Kickstarter, The Revolution of Game production

[Neobros]

Kickstarter is a crowd-funding platform that's hit gaming headlines recently with it's capability to fund small professional gaming teams to produce projects publishers will only shake their heads at, but gamers seem to want.

It all started when adventure game creative director Tim Schafer (The guy behind Brütal Legend, Psychonts, Full Throttle, and the legendary Grim Fandango) asked players to give him $400,000 (A modest sum to produce a game) through Kickstarter last month to produce a new adventure game, an adventure game publishers told him would never be profitable, because adventure games no longer sell. Gamers responded by giving him and his company a whopping $3,336,371! (A little more than three million dollars, for those of you who might think I accidentally added another number or three. 834% of what he asked for)

This opened the floodgames, and dozens of amateurs and professionals over the last month have successfully used kickstarter to fund games publishers laughed out of the room as unprofitable. Such as:

• FTL: Faster Than Light - Spaceship Simulation Roguelike-like described as "Firefly by way of Spelunky." Made by a small team of amateurs.
  Asked for only $10,000, gamers gave $200,542 (2,005% funding)
  
• TAKEDOWN - Realistic FPS, of the breed of the SWAT Series. A medium sized team made up of veteran industry professionals. Headed by Christian Allen (Lead on several of the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon games)
  Asked for a fair $200,000, gamers gave $221,833 (110% funding)
  
• Auditorium 2: Duet - Squeal to the music/puzzle game Auditorium, published on PS3 and 360 in 2010. Duet is made by the same professional team who made the first game.
  Asked for a small $60,000, gamers gave $71,061 (118% funding)
  
• Guns of Icarus Online - An online steampunk first-person airship shooter. Made by a small intermediate team.
  Asked for a small $10,000, gamers gave $35,237 (352% funding)
  
• Guncraft - FPS meets Minecraft. Made by a small amateur team.
  Asked for a small $16,000, gamers gave $16,487 (103% funding)
  
• Far West - A Western/Wuxia adventure game. Made by an amateur game designer and professional fiction writer.
  Asked for a meagre $5,000, gamers gave $49,324 (986% funding)
  
• Leisure Suit Larry: In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards - A new Leisure Suit Larry game. Made by a fairly large team of industry veterans (Mostly ex-Sierra) and creatively headed by Al Lowe himself, the creator of Leisure Suit Larry.
  Asking for a fair $500,000, and still with 26 days to meet that target. Gamers so far have given $184,097 (36% funding)
  
• The Banner Saga - Turn-based strategy/Adventure with epic art work. Made by a small team of industry professionals.
  Asking for a fairly small $100,000, and still with 14 days to smash that target. Gamers so far have given $386,449 (386% funding)
  
• Wasteland 2 - Sequel to the 1988 RPG Wasteland, no less than the father of the Fallout Series its self. Made by a team of professionals who worked on the original Wasteland and several of the early Fallout games, and headed by no less than Brian Fargo, creator of Wasteland and Baldur's Gate, and founder of Interplay.
  Asking for a large but fair $900,000, and still with 11 days to go. Gamers so far have given a whopping $2,027,528 (225% funding)

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I think (And dearly hope) this model of funding could turn game development on its head. More and more developers might cut out the publisher entirely, and make the games they want to make, instead of what the publisher thinks will sell. We could find ourselves back in a world of professionally produced adventure, business sim, and turn-based games. We could find ourselves playing wild new unpublishable games, and the games we hungered over in our teenage and childhoods years, once more!

Thoughts?

[Seriously Unserious]

Wow

That's amazing. I don't know where you find this stuff Neo but awesome find! I hope Nino reads this as I think he deserves access to the kind of funding that could enable him to make the kind of games he's truly capable of.