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What Double Fine’s Kickstarter Success Means
On February 9, Double Fine Productions launched their Kickstarter page where fans and zillionaires alike could pledge their hard-earned cash to something that may be a total success or a complete failure. In Mr. Schafer’s words, “Either way, you win” because Double Fine is partnering with 2 Player Productions, makers of the Mojang documentary, to document the entire process of development for your viewing pleasure.
As of this writing, Double Fine has $2,050,344 pledged of their $400,000 goal, with 61,717 backers and 20 days to go. To anyone, that is above and beyond a monumental feat. Those are the success stories that you hear of once every ten years, maybe. Even with that in mind, it’s amazing that Double Fine Productions, a video game company no less, is upstaging “the man” by cutting him out entirely. In the four minute long video gracing the company’s Kickstarter page, Tim Schafer makes clear what the obstacles of their next creation are and how he plans to overcome them.
His goal: to create an adventure game that fans, himself included, have been craving for years now. The obstacle: no publisher would fund it. So, instead of shuffling his feet for the next forever, Mr. Schafer has decided to say, “TO HELL WITH THE PUBLISHERS!” (Note: my words, not his), and decided that if the fans truly desire a great adventure game, why not let them fund it? If they want to spend their money on this game, why not let them from the start, and as a bonus for being such humble supporters of what Double Fine loves doing, get neat bonuses that increase in value with higher pledges? For example, pledging $15 will get you access to the full game when it’s released on Steam, along with participation in the beta, access to the video series I mentioned above, and admission to the private discussion community (which I hope is less dirty than I’m imagining it to be for some reason). Pledging $30 will get you all of goodies from the $15 tier, plus an HD download of the documentary series with extras and a digital game soundtrack. The bonuses continue all the way up to $10,000, which will grant you lunch with Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, a tour of the Double Fine offices, all of the previous award tiers, and “MORE REWARDS but we can’t post them here because they’re too big!” (Whatever that means).
Markus "Notch" Persson tweeted this image during the excitement of Double Fine's Kickstarter.
So, now that Double Fine has surpassed their lofty $400,000 goal with an even loftier number that has broken not only the one million mark, but the two million(!) mark as well, what does this success mean for the video game industry and, more importantly, what does it mean for Double Fine?
If there’s one thing that people, developers and fans alike, should not take away from this, it’s that Double Fine is paving the way for future independent developers or that this is the end of big publishers. Double Fine has an established track record and an established fanship already. They were founded in July of 2000 and released their first title, Psychonauts, in 2005. Many critics hail Psychonauts for its originality and quality, but the limited marketing it received from Majesco contributed to the dismal sales (about 120,000 copies). The developer went on to create Brutal Legend, which sold much more than Psychonauts at 1.1 million copies across all platforms, but that number was less than what Double Fine hoped to sell since the development of Brutal Legend was so expensive. Since then, Double Fine has gone on to create Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, and most recently, Happy Action Theater. Needless to say, Double Fine Productions has earned the respect of its fans, which is exactly why their Kickstarter project has done so incredibly well. People were willing to throw down money for this mysterious project because they like what Double Fine Productions has created since their inception in 2000. They make good games and what else does a consumer of video games want more than a good game? A good adventure game, apparently.
Independent games have been on the rise for some time now. This generation of consoles brought things like Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network to the table. While they are viable platforms for distributing smaller-scale games (which is what indie games tend to be) to a wide audience, they don’t seem to be evolving in any way. For example, Microsoft hasn’t exactly done much to promote XBLA on a regular basis. By ‘regular basis’, I mean that the XBLA isn’t exactly the easiest thing to find in the dashboard. To add to this, for developers to push content updates to their games on XBLA and PSN, they must trudge through an approval process, whereas other digital distribution services, like Steam, allow developers to push updates for the games almost at will. It’s the difference between waiting months to get the clearance to push an update and waiting 24 hours. This type of control that developers get from services, like Steam, is what they want for their game and to add a middle-man to the equation can make for a mucky process. The reason developers look to publishers to distribute their games is because they have the money to distribute to a wide audience and to market it to an even wider one. Double Fine, though, obviously doesn’t need a huge marketing campaign or a publisher to parade them around at events they have no interest in being at. Their end consumer is the one that buys the game anyway, so why not have that person give the developer their money directly? But, this all comes back to their reputation, one that they have respectfully earned.
Double Fine totally knows what they're doing.
As I pay attention to the rise of independent game development, I’m reminded of an article by Ewan Morrison about the “self-epublishing bubble”, where he discusses the dangers of the increasingly popular method of publishing books nowadays, which is through self-epublications, such as Amazon, Nook, and the iPad book store, and not through contemporary publishing houses. In the article, he outlines the seven stages of a “bubble”, whether it is the commercial real estate bubble, the subprime bubble, or the credit bubble, and while I think that the rise of independent development has increased this console generation, I also believe it’s still too early to tell if this is a bubble. That said, Morrison’s definition for a bubble is “what happens when people start to make money out of speculation and hype.” Sound familiar? It should. I’ve spent the better part of 1,000 words going over it. However, there is also merit to this hype (that’s the reputation thing again). Double Fine is now sitting on a considerable amount of money due to fans going ga-ga over what this new game could be and while they have updated their progress as to how they intend to spend some of that additional money (providing translations into several languages for players with a first language other than English, for example), they did accumulate a majority of it in less than 24 hours. To me, that’s frightening, and I’m sure it’s frightening (and exciting) to Double Fine, but it’s what they do with the money that will count the most. Should other video game developers see this as a viable method of funding their projects, they should also be prepared to be responsible with their new-found funding (assuming they meet their goal) or to take a fall if their Kickstarter goal isn’t met “like Double Fine’s was”.
Double Fine is a company that knows what they are doing, plain and simple. They have already proven that to their fans. It is easy to understand that some unknown, independent developers may see their success and think, “Hey, that’s what we need! That’s how we’ll get our funding!” but, with no established fanbase, that same unknown indie developer isn’t going to see the numbers on their Kickstarter page climb at the rate that Double Fine’s did. That’s the unfortunate downside to the excitement created by their successful funding endeavor. It won’t work for everyone. But, that shouldn’t discourage the industry from finding new ways, like this one, at changing the business for the better.
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The concept of this sort of thing removing the need for publishers is outrageous. This will only be the case in very specific scenarios, as Schafer himself, has said. Now, don’t take this to be an attack on your article – it’s great! I just can’t seem to comment things without seeming like an aggressive moron.