The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week of December 7

Songmasters, the Music Wars – $20k. Finished.
FORCED – $59k. 1 day left.
Sir, You Are Being Hunted – £92k. Finished.
Sportsfriends – $85k ($150k goal). 3 days left.
Pier Solar – $231k. Finished.
Rainfall: The Soujourn – $19k. Finished.
Elite – £679k (£1.25 million goal). 28 days left.
Kaiju Combat – $46k ($100k goal). 14 days left.
Fist of Awesome – £9k. 4 days left.
Retro Game Crunch – $38k ($60k goal). 5 days left.
Project Godus – £218k (£450k goal). 14 days left.
Dizzy Returns – £22k (£350k goal). 13 days left.
LA Game Space – $316k. 5 hours left.
Barkley 2 – $68k. 21 days left.
Aero 3D Bird Flight Game – $10k ($100k goal). 20 days left.
Forsaken Fortress – $39k ($100k goal). 14 days left.
Thorvalla – $47k ($1 million goal). Cancelled.
Pathfinder Online – $271k ($ million goal). 38 days left.
Tiny Barbarian DX – $9k ($12k goal). 11 days left.

Didn’t see much that was new and interesting this week but I missed talking about Girl Genius and the Rats of Mechanicburg when it came out so I thought I’d rectify that. Girl Genius and the Rats of Mechanicburg is an Action/Puzzle game for mobile created by various video game industry veterans that is based on the award-winning webcomic, Girl Genius. It had a bit of a slow start, but it’s currently at $37k  ($7.5k goal) with 16 days left.

Since there weren’t many kickstarters that interested me this week, I thought I’d talk a little about the nature of video game crowdfunding.

There are a few major types of video game kickstarters. First, you have the kickstarters that seek to acquire all or the vast majority of their funding through kickstarters. Unless you’re looking to make a tiny mobile game, you’re realistically looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars minimum if you want to fully fund even a modest indie game, especially when you consider that you can easily end up losing half of your funding from taxes, kickstarter fees, payment fees, redacted payments, and reward fulfillment costs. Due to the high cost of developing games, you generally only see famous developers or famous properties go for full funding with their initial crowdfunding goal (although sometimes new unknown games end up greatly exceed their initial goal to the point where funding could conceivably cover all costs).

Due to the high cost of development, most kickstarters don’t ask for the full funding amount upfront. They could be planning on getting funding from more traditional investment outlets or what is more likely the case, they may be planning on covering most of the development costs themselves. For example, you could have a developer who is almost finished with their game but they’re running out of money and they could use a little boost to get them past the finish line. Or you could have a developer who can make the game themselves entirely on their own dime but if they had some extra funding, they could make the game even better by spending more time on it or hiring additional help.

Where you get into trouble is when you have kickstarters that aren’t asking for the full funding amount upfront and don’t have alternate ways of getting that funding. The kickstarter could be an outright scam but it’s more likely that either the developer drastically underestimated how much time, money, and work their proposed project will actually take or they could have intentionally set their goal low with the expectation that they would greatly surpass it. Lots of bad things can end up happening in this sort of situation – they might drastically scale down the scope of their game and release an inferior product, they might go searching for additional funding, or they might just plain give up (and hopefully refund everyone’s money).

As a backer of various kickstarter projects, it’s important to remember that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The next epic Dark Souls for $50k? Yeah, that’s not going to happen (unless it’s done in a retro 2D style). A World of Warcraft killer for $100k? Again, highly unrealistic. And for developers who are planning on doing a kickstarter, it’s important to be realistic about your funding goals. It’s better to have a kickstarter that doesn’t reach its goal than it is to have a kickstarter succeed and then discover that you don’t have the capability to fulfill your promises to deliver the game you described.