Fallout: New Vegas developer contacted by publishers to start crowdfunding campaign
Some publishers are using Kickstarter to develop new brands and generate money without investment, Obsidian’s CEO has claimed.
Speaking on the studio’s recently launched Project Eternity Kickstarter page, Feargus Urquhart said the Fallout: New Vegas developer had been contacted by publishers over the last few months that wanted to use the studio to launch a crowdfunding project.
He said that some companies had suggested Obsidian would not keep the brand name and only a portion of the profits would go to the developer.
Urquhart did not name the publishers in question.
“We were actually contacted by some publishers over the last few months that wanted to use us to do a Kickstarter,” he said.
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“I said to them ‘So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for, using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don't get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits’ They said, ‘Yes’.”
Obsidian’s Kickstarter campaign for Project Eternity has so far garnered more than $1.6m from 40,000 backers.
Publishers are feeling the pinch, they are not needed any more in a world of croud funding, digital publishing and social media marketing.
Good bye!
Goodbye and good riddance to greedy publishers. I welcome a time when people can pay the developers directly for the product they want.
I am so glad to hear studios getting to skip the greedy publishers. They're scared, hurting, and getting desperate to stay alive when the ones with the real talent, the studios, get recognized and funded without the publishers hand in their pockets.
Sorry, you people don't get the point. It's definitely not the way that game makers don't need publishers anymore. If you think so, then you have absolutely no idea how much it costs making a professional game. You can't even develop a decent game with a budget of 1 million. Never.
What big companies get here is TAX free money. More and more companies create pseudo game studios under an "indie" label and start to collect money by it. But this money would never be enough to fully fund the game itself. And who is the one who gets most funded? It's people who already were in the game industry for many years. A miniscule part of real indie developers get funded though... but as said, they are a minority and have a hard time even promoting their game in the public. Only large companies can do that.
It's again the big companies which overtake a market, which originally was meant for real indie companies.
By that I'm adding, that Obsidian is in no way different than the Publishers people blame for greed. Please put off the pink glasses.
Oh - and who has thought that: Obsidian just recently reverted its harsh opinion... guess why... they realized it's not a good idea to cut the branch they're sitting on.
Kickstarter money is most definitely not tax free money. In fact, it is generally taxable the same as income from sales, and developers need to factor that in to their financial planning. See for example this article.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2012/05/23/kickstarters-sting-in-the-tail-tax/
That being said, aside from paying taxes on the money, it is largely 'free' money, in that there are very few other strings attached to it.
I think kickstarter is awesome, and I hope some amazing games come out of it. I also agree that kickstarter has been a contributing factor to the publishers losing the stranglehold grip they held over our industry for a long time. But publishers aren't going anywhere anytime soon. They provide a variety of services--financial, marketing, and otherwise--that are important to the functioning of this industry. They do however face significantly more competition in certain areas than they did in the past and that is definitely a good thing for gamers and developers everywhere.
With all due respect to crowdfunding, $1.6m is NOT a huge sum of money.
Surely not enough for AAA titles.
One good benefit that may come out of this whole crowdfunding gold rush is that developers will have stronger bargaining power when dealing with said publishers.
Any developer dumb enough to sign away it's rights to a publisher after getting free funding from fans DESERVES to get f**ked over. I hope for the sake of humanity that no publishers are that dumb.
Publishers no longer have anything to offer developers. Free publicity & fan-based advertising spreads like wildfire across the net.
Savant, Minecraft proves everything you said wrong.
Lai-Lai, just because a single company can come out with something doesn't make it the norm. It makes it an exception. Just looking at the graphics should be enough to tell you that.
I, for one, hope one day that crowdsourcing can provide 100% of the money needed to make a game, but it costs so much to make the high level games people expect nowadays.
