Why consoles should embrace crowdfunding
It’s been long since consoles are not about the consoles anymore. They’re about content and about their ecosystems and, with cloud gaming starting to throw its first sun shines above the horizon, this is only going to become more of a reality.
Developers are turning more and more towards Kickstarter and the like to get enough funding for their games. Games like Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2, Mighty No. 9, Pillars of Eternity, Star Citizen, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Divinity: Original Sin, Broken Sword: the Serpent’s Curse, The Banner Saga, Tex Murphy: Project Fedora, République and many more commercial hits were funded through Kickstarter. They’re turning to crowdfunding for many good reasons. First, they don’t need to undergo the search for a publisher and the censorship that this brings to the game during its development. Second, they get the money beforehand as a commitment, so the risk is lower as you only increase headcount if you know you’ll be able to afford it. You only become more ambitious in the scope of the game if you see the funds are going to exist tu support it. Third, you get to receive feedback from your users very early on, so you can iterate on your game design and shift priorities in time. And fourth, among many others, your own backers serve as marketing platform as they share the project with their friends on social media, generating buzz and even making you being featured in popular gaming sites, as it’s still not really common for there to be many good, ambitious games being crowdfunded.
So, why and how should Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo get into the crowdfunding game?
Kickstarter is a business that makes money by charging a commission, 5%, of all the funds raised through them. To put it in context, with one of Kickstarter’s most successful games, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Kickstarter made a bit over $200,000 in commissions. That, for a self-published studio, is a lot of money. Especially taking into account that their funding goal was at $900,000.
Kickstarter has become the go-to place for crowdfunding. It’s a marketplace that has established itself as leader, and once you get a hold of the supply and the demand it’s very difficult to be substituted by another marketplace. Except when you give enough of an incentive, which Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo can afford to do.
If they were to get into this game their incentive would not be to make money out of commissions, but to get exclusive content, since they make a cut out of every game sold. Therefore, these companies could create a section inside of their online stores where you could find games looking for crowdfunding and not charge those publishers anything if the game is exclusive, for a reasonable period of time, to any platform of that company. The concrete economics of if not to charge at all if the game releases on any of the platforms independently of if the game is exclusive or not, or if to make it free if there’s exclusivity and charge a very small percentage if it isn’t and also how long that exclusivity should be, would need to be figured out, but that’s the least of the concerns since the goal is not to make money from the crowdfunding itself.
Not only could any of these companies provide such a platform/service to developers at no cost, it could even, if they would up their recommendation engines game a bit, recommend interesting projects to people who’ve like similar games. If you see me sink tons of hours into Diablo III on PS4, recommend me Pillars of Eternity. If you know I played Shadowrun on Xbox 360, recommend me Shadowrun Returns (assuming both those games would’ve been developed for consoles). Kickstarter doesn’t have a gamer community. Every time developers want to draw backers to their projects, they need to do all the heavy lifting to catch their attention. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo could provide you an initial audience themselves. On Kickstarter you’re competing against hundreds of projects, from art to technology and trying to find your customers in a very diverse audience. On consoles (or on-demand platforms like Steam and GOG) you know your audience is right there looking for products like yours.
Bonus point: this concept could also be used for other services like Music Unlimited/Xbox Music or Video Unlimited/Xbox Video. To read more ideas on integration between games and music streaming services read this.
