Wildman campaign failed as people 'had already spent money on crowdfunded projects'
Crowdfunding site Kickstarter is beginning to wear itself out, the CEO of troubled studio Gas Powered Games has said.
Speaking at Casual Connect Europe, as reported by VentureBeat, Chris Taylor also blamed the failure of his studio’s Wildman Kickstarter, which has now been cancelled, on the fact that many potential contributors were still waiting on games they had already pledged for.
Gas Powered Games’ Wildman Kickstarter was cancelled with four days to go having raised just $500,000 of its $1.1 million target. The studio’s future is also up in the air after Taylor revealed just days into the campaign that he had laid off most of the company's staff in an effort to ensure developers received compensation.
“People had spent a lot of money on other Kickstarters and were waiting for those games to arrive,” he said.
“We also started just after Christmas, when people had already spent money.”
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He added: “Kickstarter is starting to wear itself out. It’s a numbers game. Someone has lightning in a bottle. This business is really, really tough. It’s turning into a lottery business, unless you work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and study gaming for decades.
“Now, it’s tough. It’s like going to Hollywood and saying I want to make films. You have to compete with James Cameron. I’m leaning toward there is no free lunch” when it comes to raising money for games.
Taylor went on to say that it was becoming increasingly difficult in the game industry to gain funding through traditional means, such as investment from publishers, and that independent development of console titles in particular was hitting a wall.
“There was a heyday in the 1990s where you could burst in the door of a publisher and you could get a contract. You blew your budget anyway, and they dealt with it,” he said.
“That has locked itself so tight. Consoles are going to just hit the wall. The guys who wrote these big checks — that’s just gone.”
Well, that's not at all what he said to us backers. I'm starting to not like Chris.
we should be more considerate towards those who see their company collapse and the people they feel responsible for beign endangered due to these dramatic changes in games business. it is quite stressful. this response is kind of expected by people who suddenly find themselves out of the loop. To be honest i thought the 1m was a bit too much for Kickstarter. 450K is maximum and MAYBE you manage to go over that if you get lucky. timing was definitely not that great either. people are not in spending mood right now.
It's wearing out as we only got half the ludicrous amount of money that we asked for on kickstarter.
If you ask for stupid amounts of money and also offer rubbish incentives of course you're going to fail. Just like that Dizzy reboot did.
Also Chris, we gamers don't owe you your employment. So maybe think what YOU did wrong here, rather than using every excuse in the book to explain why you failed.
Kickstarter projects are selling a product to investors. Without some sort of interesting project with some motivation of success and perhaps a working model of some sort people will not invest in your product. As for $1million goal it can be done. Look at this: http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/ And realize that their goal was smashed because people so promise in the end product and the incentives were great. So no Kickstarter is not going thin but people ARE becoming more selective on which projects they get involved in.
Planitary Annihilation. Simple premise, like Total Annihilation on a huger scale. Easy to talk about, easy to get excited about, made by good, reliable guys with a good track record of getting decent things done on budget and were involved in making Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander. Raised over $2 million on Kickstarter.
Wildman, a promise to revolutionise action RPGs in the same way Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege 2, Space Siege and whatever ele was supposed to revolutionise Action RPGs. Nothing really tangable, just "trust me, I'm Chris Taylor, I'm going to revolutionise all up on this shit!"
So yeah, Total Anihilation is awsome and you've got to pick which group of developers to go with. Go with the one with the good premise, doing something they're good at, rather than the one asking another crack at making an Action RPG that isn't totally dreary.
Despite Chris Taylor's name being on the box, Kickstarter has Jon Mavor a shot at making a game because frankly he deserves it more. GPG made too many awful, awful games to continue getting funding from any real publisher and took its pissweak proposal to Kickstarter as some last ditch attempt to save itself. Uber Entertainment is a promising new company hoping to build something great. Kickstarter worked as intended.
Wearing out? Really? Torment got fully funded in under six hours today.
It's about the value you offer, plain and simple.
The problem is everyone & there dog is using kickstarter. We have big names using it when they could fund the projects themselves. Really it needs to have some sort of means testing if you could fund the project yourself then you should not be able to start a kickstarter appeal.
Our Kickstart project failed mostly because we did not have a big name, or the will to milk cash from our networks. We put up 75K as the asking amount for 4 devs, of which we would only get 50K after fee's tax were taken. A very fair amount but once we realised that Kickstarter was more of a store than a funding platform, we realised that it did not make sense for us to offer physical incentives to further drive our final amount down. We were not going to lie to backers and claim we could make our game for half the price, then come back in a few months and ask for more money - a tactic used frequently on kickstarter. Instead we just went "screw it" and decided to work on a shorter project and hopefully get profit from that to finish our main project. If you are a celebrity, then Kickstarter is a way for you to print money. If you are an indie dev... look elsewhere. The time spent on kickstarter would be better spent on your game.
