Crowdfunding

This week in the lecture, we talked about crowdfunding, and luckily for me, I have some hands on experience with this topic. A couple years a go, a friend of a friend was developing a fighting game called Skullgirls. There was an issue with their publisher Konami, and they weren't going to get paid for a couple years for their game, along with having to publish the game before it was up to the developer's standards, so they started a Kickstarter campaign to keep their studio in business and get their game finished. The initial campaign goal was for $150,000 so they can finish the last character that was in development, but the campaign exploded. They ended with over $800,000, and they added more and rewards including sketchbooks filled by the artists, massive art collections, the soundtrack and of course copies of the game. With the massive amount of funding, they also added 4 extra playable characters on top of that, along with a ton of extra color palettes for the characters.

In a similar vein, since I didn't see this in the lecture, there's something similar called Patreon, which is similar to Kickstarter, but for on going projects. Pateron supporters pledge an amount for each step, or issue published, with a monthly limit set. For example, several podcasts I listen to run a Patreon account, and pledgers will pledge anywhere from $1 to $10 per weekly episode published. The money is to help pay the producers of the show for professional sound editing and help get them better equipment for the show, so the producers don't have pay for all of the expenses for their show out of their own pocket. Some of these groups are trying to make this into their profession and need the money to quit their current jobs and focus on producing the best material they can.