After the collapse of the relatively popular Haunts project on the crowd-funding entertainment website Kickstarter in the middle of October, interest in the new and wholly exciting field of independent speculative publishing has ballooned. Projects like Ouya, the “beautiful, inexpensive package” that promises a console experience on your television (so inventive!), Eternity, Obsidian’s first foray into the Infinity Engine retro scene since the dissolution of Black Isle Studios, and even the Homestuck adventure game, what’s sure to be a treat for fans of what some call the Odyssey of online entertainment, promise big, spectacular developments, for low-risk, high-reward investments from a trusting and hopeful public.
My big question is, why all these big promises, and why so few returns?
The answer to the first question is simple enough: no one is willing to make the leap unless they have faith they’re not going to fall, and these Kickstarter runners are masters of contemporary PR. With what is ostensibly vapourware and a few spin doctors, millions have bought into a bevy of ‘possibilities’ that are so vast, so inspiring, so absolutely ludicrous, that the entire affair practically circles around again. It’s so stupid, it’s foolproof!
Ouya is the quintessential example of how, without a publisher mediating the public-developer relationship with an ounce of common business sense, inflated egos and big words can sell a product before it even hits the shelves. A glorified Android device that does a few things that your PC can do so much better, and nicks its design from countless other sources while it’s at it? Let people believe it can run Skyrim and you have your sale! Whether it can actually run Skyrim is irrelevant; what matters is your “investors” believe it can, specificationsbe damned. And hey, playing Canabalt, a free Flash game, on your TV screen that supports the same HDMI or DVI device your PC outputs, that’s worth the price of admission, right?
The problem here is that Kickstarter tends to inflate the expectations of its users because it is primarily a tool for bypassing the bloated and ponderous publisher-developer slavery of yesteryear. It’s about making a sale, not creating a product, and all sales pitches are hyperbolic and self-congratulatory to the point of nausea. Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure talks at length about the challenges of producing games, and the creative freedom provided by circumventing publishers, but he, and the countless other Kickstarter revolutionaries that are sweeping the collective entertainment industries conveniently forgo mentioning the high costs, lack of support, and unreasonable demands of the selfsame crowds that do the financing. They want to be able to get their product quickly, and they want it to be of the highest possible standard, in an even more demanding way than publishers. Ouya fans want to play Skyrim, Wasteland 2 hopefuls want a Wasteland that lives up to the original, and Anita Sarkeesian’s investors want to see her rip a stagnant medium a new one. If they fail, they’ll be disappointed, and disappointment begets terrible, all-consuming, Star Wars prequel trilogy tier anger. This bubble, as we can see with Haunts and the horrific backlash from its failure, is about to have an aneurysm and burst. All we can do is watch, and when Kickstarter itself admits that it has no way of enforcing its suspiciously sparse terms of use and making developers deliver, it’s very easy to see how a failing pledgee could pocket his earnings and run.
I’m probably coming across as intensely critical, but this is only because I so desperately want to see successes that just aren’t happening yet with the big figurehead projects. Minor projects are succeeding – FTL, an unsung hero of the crowd-sourcing bubble, came to completion without a hitch, and delivered a quality experience to its fans, just as they wanted. There’s even a bright side for Haunts, which isn’t entirely dead: Blue Mammoth Games have expressed an interest in picking up the nearly-complete project and carrying it to the finish line. There’s always a reason to hope, especially when that hope is for a world without gigantic AAA cartels like EA and Actiblizz churning out stale product after stale product for their casual fans, so endeared to the taste of all that swill.
In the end, what Kickstarter users have to be prepared for is that they’re less investors and more bettors. Each product is a racehorse, and sometimes, racehorses get turned into glue without ever finishing a race. It’s very sad, but it’s the way the world works, and before, publishers were the ones who took the losses, not the consumer. When GREE folded, Square Enix lost Fortress, but they shouldered the burden and moved on. Cavia did the same years later, to everyone’s deep sorrow, and still Square Enix soldiered on. Now we have to prepare to be the ones who get shafted, and for those of us who part with what little cash we have to support an idea we love, that’s a hard taste, but one we’ll have to acquire eventually.
Right now, it’s too early to really make a call, and all we can do is wait and see, with hope in our hearts and wallets in our hands, ready to make the same mistake over and over again. I’ve invested in some Kickstarters myself, and am praying to Eldath that they succeed. I’m just waiting for them, and crowd-funding, to fail, so I can pat myself on the back, heart full of remorse.
Azad Nalbandian
exeposedev 