Friday 1 June 2012

Kickstarter

The longer Kickstarter goes on, and the more projects get on it, the more the problem for each project becomes publicity rather than funding. As noted by xkcd, we might then get meta-kickstarter campaigns whose goal is to raise enough funds to pay for the advertising for the real campaign. And that's been the problem all along, really. If you can reach enough of the right people, you're going to get up-front capital to fund your project, and the one thing Kickstarter contributed to that situation was crowdsourcing. You don't need to find yourself one person with $100,000 to invest now, you just need 100,000 people with $1 each. But when there are 100,000 other projects on Kickstarter, you need to stand out enough to grab everyone's attention.

For instance, the Two Guys from Andromeda, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, the creators of Space Quest (a favourite series of mine), have a project on Kickstarter to get a new, similar game going, but it feels to me like they might run out of time. Is it a failure of advertising? Possibly. It's hard to say for sure. I really hope they make it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've put some of my money in.
PPS - Unfortunately, I don't have $230,000 to put them over the top.

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