Critical Incredulity

Kickstarters & Publishers: The Rant

Kickstarter succeeds because it is - in a sense - progressive, like the income tax.  People with more disposable income can contribute more.  The model has a way of monetizing passion, with backer rewards.  The publisher model has it’s own ways; DLC, pre-order incentives, and collector’s editions.   As such, it is not terribly consistent to scorn one and endorse the other, especially since consumers explicitly know what they’re getting with the latter.  Yet the myth of the “complete game” rolls on, despite the fact people seem to be okay with missing out on backer reward tiers they do not qualify for.  In terms of public perception, it certainly pays to be the underdog.  

Ultimately, consumers will weigh their options and make their choices.  Whether or not publishers have anything to learn from Kickstarter depends not on their success in getting funded, but on their critical reception and profits after release.  If a crowdfunded game with [feature set X, like an old school RPG or a space sim] sells well - by the publisher’s standards - it might convince them that such genres are more viable than they had assumed.  They would also learn that such games can be successfully made on a Kickstarter-sized budget.   

Furthermore, without actual financial statements or inside information the likes of which employees of publishers like EA are forbidden to disclose, debating over how well these companies believe they’re doing themselves by their own standards and expectations can only be baseless.  That isn’t to say that disinterested outside feedback wouldn’t be valuable, but video game forums are hardly disinterested, and hardly have enough facts to make sound judgments. 

Discussions on this subject fall into the bad habit of conceptualizing entities like “publishers” far too simply, into something vaguely akin to a person.  Publishers are, especially on the scale we’re talking about, vast endeavors with complexities and details we have limited understanding and typically no firsthand knowledge of.  As with any large organization there are also, within it, differences of creative and economic opinion.  Yet these arguments forge on with the implicit assumption that the same - yet much better informed - discussions aren’t happening between people who actually work there.