Kickstarting Video Games

Kickstarter [1], a crowdfunding website was founded in 2009. I didn’t become aware of the site until February 2012 when Double Fine Productions [2], a video game studio founded by well known designer Tim Schafer, decided to use the site to attempt to fund a new video game project, a project that would not get funding through traditional publisher routes [3]. They asked for $400,000 within 30 days to fund the production of a small point and click adventure game and the documentation of the project by 2 Player Productions [4].

It took just 9 hours for that funding goal to be reached and within 24 hours it has surpassed $1 million in donations. By the end of the Kickstarter campaign more than $3.3 million had been donated by over 87,000 backers. And in January of this year (2014) the first part of the game that was funded by this Kickstarter was released [5] with the second and final part coming later in the year. The success of this campaign lead to a surge of other similar projects as well as some not the same but even more successful, like the Pebble watch [6] which raised over $10 million and a film based on the Veronica Mars TV series which reached more than $5.7 million [7]. But I’m going to concentrate on the video game companies that tried to follow Double Fine’s success.

Not many could match or beat the amount that Double Fine had raised which was at least partly due to the nature of the project and who was leading it (Tim Schafer is a very well respected designer of adventure games having being involved with creating Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango). But other well known designers of older and well respected games were able to get funding for new projects based on these old licences. So since 2012 there have been many sequels funded, like Broken Sword 5 ($771,560) [8], Dreamfall Chapters ($1,538,425) [9] and Wasteland 2 ($2,933,252) [10]. There have been some remakes of classic games funded as well like Leisure Suit Larry ($655,182) [11] and Carmageddon ($625,143) [12]. But the biggest Kickstarter projects came from new game ideas from well known designers and studios.

Project Eternity [13] from Obsidian Entertainment raised over $3.9 million for an old school RPG in the style of the Baldur’s Gate series and others of that ilk. Keiji Inafune [14], heavily involved in the creation of the Mega Man series of games, got over $3.8 million on Kickstarter for a game that many see as a spiritual successor to Mega Man. And the project with the biggest amount funded just through Kickstarter is Torment: Tides of Numenera [15] from Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment which received more than $4.1 million.

This year has seen the start of releasing the end results of these larger Kickstarter projects and the future of Kickstarter, and other sites like this, as a viable platform for funding video games relies on how these games are received by the public and by the people who backed the projects. Personally I believe that while Kickstarter won’t become the main way to get funding for a video game it is a great option for those projects deemed too niche by big video game publishers.

References:

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/

[2] http://www.doublefine.com/

[3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fine-adventure

[4] http://www.2playerproductions.com/

[5] http://www.brokenagegame.com/

[6] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android

[7] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project

[8] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/165500047/broken-sword-the-serpents-curse-adventure

[9] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey

[10] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2

[11] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leisuresuitlarry/make-leisure-suit-larry-come-again

[12] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stainlessgames/carmageddon-reincarnation

[13] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity

[14] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightyno9/mighty-no-9

[15] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the name given to the activity of collecting the services or thoughts or content from a large group of people. It’s a fairly recent term having been coined within the last 10 years and usually used to describe online behaviour but the practice of what it means has been around for a lot longer. For example the Oxford English Dictionary asked for word suggestions from the public in the mid 19th century and in the 20th century variations of this type of thing has been used to collect genealogical and genetic data for use in research. [1]

The most obvious example of crowdsourcing online is Wikipedia [2], despite the Jimmy Wales’, one of the site’s co-founders, dislike of the term due to it’s origin from the word ‘outsourcing’ which, according to Wales, gives a bad impression on how Wikipedia uses the people who contribute to it [3]. So while the term may be imprecise, the practice of it is plain to see. Since it’s launch in 2001 it has grown to having over 30 million articles written in 287 languages with a membership of over 20 million user accounts and 71,000 active editors [4]. The sheer size of these numbers just mean more things are getting added, edited and deleted on a second by second basis.

 

So while Wikipedia may well be the biggest and most well known website that uses crowdsourcing for the majority of it’s content it’s not the only one. For example there is OpenStreetMap [5] which is a crowdsourced online mapping project, like Google Maps but freely open to editing by users. Similar is Crowdmap [6] which allows users to make maps for specific things like locations of organic farming projects or countryside clean up crews. Another big use of projects like these is for mapping crisis data during natural disasters or public revolts.

Another type of crowdsourcing is known as crowdfunding which essentially is where a person or group of people ask for money to help fund a project. Types of funding range from a simple donation to an actual investment or loan in which the person giving the money will get a return on that at some point in the future. Next time I want to talk about a particular type of crowdfunding which is of personal interest to me.

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing#The_Oxford_English_Dictionary

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

[3] http://apcmag.com/five-weird-facts-about-wikipedia.htm

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

[5] http://www.openstreetmap.org/

[6] https://crowdmap.com/

Open Source Software

Open source software is ubiquitous these days. Open source software is software that is usually available for free and is completely modifiable by users. There is a similar movement with regards to free software for all which is the Free Software Foundation (FSF) [1] founded by Richard Stallman. Their focus is on the freedom of sharing software with other people whereas the open source drive concentrates on the actual code of the programs being modifiable by any who want to. A way developers in these areas are compromising between these two views is to describe their programs as Free/open source Software (FOSS), or Free/Libre/open source Software (FLOSS). For ease I’ll use the term open source software in this post.

The growth of the use of open source software is relatable to the increasing expansion of the Internet and the ease of sharing files with other people. But this isn’t a new thing. In the very early days of the Internet programs were freely shared among other people, mostly the academics who helped build the networks. The rising commercialisation of the Internet meant that while sharing of open source material still happened but wasn’t really known by the public in general.

What helped start the rising trend of the use of open source software was the creation and release of the Linux (otherwise known as GNU/Linux) operating system by Linus Torvalds [2]. The development of the Linux kernel and the other components that make up an operating system was and still is done completely open which means thousands of people have help develop parts of the whole, with many different versions (or flavours) being distributed throughout the community and into the general marketplace. The actual developing helped create a community for which the products are aimed at. Linux is very popular among big software companies such as Google who have used it to develop the Android OS primarily for mobiles and tablets and Chrome OS which is mainly used for small form PCs or specific notebooks known as Chromebooks.

Despite Linux’s popularity among developers is has yet to be adopted by the general desktop market largely due to the fact that most PCs have either a Windows or Macintosh OS pre-installed. There are calls to get more PCs with Linux pre-installed to allow users more choice. But some type of open source software is used by most people these days anyway. Browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are open source. Other widely used open source software include Mozilla Thunderbird (an email client), VLC media player, Apache OpenOffice and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). These programs largely exist because people are wanting a free and stable version of other proprietary software like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. And open source is not restricted to software, with websites like Wikipedia being a free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. The use of open source, software or otherwise, will continue to grow as long as there are people who are happy to give over their free time to make it with little to no recompense.

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

[2] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about

The Internet & The World

The internet is a vast global network covering most of the world. The data on the internet connects millions of people together in so many different ways and it’s easy to forget that it has a physical nature consisting of routers and servers all connected via masses and masses of cables. It’s easy to imagine a building full of this kind of thing connected to another building in a different city of the same country but how different countries are connected to each other is not so. Handily there are people out there who collect data on the submarine cable network between countries and with this you can get a very nice overlook of this network: [1]

What sites like the one shown above also allows us to see who owns the cables. Knowing about these cables and wondering who owns what leads to some interesting questions. Like could a single corporation hold to ransom a country’s internet connection? A massive denial of service attack via the possibility of severing the physical connections between countries. Of course such a thing would be harder to achieve against countries with multiple undersea connections. But it may be possible for a corporation to do such a thing to a smaller country, to what end I don’t know. What is possible and what is happen is that governments across the world are controlling (or at least are trying to) their country’s internet.

 

During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, as part of the larger Arab Spring uprising in which the Internet played a hugely important role, the under threat Egyptian government forced a shut down of access to the internet [2]. While sites have been blocked by various governments in the past sites such as Facebook & Twitter (both of which we’re also blocked by the Egyptian government before the shut down) the total ‘net blackout of a country was unprecedented. But now that is has happened once, it’s entirely possible for it to happen again.

While most governments wouldn’t go to so far, they do try to limit certain actions, piracy being one of them. The most notable attempt at stopping internet piracy was the US government’s Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA [3]. Essential what the bill proposed was that content creators (in other words the US film & music industries) would have the power to stop people going to sites that may have some form of illegal downloading of copyrighted material and do this without any judicial process just requiring a letter essentially of good faith stating that the site in question had infringed on it’s content. There is a lot more to SOPA than this but that will suffice as a brief overview. Thankfully this bill failed to get passed into law but there is always the potential for this or something like this to appear in the near future.

References:

[1] http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

[2]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/8288163/How-Egypt-shut-down-the-internet.html

[3] http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa