Speaking at a preview event to Brian Fargo, CEO of InXile entertainment, which is currently approaching the release of its partly crowdfunded Wasteland 2, I noted that the Kickstarter model is in one very significant way the opposite of the publisher pitch. With publishers, the developer usually comes in with an estimate of costs, and the publisher then beats them down until a number both are happy with can be agreed.
With Kickstarter, conversely, the developer sets a number, and then, if the idea is sufficiently resonant, they might get as much money as they have asked for, or far more. And, of course, the sum they have asked for may or may not represent the amount they actually need to make a game.
My interest was recently piqued by the controversies around the Kickstarter campaign for Areal, which was cancelled within 48 hours of its completion by Kickstarter, having raised more than its $50,00 target. With questions and skepticism raised not least by my colleague Erik Kain, Kickstarter chose to close the appeal for unspecified infraction, preventing Areal's developers - who, it should be noted, at the time of writing are still maintaining that they are the injured party in this situation - from receiving any of the $65,000 raised.
I spoke to three game developers whose Kickstarter appeals have been unexpectedly successful - Cameron Kunzelman, creator of Catachresis and Alpaca Run, Josh Presseisen, whose Kickstarter for The Deer God reached the $50,000 initially requested by Areal, and Fargo himself, whose wildly overfunded campaign to make Wasteland 2 was one of the prime movers in the influx of video game projects to Kickstarter. All have succeeded in funding their games, and all have received more funding than hey asked for. What difference does it make to their processes?
The microgame auteur - Cameron Kunzelman
Cameron Kunzelman makes short games, independent in structure and spirit, largely available for free from his website. His upcoming game Epanalepsis is a more ambitious project - a point-and-click adventure dedicated to the evolution of a single city block experiencing late-stage capitalism over three separate time periods - the 1990s, 2010s and 2030s. So, Jane Jensen meets Jane Jacobs, as nobody would say.
The Kickstarter for Epanalepsis is in its last days, and has so far raised over $7,000, with an initial target of $4,000. Kunzelman has used Kickstarter twice before, asking for small amounts: the spiritual successor to Epanalepsis, Catachresis, asked for a measly $125 and ultimately raised ten times that amount. Kunzelman explained by email that Epanalepsis aimed to build on the simple, highly atmospheric pixel-art approach of Catachresism, using the same tool, Scirra's Construct 2.
I have a weird relationship with point and click adventure games in that I generally don't enjoy playing them very much, but I do think they're a wonderful vehicle for a certain kind of storytelling. I think that people who are excited to play those kinds of games are willing to stick with you for the long run, and I find that type to be fairly rare in videogames.
We've really been trained to love or hate something in the first fifteen minutes. Contemporary game designers are very good at hooking you in the first fifteen minutes and getting you invested in that time period. There's no problem with that, of course, and that's an amazing skill. But I also like the idea of a game that slowly grabs you, like a novel would, over a few hours. I think Catachresis was successful at that, and I'm trying to hone that in Epanalepsis.
Kickstarter has been responsible for bringing entire genres back to prominence, as markets are revealed for genres and approaches that a mainstream publisher cannot effectively monetize. However, it is also littered with projects, often by first-time developers, which critically underestimated the cost of making a game. With that in mind, $125 seemed to be a pretty low ask for a game, even a pixel art game. What does overfunding mean to a project of that small scale? Primarily, says, Cameron, the amount that contributors can be paid, rather than fundamental changes to the game.
For [Operation Make Something], which asked for $200] I wanted to be able to pay myself; for [Catachresis], I wanted to be able to pay my music composer. The low ask was about making sure that I could meet that goal--paying someone else for their labor--while still being critical of the apparatus itself. I think I've softened on Kickstarter in a number of ways, but I still see it as a way of allowing me to contract labor to fill in my weak spots as a developer--it is a way of getting a "team" together while making sure that everyone is compensated. At the end of the day, I'm okay with working for very little (or, historically, nothing) with the hope of profits in the future; I feel weird about asking other people to do that for me...
I'm fundamentally a hobbyist, in that making games is not my primary job.
Out of $4,000, a full half of that is dedicated to paying for music creation and licensing. The rest goes into a general slush fund of development costs - buying or replacing hardware if that comes up, covering my original costs to develop the Kickstarter itself (commissioning art, paying voice actors for the trailer), paying Kickstarter their cut, fulfilling rewards, and then paying myself.
Assuming that I work on the game for merely 200 hours (which is ridiculous, really, because I will end up at multiple times that before release) and have $1500 of general funds left after all of that, I will make about $7.50 an hour, or right around minimum wage. So I'm making a basic wage but not much more than that
Overfunding on Catachresis meant that everyone could be paid a little more. Overfunding with Epanalepsis means more tracks and a slightly increased scope for the game. As I've said other places, funding at $4k means I can make the game; funding at $10k means I can make the game that I want to make, with more music and more specific, single-shot scenes with assets that don't get used in more than one place or time.
The indie platformer - The Deer God
The Deer God is an odd concept, but one that apparently resonated: a hunter is reincarnated as a deer, and has to escape his former peers and survive the threats of the woodland, while finding the time to romance does, sire fawns and gain magical powers from elder stags.
So, pretty much an Assassin's Creed homage, all told.
The Deer God came within touching distance of doubling its $26,000 Kickstarter target, and also used the campaign to promote preorders on the site of its developer, Crescent Moon Games. Cannily, the interest generated by the Kickstarter campaign was also leveraged into securing qualification for Steam Greenlight, meaning the game will release on the large and lucrative Steam digital store.
Interviewed by email, Josh Presseisen of Crescent Moon Games acknowledged that, like point-and-click adventures, this sort of game is a natural fit for the Kickstarter audience.
The Deer God seemed like a natural fit for Kickstarter versus other games I've released. The community loves pixel art games, they love innovation, and they love originality. I think the Deer God combines all of these. I also feel the same way about Steam Greenlight - it was approved quickly there. I'm still looking for other funding sources to bring the game to additional platforms, but Kickstarter is a great way to raise awareness for new games.
The initial $26,000 target was intended to pay three staff to work on the project part-time. Doubling that has allowed for more people to be allocated, with particular implications for the ports (unlike upcoming Assassin's Creed games, The Deer God is coming to the Wii U as a result of a stretch goal's fulfilment).
The hunger for content in the online games press means that an interesting-looking Kickstarter project has a good chance of finding its way onto major games sites, and The Deer God was featured by Destructoid and the PC gaming trendsetter Rock, Paper, Shotgun. However, Presseinen notes that in terms of funding being featured within Kickstarter itself had a far more noticeable impact:
During those times I could actually see the numbers changing just as I would watch the page - so those were by far the most significant to moving us past the goal and into the stretch goals.
Making it rain in the nuclear desert - Wasteland 2
Kunzelman said in his responses that he was "critical of the rhetoric of Kickstarter" - that it demanded unalloyed positivity about the project and what backers will help you to achieve - potentially leading to situations where a beautiful, detailed and highly systemic first-person shooter in a post-apocalyptic world is promised in a $50,000 Kickstarter. He argued, uncontroversially, that the target audience for many Kickstarters - Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous and other revivals or returns from game industry legends - is well-off 30somethings with disposable income and nostalgic inclinations.
Is it me, or is there sort of a Ron Perlman thing going on here?
Arguably the first Kickstarter project to walk that walk was Wasteland 2, by InXile Games, which launched a Kickstarter in the spring of 2012. The original Wasteland was released almost thirty years ago and, Brian Fargo told me at the European press preview of Wasteland 2, two decades of that had been spent trying to make the sequel - first securing the rights and then looking for funding. No publisher had been interested:
Kickstarter - talk about a Hail Hary pass!
If it hadn't worked there was no way I'd be able to convince anyone to fund it.
And when you do a Kickstarter campaign, you're really flogging* yourself in the public square. You have your coworkers, you have your family, you have your fellows in the industry. They're all watching you succeed or fail; it couldn't be more dramatic. It must be like opening a Broadway play - if it closes the next week you're just mortified, right?
The campaign was launched with a $900,000 target - with Fargo promising to put in $100,000 of his personal money if the target was reached. By the time it concluded, donations were at $2.93 million.
It completely changes the scope. I was telling my friends about Kickstarter - at the time, most people weren't familiar with it at all. So, when I said I went on and asked for a million dollars and they gave me triple that, they almost fell out of their chairs!
There's a lot of difference between working with the crowd and working with a traditional publisher. The crowd is all about trust. They are giving you the money up front and saying "we believe in you, and we believe that you'll deliver. Please don't let us down."
That's basically it. With a publisher, they'll dole out the money month by month, and say "You have to prove to us that it's going our way. And if it isn't maybe we'll pay you slow..."
I can say that [when working with publishers] I spent 30-35% of my time just getting paid. From a production standpoint it takes longer, and in terms of my mental capacity. Am I thinking about how to make the game greater, or am I arguing about how to get paid, or proving that I know what I'm doing, or creating milestones that aren't about execution? That's a huge difference.
And also you add the question "what are my guys going to do next?" It's more of a service business: you're unlikely to get out of the hole any time quickly, because you took at $20-30 million dollar advance. Even if you do make money, you aren't going to make it until quarters down the road. In which, how are you going to make the payroll? So, guess what - there's another 35% of my time thinking about that, plus negotiating, trying to get a contract... It used to be 70-75% of my time was spend outside the product. Now it's 95% [on the product]. To me that's the biggest real-world difference.
The publicity generated by the size of the funding - and thus the increased possibilities for the game - gave Fargo and InXile new options. A distribution deal with the highly acquisitive German publishers Deep Silver (who rescued Saints Row from the bankrupt THQ, and more recently made the news by purchasing the Homefront license from Crytek) secured a retail release for what was going to be a digital-only game. Fargo also handed off the fulfilment of the Kickstarter benefits to Deep Silver as part of the deal, as they already had the mechanisms for delivering promotional merchandise.
Conversely, as soon as funding was complete, 10% of the funds immediately had to go to Kickstarter, and there were outcosts to Chris Avellone and Obsidian Entertainment and front-loaded contractor fees that also shrank the pot.
The final budget of the game, Fargo said, ended closer to $5 million that $3 million - through the Deep Silver deal, through increased sales if InXile's back catalog, through Steam Early Access revenues and with further contributions of his own money. The team has swelled to 25 strong; as the game nears completion and release in September, members will transition to InXile's next game, Torment: Tides of Numenera - also Kickstarter funded. That team size, and the commensurate size of the game, is very much a function of its overfunding, said Fargo:
It's nothing like the $900,000 project we were going to make... When we hit $3 million the initial scope went out of the window. My production guys said "Let's focus on Arizona [the game is set in Arizona and Los Angeles] - that's 25 hours of gameplay". I said "I don't think that's ambitious enough. I want to go for it...
So, there was a conscious decision to make this a 60-70 hour game. I made a calculated risk, but we were always financially in pretty good shape.
Kickstart, continue
One of the strangenesses of the rise of Kickstarter is that, while it is a way for dream projects to be funded, it is asked to support many different shapes and sizes of dreams - $125 to keep a developer in noodles while making a game is secured by the same systems as $10 million to make a smartwatch - or $3 million to make a spiritual successor to Fallout. Scope and scale are issues that, in the two and a half years since Kickstarter began its rise to first-choice status for many video game, are still being negotiated. Some projects will always promise too much, or ask for too little, or suffer any number of possible misfortunes. Done right, though, a 2D role playing game investigating the gentrification of urban space, a platform game about reincarnation and deer love and a $3 million ride through a radioactive wasteland have interesting things to say to each other - and are all intriguing products that may otherwise never have been proposed.
My preview of Wasteland 2 will be upcoming.
