to spur successful Kickstarter-based projects to re-invest five percent of their post-launch profits back into other companies who seek crowdfunding," he says. "The money that is raised through Kickstarter is the least dilutive capital that exists so we should use part of the savings to help others. We need to make sure this model is self-sustaining." The full list of affiliated projects can be found at kickingitforward.org.

Kicking It Forward is an explicit acknowledgement that Kickstarter cannot be seen as just an easy way to raise capital and tap customers for pre-orders in the guise of rewards. Encouragingly for Fargo the initiative has been picked up by projects outside the gaming community -- chocolate sauce, astrophotography and Braille postcards are just a few of the Kickstarters signed up to the scheme. It also introduces a layer by which experienced Kickstarter users can vet potential enterprises, picking out good ideas which are in danger of being overlooked.

The initiative is -- even more than Kickstarter -- an honour system and one still in its infancy. It relies on the projects involved being seen to make good on their reinvestment pledge once they have begun to make a profit. If that happens enough and with enough of a publicity push from those successful ventures on social media and at events, then Kicking It Forward could become shorthand for the creator's integrity and sense of community. The online equivalent of an ethical production stamp. If bigger players are transparent about their Kicking it Forward investments, it might also serve as a seal of approval, in much the same way that the perceived quality of a startup can sometimes be gleaned from the prestige of the venture capitalist that has invested in it.

Fargo hopes that the platform will continue to provide a viable funding route. If that is the case, he generously predicts that "today's current indie developer will one day beat my Kickstarter records easily".

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/1/kickstarter

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