Designer of the turn-based strategy title X-Com, Julian Gollop, spoke with Gamesindustry about the difficulties that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter are starting to have. He had quite the strong opinion about crowdfunding at Poland’s leading games festival, Digital Dragons.
He started off by saying that “Crowdfunding is much more difficult now than it was even a year ago. That’s the reality.” Gollop’s lack of faith in the crowdfunding giant stems from his own experience with the site. He says that if it wasn’t for his previous success and reputation with games like X-Com, Chaos Reborn wouldn’t even have gotten funded.
Only in special cases do games get funded
Chaos Reborn reached its target but only in the final days of the campaign and that only happened because Gollop had done “a lot of work on PR and promoting the game: on [his] blog, on Twitter, [he] got journalists looking at the game so [he] had coverage in print and online.”
Gollop believes that the only reason he was able to get the funds was because of the work he put into the campaign and he admitted that it was easier for him due to his success in the video game industry prior to even starting. One would wonder if a reputation like his is actually necessary to get all the funds today.
“For me that was an easier process than for most because of my history and people were interested in what I was doing anyway, but still, it was a lot of work. I even delayed the Kickstarter [twice] all because I didn’t think the PR was sufficient yet.”
The point Gollop is trying to make is that even with all the promotion and publicity that his project Chaos Reborn had, it still only reached its goal in the final days and it was cutting it close. If someone doesn’t have the kind of pull that Gollop has, maybe the project would have never been funded.
“If you’re going the crowdfunding route, you have to do your PR and promotion consistently for months before you even start.”
Gollop stated that Kickstarter now involves an incredible amount of work and dedication if you’re going to make it work saying that it is “ten times tougher” to crowdfund in today’s atmosphere.
So are the days of crowdfunding almost over? Well, if you agree with Gollop they are.
Does this type of competitive crowdfunding process that he talks about encourage only the best games to come out on top? Tell us what you think below!
