Crowdfunding Video Games: Is It Worth It?
Recently, Polygon and a few other websites have put up articles that have indicated that video game crowdfunding had come to a decline in 2016 along with charts and data. While it certainly hasn’t been booming as much, it’s not collapsing. There’s also been a mention of tabletop games.
Although there were some Kickstarter projects that came in prior, crowdfunding video games didn’t become popular until 2012. If you were a game developer back in the day, the mindset was that you had to cling to the big companies just so you could get people to work with you, create your game, and have it published. If you think about it, it’s almost the same when it comes to music wherein people had to buy an entire record album instead of just buying that one song you liked hearing in the radio. Now we’re in the modern age, it’s so much easier to gain access to development tools and all you need now is funding the people and process to make the game. And there have been a lot of excellent video games released recently. But then why is it declining?
On the topic of video games versus table top games, one of the reasons that the latter succeeds more is because of development time. Video games take a lot of time to make and some popular projects stay in development hell for months if not years. The amount of time you have to allot with creating assets and making sure your game works is not a walk in the park. In comparison, the majority of Tabletop games are almost already finished before the crowdfunding even begins. The good ones already have the pieces, the board, and the rules made. With that, it doesn’t need an equally long time to be made since it’s up to the players and the set rules on how to make it work. Once it hits Kickstarter, it just means that it needs manufacturing and distribution funds.
Backing a project means you are donating money so that it may come into existence. A video game can’t put up a good fight without a good demo or promotional video. People will ask if it is possible and if they will enjoy it. You can’t just put out an idea for a video game and expect people to support it right away without giving a sample. It comes down to being a good salesperson. With that said, even if people do like your demo, it doesn’t always guarantee that they will like the final product. The video game Mighty No. 9 is an excellent example of this. Many people were excited to know that the creator of Megaman has begun his own indie project funded via Kickstarter. Unfortunately, it spent years in development hell that people have almost forgotten about it. And when it did came out, what we got was a game that felt half-finished and bland. This may have been a big cause of the crowdfunding decline. This topic also applies to the fear of vaporware.
Overall, it all comes down to feasibility and failed expectations. But why do people still go for crowdfunding?Take a look at UnderTale. It’s a simple little game with a one sentence description: “A traditional role-playing game where no one has to get hurt.” Coupled with a charming demo, it went from its initial goal of $5000.00 to a $51,124.00 amount. The reason for this is that the developer, TobyFox, knew his limits and so did the backers because of his previous works. With that, they were able to come up with a game that was able to deliver far more than what was expected. For an indie game released in 2015, it still rings to my heart until this day.