If you remember, we did a report last month about a post Larian studio head Swen Vincke made wherein he stated that their next slate of games wouldn’t be crowdfunded. Far enough, right? After all, they made quite a bit of money off of Original Sin and can probably fund themselves for quite some time.
Seems some of their fans disagreed, since their insistence on him returning to Kickstarter has caused Vicke to reconsider.
On his blog, Swen Vincke makes mention of his change of heart and how he feels about the scene:
Not so long ago, in fact, just a few weeks ago when I posted my last blog entry, I said that Kickstarter might not be the right route for our future projects. I argued that it’s a limited pool and that it would be wrong for us to fish in it if our games are earning sufficient money for us to invest in our future projects.
I immediately received a few strong reactions, both publicly but also privately about how I got it all wrong, and that in fact I should steer Larian back to Kickstarter. The reasoning is that successful crowdfunding projects send more people to the crowdfunding scene and that benefits the smaller projects. This is referred to as the “halo effect” and one particular bright person compared it to “a restaurant sitting alone or on a block with many others. They all do better with more traffic”.
Like the lover of gaming he is, Vincke seems to feel he may be capable of helping other indie devs reach his level of success:
Crowd funding is a wonderful invention and something that has changed the lives of many independent developers. It has rekindled innovation in an over-consolidated market where the traditional powers now have you pay extra to fight the coolest bosses. It should be cherished and protected at all costs and gamers would do well to prefer buying their games via crowd funding lest they find themselves playing games designed by whoever talks best at some marketing meeting.
So, if it indeed is the case that a return to crowd funding by past success stories helps boost the scene then I’m all pro. Only fools and dead men don’t change their minds.
I would very much appreciate hearing your thoughts about this, especially if you’re somebody who crowd funded before. Is it ok for a company who’s enjoyed a certain level of success thanks to a crowd funding to return to crowd funding? Is it something that should be encouraged so that more people discover crowd funding? Or is something that should be discouraged because the pool of crowd funding is limited?
Vincke has always been very straightforward with his fans, and this yet again proves it. Personally, I don’t care how he handles his next game, so long as it happens. after Original Sin, they have a lot of money to play with and I’m excited to see where they take the series next.
