Can the current Kickstarter boom continue and will the presence of established businesses affect our willingness to offer up our cash?
As Kickstarter‘s reputation for swiftly bankrolling projects grows, it’s no surprise that established games companies and industry veterans have been sitting up and taking note. As a result, the site has been gradually filling up with games pitches from old hands tapping into the crowdfunding zeitgeist for better or worse. But the famous and financially secure need to start building a sense of community and nurturing smaller projects if they don’t want the funding and the good will to dry up as quickly as it arrived.
The basic premise of Kickstarter is that it offers a platform for individuals or businesses to seek donations of varying amounts, some attached to particular rewards, in order to fund a project. The specific benefits of the system when it comes to games vary from project to project but generally can be divided into three categories: raising capital, particularly for games it would be hard to fund through conventional means; the capacity for using the platform and its reward scheme for marketing and pre-ordering; and engendering good will amongst your target audience through dialogue and through the donors’ own sense of philanthropy.
But the arrival of big business threatens to upset that arrangement in a significant way. The platform operates on a largely good faith basis and good faith is not a natural bedfellow for big business. As per the site’s terms of use(Kickstarter declined to be interviewed for this piece) the creators of projects are offering backers the chance to enter into a contract with them. But “Kickstarter is not a party to that agreement between the Backer and Project Creator. All dealings are solely between Users.”