Crowded House

Earlier this week, veteran developer Tim Schafer announced that his company, Double Fine, wanted to make an adventure game - a genre often lamented as being dead before its time - but that it wanted to secure funding for the game through unconventional means. Schafer launched an effort on Kickstarter, a funding site, aiming to raise $400,000 from the company's fans to fund development. At the time of writing, the effort has far exceeded that figure. Double Fine has the money to make its game, extracted entirely from the company's own fanbase without the slightest bit of involvement from traditional funding sources like publishers or venture capitalists.

This is crowdfunding - the logical evolution of crowdsourcing. What began as an effort to aggregate the spare computing power of volunteers and expanded into the aggregation of their spare brain power has posed a new question - can we aggregate the spare money in their bank accounts? The answer, it would seem, is yes.

Crowdfunding poses absolutely enormous questions not just for videogames, but for the entire structure of our economy - particularly our creative industries. Of course, Schafer's success is a fringe case, and it's worth noting that another equally ambitious crowdfunding effort, which hoped to raise $300,000 for the development of a sequel to the Nexus space combat game, recently failed to hit its targets by quite a significant margin. It's not time for game developers to burn their bridges with publishers and VCs just yet - but all the same, there's a seismic shift in the landscape occurring here which is important to consider.

"Crowdfunding asks the Internet audience to put their money where their mouth is and pay for the development of something they'd like to enjoy."

Publishers - and to a certain extent VCs - have different functions depending on which perspective you view them from. Financially, they are investors, picking projects which are likely to succeed and throwing backing (financial and otherwise) behind them in the hope of making a return from the project. Creatively, though, they are gatekeepers. They are, for better or worse, in the business of finding things which they believe they will be successful and permitting those things to be made - and thus, by act of omission, preventing other things from being made. In this, publishers rely on their own instincts and market research; no mechanism has existed up until now to effectively test what the market will actually pay for.

Crowdfunding approaches that from a novel perspective. Rather than putting a group of people into a room with some free biscuits and asking them if they'd theoretically spend some theoretical money on a theoretical game at some theoretical point in future, a scenario from which the only reliable data that can be extracted is related to the group's preference in free biscuits, crowdfunding asks the Internet audience to put their money where their mouth is and pay for the development of something they'd like to enjoy.

There are multiple ways to approach this. Kickstarter is the most popular at present, and simply says, "invest, and you'll get a copy of the finished product; invest a bit more and we'll give you some goodies as well". Capitalists have criticised this on the basis that the investors don't get any return on their investment - if the product does stunningly well, the people who funded it don't get anything back. (Crowdfunders would probably respond that capitalists might enjoy their lives more if they didn't measure every damned thing in coins, and observe that most of the history of human creativity has been funded by patrons using their wealth to pay for artists to create things for them, not by suited executives shepherding creative talent into building marketable "product".)