Crowd Funding

How is crowd funding affecting the relationship between institutions and audiences at the Publishing, Design, Marketing and Distribution level? Answer with Assassins Creed and Double Fine Adventure

One of the key changes in the video game industry is coming through Crowd Funding, an idea where people can post their ideas on the internet for things such as Music Albums, Films, or in this case Video Games. Here I will be talking about the effects that Crowd Funding has on the Development, Publishing, Marketing and Distribution, with Assassins Creed and Double Fine Adventures as the main games in this essay.

Crowd funding has changed the relationship in the development of the games. In most games the publishing of the game is done solely through big companies such as Sony, EA or in the case of Assassins Creed, Ubisoft. Assassins Creed has developed as a franchise and has appealed to a larger audience through its many different genres. But in recent years we have seen changes around this, and now the audience of the game are starting to become involved through websites such as Kickstarter are enabling smaller companies and developers to put their ideas on the internet. The audience are then able to fund the game and allow the people who develop the games to use the money to make them games. They do this by being offered incentives, and the incentives vary based on how much is pledged. Double Fine Adventure is a game which has been made through this process. Tim Schafer was turned down by various companies, and via kick start he managed to raise $3,336,371, much more than his target of $400,000. He managed this through video presentations on YouTube, and this encouraged 87,172 people to pledge through various incentives, ranging from a copy of the game, to a t-shirt, to a lunch with the creators of the game.  The plus side to this that they only have to give 5% of the money away, and they still keep full control over the game.

The Design and Production of games produced via crowd funding are very different to that of Ubisoft. Ubisoft have a “closed door” policy, where the only time that we find anything out about the game is via the marketing or an occasional leak which doesn’t involve the audience in the game. However, with Double Fine Adventures the audience of the game are much more involved in the story and the looks of the characters meaning that it can actually be fine tuned by the audience, and this also provides much of the marketing of the game, therefore saving large amounts of money that games like Assassins Creed cannot. During the production of the game Tim Schafer produced several making of videos to inform the audience as to the progress that is being made and they can see what their money is being put towards. The production of the game can then be tailored towards the audience much more than conventional games.

Crowd Funded games have the added bonus of not having to spend money on the marketing of the game. They have their target audience and can keep them informed via email about the game, and therefore they can use free advertising, as well as word of mouth of the customers across the internet, and in particular the 87,000 who are already supporting Double Fine Adventures. Last year (2011) Ubisoft announced that they had lost $45million, and a large percentage of this had been spent on the marketing of the game alone as they have had to put a large sales drive in to try and force people to buy the games.  The Indie Developers don’t have this problem, allowing them to spend more of their money on the game, allowing them to make a much higher quality product than they might otherwise have been able to.

Finally, we have the big impact on the distribution that cloud funding is providing. With the lager games companies when trying to get their games into retail they have to spend vast amounts of money on just getting it into the shops. Retailers such as Amazon and Game are two of the main retailers in the UK and many games come through them. However with Crowd Funding they already have the information of 87,000 people, who will all receive the game, and the rest of the copies of the game can be bought through Steam, The App Store, The Android Market, The Playstation Store and The Xbox Live Market, meaning that Double Fine Productions do not have to pay all the costs of putting the game onto discs and getting them in boxes, they can simply get the games on the market and then they will never run out of copies.

In Conclusion I feel that Crowd Funding could be the next big thing to revolutionise the way we play video games. Judging by my findings I think that by the time that the next generation of games consoles come out the more well known companies in the video game industry will start to see declining sales, while the Indie Games makers and the Crowd Funded games will start to become much larger than they currently are.