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Rob Zacny

Episode 182: Three's a Crowdsourcing

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Bruce, Troy, and Rob discuss the changing landscape of game financing, or at least they try to. The end up discussing Kickstarter almost exclusively, the return of Tom vs. Bruce, and their feelings of optimism about what crowd-funding can mean. Troy douses them with the cold water of reality. They also contemplate the strange meta-game of Kickstarters, and Ian Bogost’s skepticism. Nobody can pronounce OUYA.

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I think the problem is that people's initial impression of kickstarter is that it is a fundraising platform. It isn't really, from my experience of failure. Its really more of a fund motivation platform, where you can take an existing audience and give them an opportunity/reason to send some money your way.

I am sure there are some exceptions, but you really need lots of connections to get publicity around your project and even then if you don't have a large fanbase already you are fighting tough odds. That being said, I really enjoy backing projects and I think that, once refined, it will be the best way for content creators to get funding for their next project.

There is a cool thing that you can do with kickstarter as well: Funding free content. http://www.kickstart...r-force-returns

The Cyber Force comic book is a great example where the creator simply wants to fund giving away free copies to stores around the country in an effort to get people into their local store and perhaps reinvigorate that market. I really hope that more content creators will use kickstarter to get as much money that they *need* and then release the project for free once they reach their goal, which is basically what Tom vs Bruce is.

I threw some money towards Tom vs Bruce purely based on their appearance in this podcast so please make sure they appear regularly!!!

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Strategy game discussion closed for cleaning this week, it seems...

On the subject of Kickstarter, I think it's a decent idea at its core, as I believe it's in line with my own belief that consumer clout, at its essence, is expressed by how one "votes" with the cash in one's wallet. The Kickstarter concept seems to fuel that line of thinking. Of course, as is the case with most new ideas or endeavors, there will always be some bad apples out there who will try to corrupt a concept in any way imaginable in an attempt to get one-up on the world.

Hopefully Kickstarter can maintain its identity and relevance in the years ahead without devolving into some kind of twisted "Swiss army knife" means of making decisions, (e.g. "Should we fix the potholes on Main St. in Yourtown? Vote now on Ballot Measure X, brought to you online by Kickstarter!) I can just visualize that as the next evolution to the brain rotting flotsam and jetsam in future election years! :o

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I am going to side with Troy here and take a more negative view of kickstarters. I don't think it is the future of funding. Basically because you are giving money for essentially a promise that maybe you'll get something in the future, and I think once enough kickstarters fail to deliver people will turn their back on them. I also do not think the board game example is a valid comparison. When you sign up for a board game, when the numbers are reached the game is printed, ships and you get a game for your money. You may not, at the end of the day, like the game, but you will at least have something for you cash. This is the key difference between the board game model and the computer game kickstarter.

I think the future for game financing is the model that Endless Space used, you paid for Beta access. If Endless Space had failed you would have had a beta version for your money. Now you might have never played again, because you were so unhappy knowing what might have been, but you would have something for you hard disk. The strength of this model is that you have to produce something first almost like security before people give you money. Your beta build is an advert which says look how far we've come and imagine how it will look if only we had a little more money to finish it.

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I think it was Troy, who really nailed it when he said that the real advantage to kickstarter is it's a great way for people to sort of test the waters and see how much interest there is in a project. And as Bruce said, it is a way for a company to shift and mitigate some risks, which is really important for smaller developers. So while Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing models almost definitely won't upend the role of traditional publishers, some cool projects will definitely get made that otherwise wouldn't necessarily get made, and I think that's pretty sweet.

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It's worth noting the varying quality of the pitches for games on Kickstarter. I've been keeping an eye on things there for a while (since we may well take a poke at it at some point for our games), and you can usually tell immediately that some pitches are doomed. Some pitches are doomed because they don't describe the game, or because they're coming from nobody you've ever heard of and don't have anything more than concept art. Some are doomed because they're obviously rank amateurs and the odds of them successfully completing the project are miniscule. Some are doomed because the idea is just stupid, or because they're asking for too much money. Many are doomed because they're asking for $10K to make a rich, story driven MMO.

Personally, I look at kickstarter et al as a way of helping to create things that publishers would never touch. In many ways, the big hope for Kickstarter is that it will start to reverse the recent trend of genre death. The publishers are getting more and more conservative, and it's getting harder and harder to get anything green-lit that isn't one of a small and shrinking set of established genres. Any publisher-backed title failing in a major genre becomes a declaration of that genre's death. Kickstarter and indie successes, as rare as they may be, will hopefully prevent the industry from distilling down to CoD clones.

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Kickstarter is part of a bigger shift we're seeing in the so-called "creative class", and how we are connecting more directly with people on an individual level.

One of the hipster trends in big cities are "make shops", places like this in my local city: http://www.columbusideafoundry.com/. There has been building over the last decade a cultural push toward the physical and the more personal. This is also echoed in big corporate branding with "authenticity" being the meme among thought leaders in that field.

Kickstarter hits these trends perfectly in two different ways. First, it provides an opportunity for creatives to produce their own inspirations as opposed to simply schlocking things together in their employer company. The indie games movement is another example of this in practice, and something that Kickstarter directly supports. Then, it connects producers with consumers. This is hugely, hugely important. From a personal perspective, as someone who really loathes superficial and inauthentic relationships and connections, I'm seeing more and more people trying to build and connect on micro, one-to-one levels. Kickstarter allows this in wonderful ways. Say what you will about it, the format allows a lot of creative and interesting things to be offered to consumers. And consumers are gobbling them up. Things like getting your name in a game as a cool character, that rocks. It is weaving together the designed artifact with the experiential participation and integration that we crave. I've tried to think about how to sell those sort of things OFF Kickstarter, just on our normal company website. And I'm pretty sure it would not be very successful. The focus of the Kickstarter lens makes all of those things more vibrant and, importantly, participatory.

Troy made a comment on the show about things going back to the Middle Ages and he was onto something. Not that we're going all the way back there, but there is a trend moving away from the abstract, indirect and industrial to the concrete, direct and personal. I've seen it in all of the industries I'm fortunate enough to work within. And it is part of a much longer historical arc that we've seen before, such as the arts and crafts movement in response to the industrial revolution.

The wild card with Kickstarter, as people have noted, is the uneven quality. It is certainly inevitable, inherent in the process and even structure. There is less accountability, and the sellers often have less proven track record delivering successful products *on their own*. Personally I see it as a process. Kickstarter has made my desire to serially publish board games more possible. The first campaign was very successful. I think the game is good, but it also reflects my limitations as a creator: my strengths and interests are in design, and my weaknesses and dislikes are in development. Objectively I am very pleased with much of the innovation in the game but dissatisfied with how my personal limitations show thru in the overall fit-and-finish, whether it be the rulebook or the cumbersome markers or some mechanics not being fully baked. I suspect in these ways I am a "garden variety" creator on Kickstarter: there is a good core there but the seams do show.

However, where the "kickstart" metaphor comes in is that it allows me to do another game. And that game will have some of the same limitations but also will be improved thanks to the lessons learned. And, again thanks to the first project, it allowed me to hire someone to take over development and other aspects for subsequent projects. So the *third* game is going to be vetted and polished and presented in a way perfectly consistent with what good, reputable, established companies produce. But it had to start somewhere, and it never would have begun if I hadn't pushed the button - warts and all - and the community hadn't been so generous with its support.

So long as Kickstarter is a gravity well for game buyers I fully expect to do all of our pre-order campaigns there. I love how close I get to customers; I love the creativity in rewards it offers; I love that it generates lots of pre-orders to hedge the financial risk. I think it is a genuine win-win. I'm so appreciative for both the service, and the people who use it and choose to buy our things.

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Regarding fulfillment risks, Nathan Seidle of Sparkfun recently gave a talk about his expereinces with 'the pit of dispair'. Projects that succeed but not enough to become a whole different category of success and the pain that follows (vid of the talk

). It's electronics focused, but reminded me of the Little Metal Dog Show conversation on Game Salute's Springboard. Troy is not alone thinking the KS business model has issues, but people are trying to make it better.

I also don't know if I buy into Bogost's QVC-fever-dream angle (and no, I didn't buy in on an Ouya). I still think of my backings as patronage. Maybe thats the wrong word. I understand the contract I'm getting into. I am aware the output of individual Kickstarters may and will suck. However, I also know that my $20 aggregated with others means somone is able to quit their day job for a while and go work on some project. Doing that, they'll attempt interesting things, pick up practical expereinces, and push the state of the art a little further along.

My day job involves managing a giant stack of software that all began as quiet little projects, so I'm sticking with my romanticism for a little while longer.

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Interesting discussion. I'm working on a board game, have no idea how to publish it yet, but Indiegogo (not Kickstarter as I'm not in the US) is probably an option. I'm not familiar with Indiegogo yet, but if I did a Kickstarter, I also wouldn't want the burden of shipping a whole lot of rewards. A T-Shirt would be likely if I'd have a really cool design, but I wouldn't want to come up with a lot of middle reward tiers, unless the ideas for those somehow came to me naturally.

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If the components for your board game are simple you can also put them on this store https://www.thegamecrafter.com/

I used it to print out a prototype just for my own use but you can open it up for others to buy at whatever markup you want over the base cost. You can contact successful kickstarter projects and ask them for help, that usually works.

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