14 DAY TRIAL // Brian Fargo, founder of inXile Entertainment, a developer currently involved with the upcoming Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera role-playing games, has shared his thought regarding the evolution of Kickstarter.
The Kickstarter craze that started with the heavy-hitters Double Fine Adventure (now dubbed Broken Age), Divinity: Original Sin and his two aforementioned games allowed many developers to secure the funds they needed in order to develop their dreams into full-fledged games.
The increasing momentum of the crowdfunding trend was, however, a double-edged sword, as it began drifting from a place for weird and experimental titles and fanservice and migrated toward being the mainstay of the indie game development scene.
That, of course, means that it's becoming increasingly hard to run a successful campaign. Many projects have failed and many would-be backers are still waiting to receive the fruits of their pledges, and so the chances that you can simply create a project page and end up with money are nearing zero.
Brian Fargo has said that the most successful projects are those that can only exist through crowdfunding or those that fill a niche that's currently missing on the market, an increasingly more difficult occurrence, as the titles keep piling up and filling up all the gaps within genres.
"I think sometimes some of the projects that have failed is Kickstarter doing its job," he has stated during an interview with Digital Spy.
He has said that the increasing number of projects failing to meet their goals means that the market is already saturated within certain genres, and that the community is done simply backing everything that might spark an inkling of interest.
He has pointed out that Kickstarter worked very well for him and for Double Fine Productions and others like them because they're middle-ground developers, not just two guys working on their spare time.
"I think the projects that do most well on Kickstarter are things where you've been denied the ability to get it somehow, or there's a hole in the marketplace that needs to be filled with a fanbase behind it. Well, those holes have been filled over the past couple of years," Fargo points out.
He says that the issue isn't so much that Kickstarter is fatigued or even dead, as some people like to say, but that there isn't a strong demand for certain games, and that's why people are hitting some problems, using last year's Mighty No. 9 as an example of a very successful project, due to the fact that people really wanted a Mega Man sequel from Keiji Inafune.
"Kickstarters continue to do million dollar [fundings], there's a lot of board games and other things that hit. They're still working, but you truly got to be filling a niche. It feels like there's always too many of them. It's just hard to do well," Fargo adds.
He continues to state that Wasteland 2 would be just as successful if it emerged on Kickstarter today, because there was and still is a Fallout audience that enjoyed the first two titles and simply wanted a tactical, isometric post-apocalyptic role-playing game more than they wanted something like Fallout 3 or New Vegas.
Wasteland 2 is currently available on Steam Early Access and is scheduled to launch in late August this year.