#KICKSTARTER RISE OF THE THIRD POWER PC#

Lamenting the disappearance of hardcore, tactical shooters – almost entirely squeezed out of the marketplace by identikit shooters built upon linear corridors, regenerating health and bombastic set pieces – Takedown became something that fans who had missed tactical shooters as much as Allen did could get behind. The success of Christian Allen and his studio Serellan's Takedown Kickstarter further illustrates how targeting a niche can work. The fact that the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter just closed at over $3 million reinforces it even further.

#KICKSTARTER RISE OF THE THIRD POWER PC#

Was there going to be much point in a sequel to a hardcore PC RPG from the '80s? Was there anyone left invested enough in the 1988 classic to even warrant it? The fact that the minimum funding of $900,000 was reached within 42 hours would indicate yes. Fargo has been keen to bring back Wasteland for years and Kickstarter proved to be perfect way to do it. Take Brian Fargo and InXile Entertainment's Wasteland 2 Kickstarter. The phenomenon is reflecting well on developers and gamer alike. In a system where development costs are spiralling ever upwards, and publishers are finding themselves increasingly unable and/or unwilling to support niche projects, Kickstarter has given developers a place to let gamers show them directly how much they really want something.

The Kickstarter eventually closed with over $3.3 million in the kitty from more than 87,000 backers. And support it they did not only did Double Fine Adventure go on to exceed its $400,000 goal in just nine hours, it made over $1 million on the first day. You'd get a better reaction by announcing that you have the plague.' Double Fine Adventure, in this case, really is a game that wouldn't exist without fan support. Like Double Fine's Ron Gilbert wrote in his personal blog as way back as mid-2005: 'From first-hand experience, I can tell you that if you even utter the words 'adventure game' in a meeting with a publisher you can just pack up your spiffy concept art and leave. Publishers are not willing to fund adventure games. It's all well and good to wish Double Fine would make a point-and-click title in the spirit of old-school adventure games, but you can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which one gets filled first. They've been given a place to put their money where their mouths are. Perhaps even more impressively, gamers have been given the ability to demonstrate that there are, in fact, audiences for the kinds of games larger publishers are unlikely to back.

Kickstarter, an internet crowd funding platform that began in 2008, is suddenly funding the sorts of video game projects that, just a few months ago, were little more than internet forum fancy.ĭevelopers able to identify holes in the video game market have been able to harness the power of crowd funding to finance the process of taking these projects from paper to product. Talk is cheap, but the dramatic rise of Kickstarter has moved the goalposts. If you've spent any time on the internet whatsoever you would have noticed by now large tracts of it are monopolised by people either complaining about things they largely have no control over, despondently reflecting upon how much things have changed, or earnestly pondering how things could improve.

Kickstarter rise of the third power