By René Korsgaard
If you are a fairly seasoned gamer like me, you probably remember the good old days, where games could not just simply rely on flashy graphics, and where every other game was not the same First Person Shooter with a different skin.
Back then games relied on compelling stories that made you laugh or cry, and/or interesting and innovative game mechanics that revolutionized the field. This great era gave us veterans and classics like Super Mario, Pac Man, and trademark games of the now seemingly dead “point and click”-adventure genre such as Monkey Island, Full Throttle, and Day of The Tentacle. I remember fondly spending hours and hours on end in front of my old man's 486 PC with Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne trying to stop the evil purple tentacle from taking over the world.
But let us be honest, compared to today's beautiful graphics and advanced fast paced game mechanics the old “point and click”-adventure games were rather linear and limited. There is no way that a new production of said genre would fly today. Or is there?
Nostalgic fans donate 2 million dollars to the Double Fine Adventure
Double Fine Productions with Tim Schafer at the head, who has titles like Day of The Tentacle and Full Throttle under his belt, certainly believe that the market hungers for a new title playing on the nostalgia of “point and click”-adventure genre.
However, the publishers do not, and with no publishers there are no development funds, and with no funds there is no game. With enough publishers laughing at Tim Schafer after hearing about his idea of making an adventure game, he finally got the brilliant idea of asking the nostalgic fans of the genre to buy the game before development had even started, and that is how the Double Fine Adventure Kick Starter pledge was born.
In this pledge Double Fine Productions ask fans to contribute 300.000$ for developing the game and 100.000$ to continually video document the process such that the backers of the project can follow the development of their “investment”. Furthermore by donating to the project the backers entitle themselves to anything from a free copy of the game to one of Tim Schafer's last four unopened Day of The Tentacle triangle boxes all depending on the amount donated.
What happened next was rather unexpected.
In a matter of a mere 8 hours the asking amount was already donated and the funds kept pouring in, and at the time of writing this article the pledge had generated a whopping 2 million dollars. That is a record braking amount for a crow funded game [1]. Is this just a phenomena related to the nostalgia of the genre or is it much larger than that? Can this be the future of game development? Only time will tell, but we can at least speculate as to why Double Fine Adventure became such a success story, and what is needed for others to follow in their footsteps.
First and foremost Double Fine Productions are lead by veterans within the field of game development with largely popular titles of the chosen genre under their belt. Consequently a large fan base have emerged over the years.
Thus, they have earned the trust of the backers to a point that they are willing to buy the game upfront with the confidence that the game not only will be finished and eventually published, but also that it will be a game worth playing. This means that unknown indie developers cannot hope to generate nearly as much support even though that their game concept might be more innovative and interesting than that of Double Fine Adventure.
One of the successful crowd funded indie developments are the title No Time To Explain that received 26.000$ via their Kick Starter pledge [2]. That is significantly less, than 2 million dollars, and as a result the game is a lot smaller and less polished. However, other companies fitting into Double Fine's category might be able generate support for their games in the million dollar range.
The second key to their success is the scope of their game. The concept and genre lends it self to a relatively small development compared to the blockbuster titles that are being produced. Even though 2 million dollars seems like a lot, it in fact is just a fraction of the budget of blockbuster titles published by industry veterans such as THQ, EA, Valve, and Blizzard. In comparison Call Of Duty titles development costs are estimated to be around 50 million dollars [3].
So seeing big blockbusters produced via crowd funds is far fetched. However, if you look at the titles produced by said companies they all fall into the “secure” games category. Meaning that they do not offer particularly innovative game mechanics, but instead iterate on the tested and proven popular genres such as Real Time Strategy and First Person Shooter.
So what can we hope to see of changes in developed games as a result of of the Double Fine Adventure?
Hopefully we will see more companies reminiscent of Double Fine follow in their footsteps and get crowd funding for projects that publishers are too scared to touch, because they do not lie within the main stream. If this will be the case, then one should note that making an interesting game with a budget of “just” 2 million dollars cannot rely on big productions of flashy assets, but instead have to go back to game development's roots of relying on compelling stories and innovative gameplay.
Hopefully this will lead to new interesting genres that publishers are willing to put larger funds into. Formerly modders have fallen into this category with modifications such as Half-Life's Counter-Strike and Warcraft 3's Defence Of the Ancients (Dota). The difference between the two scenarios is that modders often have no budget for developing and often little to no experience with game development.
This new type of funding will let industry veterans unleash their full potential into creating innovation for the industry, which in this humble writers opinion means a much brighter future for games and gamers alike.
References:
[2] http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/558562
Target audience: Seasoned gamers and people with interests in the gaming industry.
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