Comments on: The Collective Sigh: Questions Over Square-Enix’s Crowd-funding Programme

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 22:30:41 +0000

It’s sounds like a nifty idea, however I don’t like the fact that they don’t give assurance of a completed game to the people that crowd fund. :-/

By: John Peat

John Peat — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 14:21:28 +0000

Surely this is just a long version of

“Money you throw at Kickstarter/IndieGogo is NOT A PRE-ORDER – all you’re guaranteed is whatever instant rewards may be offered – anything else is pie-in-the-sky – you are NOT INVESTING – you are giving someone money in the hope they make a game – you should do a BIT of research and see if what someone is claiming is remotely likely to happen”.

The most famous crowdfunding failure – ‘CLANG’ – failed all of those tests – what they were claiming wasn’t possible to do but people saw a clever video and went ‘woo’ – same with the IndieGogo “calorie measuring bracelet” – it’s scientifically impossible and yet people have thrown almost $1m at it – stupid people.

As for Squeenix’s “10%” – they are offering to promote your campaign (not your game) and so that seems reasonable to me – in the same way that the developer spending funds on development tools or contracted-out work is reasonable.

Given that I’ve never heard of this program until today tho – I’m not that it’s promotion which is worth that much ;0

By: RiptoR

RiptoR — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 14:10:58 +0000

I wholeheartedly agree with your thoughts on this matter.

I personally like the idea of crowdfunding and have backed a few projects myself on kickstarter. I think that crowdfunding can help indie developers to release new and unique games to a market saturated with games that rehash the same tired ideas over and over again. As we all know, publishers don’t really like supporting games that are different, which means that some of these games would never see the light of day without some extra funding (funding they can’t get with big publishers).

But those same publishers should not get involved in the crowdfunding scene. As you said, things get ugly when these publishers use crowdfunding as an excuse to reduce the risks that are involved with publishing unique indie games.

Also, Square Enix seems to want part of the crowdfunded money without ever investing into the projects themselves (except for some marketing, which is vague in itself). That’s just mindboggling.

If Square Enix doesn’t want to risk losing money on indie projects, then they should just stay away from the indie scene in the first place.