Double Fine and Kickstarter Did Not Kill the Publishing Model – But They Did Show How it is Changing
Tim Schafer, mostly known for creating many classic adventure games including the Monkey Island franchise, has been all over the gaming news recently for finding unorthodox funding sources for projects that his studio Double Fine Productions is working on. First, after claiming that he would need “a few million dollars” to make a sequel to the cult classic Psychonauts, Markus Persson of Minecraft fame came forward and expressed interest in funding it. Then on Wednesday, February 8th, he and his studio Double Fine Productions launched a project on Kickstarter to fund an old-school-style point & click adventure game, needing $400,000 to make it and a documentary about the development, with extra money going toward further funding and a potential iOS version.
The project generated over $1 million in under 24 hours.
So, this is someone – a notable gaming personality and long-time developer – using a service for anyone to raise money, and he and his studio did it in rapid time. If it’s possible to fund a game this way, without going through publishers at all, does this mean that the publishing model is dead? Could any developer just go off and get their customers to fund their projects on the internet?
No. These are extraordinary circumstances. Tim Schafer is probably one of the few people who could actually pull this off – and especially to the degree of overfunding. There are plenty of underfunded Kickstarter projects from relatively unknown developers out there as well. But, plenty of people have funded their projects on Kickstarter without having the kind of subculture fame that Tim Schafer and Double Fine have. Kickstarter should be regarded as what it is – a useful tool in bringing games and other independent projects to market, but not the way to fund all projects going forward.
What this is emblematic of are three different developing factors in the world of development. One, digital distribution is rapidly opening up new business avenues for smaller projects, ones that can be either self-funded, worked on in spare time, or possibly even funded through crowdsourced means. No longer needing a boxed product on retail shelves, where distribution can be achieved through simply uploading a file to a server. Two, it means that publishers are not a necessary part of the equation like they once were. In an increasing fashion, larger-scale projects from bigger developers are going independent, and new avenues for making money off of them are arising.
Third? Forming a presence, building a rapport with the press and with customers is never a bad thing. News spread about this project because people respect Tim Schafer. He frequently interacts with people who reply to him on his Twitter account. He and his development studio have developed a respect with people though not just his projects but in the way that he operates with people. And by doing so, they have opened up lucrative new ways to fund the projects that they want to do, and that their customers want so much that they’re willing to pay for it before it’s even made. For aspiring independent developers, that has to be a promising sign that making the projects they want to do, without any creative or financial interference from publishers.
