If you read any tech news last week, you’d have been hard-pressed to miss the news of the video game/documentary film project “Double Fine Adventure” quickly racking up $1M in pledges over at Kickstarter. As I type this, that project is funded to the tune of $1.689M with 29 days to go in its fundraising campaign. We’re witnessing crowdfunding turning the corner and the beginning of a change in the game.
If you’re late to the party, crowdfunding is the term used to describe websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Someone will post a description of a project and then people will pledge money towards getting that project done. Think of it as a PBS/NPR pledge drive and you won’t be far off, especially since the best ones offer premiums that scale with the donation levels. Crowdfunding tends to come in two models: Kickstarter is from the school that nobody’s credit card gets rung until the project meets its stated goal (i.e., if your goal was $50K and you had $45K pledge, you get nothing). Indiegogo comes from the school that you get whatever money is pledged, but you’re charged a higher fee if you don’t meet the goal. Crowdfunding seems to have its in music, but has branched out to film, tech, publishing and charity projects.
There are two big changes happening in crowdfunding right now. I’ve monitored the topic for Publisher’s Weekly for a little while now and we’re definitely seeing larger amounts of funding on the high end of projects. The webcomic Order of the Stick is sitting on $667K with a week to go in their campaign. That’s the largest amount of money pledged towards book, and here’s the kicker: it’s money to reprint some out-of-print books, not to fund a new work (although some new work is being created as premiums for the funders). For that matter, the webcomic Diesel Sweeties is at $24K and counting to reformat the comic strip as eBook(s).
Now what do Double Fine Adventure, Order of the Stick and Diesel Sweeties all have incommon? They’re projects by known quantities. Double Fine Adventure is fronted by Tim Schafer and Double Fine Productions. It’s a game company that’s been around since 2000 and has shipped games before. Diesel Sweeties also goes back to 2000 and was popular enough to have made the jump to newspaper comic sections for a time. Order of the Stick dates back to 2003 and is popular enough I found a copy of one of their reprint books in the library.
This brings us to the second big change: Crowdfunding is losing its stigma.
Not so very long ago, if you talked to a creative professional about crowdfunding, you’d getting a dismissive shake of the head. It was perceived as digital panhandling. A _professional_ was paid, after all. That’s increasingly no longer the attitude. Crowdfunding is becoming something closer to pre-ordering with the turbo boost of limited edition premiums. If an established professional has a following that can be efficiently tapped (and this is an “if”), we’re now seeing a clear path for said professional to say “Here’s what I want to do. Here’s what it’s going to cost. And here’s what you get for funding me.”
We haven’t really seen a superstar go this route yet. The mind boggles at what would happen if a highly socially networked creator, Neil Gaiman comes to mind as someone who can easily tap a huge and rabid fanbase, decided to put his next project in the crowdsourcing system. Likely it would run Double Fine Adventure right off the road in terms of size.
While crowdfunding has been more of an arts project outgrowth, we are seeing tech come in with design projects and with video games. The key is to fund a project, not a company. (Your company is financed by the project, if you want to go that route. Please keep the order straight.) It only makes sense that known quantities with a track record can get more money pledged than unknowns with a dream. And now that the sheer amount of money involved is transforming crowdfunding into a tool, rather than a stigmatized curiosity, we’re going to see more of this. The biggest danger is the signal to noise ratio being lost in a gold rush. Still, if you’re connected to your audience, you’re the one with the signal, not the crowdfunding website.
The game is changing and the mediaeval system of the arts patron is being democratized and distributed across the masses.