14 DAY TRIAL // The gaming industry today isn’t in the best of situations, as more and more sequels are being released while publishers are less willing to invest in new games that don’t have any sort of multiplayer or at least an online component.
Lots of gamers have complained about these worrying trends, saying that everyone should try to make their voices heard and convince developers and publishers to take more chances.
However, seeing as how Call of Duty games and titles similar to them have been breaking sales records and producing copious amounts of money, developers and publishers are more than willing to keep producing sequels and multiplayer-focused experiences in order to continue exploiting that demographic.
Fortunately, something awesome happened this week, thanks to famous games designer Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine.
After complaining that big game publishers aren’t willing to support new intellectual properties, Double Fine decided to crowdsource the funding for its new game, an old-school point-and-click adventure title that would require around $400,000 (€300,000) to make.
While Schafer set a one month term for reaching that goal, the whole project pretty much exploded in terms of popularity and gamers already donated to the target amount in around 10 hours since its beginning. In 24 hours, over $1 million (€750,000) was raised and, right now, the sum is well over $1.5 million (€1.13 million).
While this is great news for Double Fine and its adventure game project, this is even more important for the games industry as a whole, because gamers have finally decided to make their voices heard by spending money on an adventure game that shouldn’t even appeal to the lots of people.
Lots of campaigns against sequels have told people to vote with their wallets, but this Double Fine project has finally shown that people can and will do such a thing.
While this will no doubt lead to a flood of game projects appearing on websites like Kickstarter, that are looking to get some funding, let’s hope this success story will make big publishers invest more in new games and IPs.