The “Fund A Person” Model
Recently on Reddit, an indie dev had proposed a grand experiment that he was raising money for: A game dev funding model where instead of having people fund a business enterprise, they would just fund the development itself, and the resulting product would be free for anyone to play.
According to Henry, or Hengineer (his reddit handle), here are the key attributes of this approach:
It’s pay-what-you-want, which is respectful of what people can afford.
It creates a personal relationship between the player and the developer.
And more importantly, the money is used directly to make games: salaries, equipment, office space, etc.
So how would this look in practice? To the average consumer, this experience wouldn’t look at that different. It’s still a person who wants to make a game going to Kickstarter or the equivalent and asking for money to make the game, and those who trust in the vision and the team would back it via donations.
The main difference for the consumer is a major decrease in overhead, and far greater focus on the craft of game making than worry about business viability and such.
It also frees up the kind of products that get made as most games being made now a days are focused on generating revenue, which is notoriously difficult unless you’re willing to either 1. go freemium and hope to create high value consumers or 2. create a single player experience game that focuses on revenue through units shipped.
With this model it is now possible to create games without having to worry about the other costs or commercial viability, so long as the fund raising target is met.
These all sound like good things at a first glance. In the early stages, funding and sustaining a development team is always one of the larger pitfalls that any game developer must contend with.
However, another poster on reddit then post this thought regarding this model:
Simply put, changing the revenue model to an expense-focused perspective is convenient for the producer (you), but the consumer is fundamentally cost-focused by virtue of being pre-occupied by their own finances. Shifting expense concerns onto them burdens them with risk, and ultimately it is not appealing to most consumers.
So while this model might be good for you (the person), by complicating things for your consumers, it can be bad for you (the businessperson).
This right here, I believe, is the center issue of this model. Most consumers are not industry experts who can suss out quickly the potential outcome for any given team. This model really does not change the value of the product at all for the consumer except that the amount needed for a successful campaign is now substantially lower. Add to the fact there is an even greater disconnect from the consumer to the product and those who back it are effectively giving money in for no equity return, and this becomes a massive problem.
It is, in effect, a donation model.
From a production standpoint, there is another problem, and that is one of motivation. Often times, people respond to very real threats and very real deadlines, which while stressful, also spurs creativity. With the motivation of product longevity removed from the equation, a huge part of that motivation disappears.
So in a word, it is a model that is even more high risk than Kickstarter, with even lower potential return.
This is not to say the model can’t work. This is, in fact, how The Patreon Model works. However, to make this work, it is now predicated on two important factors.
The first one is scope. With a donation model, the potential pool for raising capital becomes drastically smaller. (Using Patreon as an example, most gaming projects have funding that comes in at maybe 400 a month or 200 per creation) This means that the scope of the projects must be drastically smaller in order to control cost and time risks. While the ability to do scope control is important to any production, it is even MORE important for the would be patron model dev.
The second one is probably the most pertinent, and that is trust. Kickstarter as is already asks for a tremendous amount of faith in the developer to be able to carry through with the development. As of right now, only 1/3 of game devs from Kickstarter will deliver on their promise. Most will hit a development snag, a project milestone slips, and then the cash runs out. With a model of this type, we can only expect the failure rate to be even higher with the albeit illogical decrease in motivation to deliver. And so often times, the only way people can overcome this fear is to go with a dev that they actively trust. This requires a considerable amount of relationship building prior to the campaign being funded itself. There are two ways to get around this problem: already have games under your belt or laser focused campaign efforts.
Though, we must ask ourselves, if a dev ALREADY has successful games under their belt, do they really need to go to this model to raise the money they need to make games? As the saying goes, “those who need my money don’t deserve it, and those who deserve it, don’t need it”. After all, if Chris Roberts (of Star Citizen fame) were to come in and tried to fund his next project this way, he would succeed in raising that money immediately. And yet at the same time, if Chris Robert were to simply say on his tweeter feed: “Hey guys, I’m going to make a new game, and I just want to know who might want to play it”, he’ll get enough pre-orders from that alone to get his game funded from an institutionalized source too. So really, those who can easily succeed in this model will not need it at all.
So the question then becomes, WHO should use this model and HOW should they use it?
With a little bit of extrapolation, we can already safely figure out who would be the best candidates to use this model: Veteran content makers within a community without the business acumen. As stated before, those with a strong reputation will not need this. However, not every game dev out there who has some level of success can necessarily make the leap due to the fact that not all game devs are have good business sense, and not all devs’ natural habitats are lucrative enough to be market sustainable. This model is perfect for those who already have some success. i.e. a veteran modder in a Skyrim community. In this scenario, the modder ALREADY has a strong level of trust from his own community thanks to him already having a portfolio of passion projects he has done on his own. In this scenario, each project probably has taken him a ridiculous amount of time to pull together from ideation to release, since chances are he’s doing this on his time off from his real job.
The HOW question is a bit trickier, but I’ve already alluded to the answers to that previously. The answer is that it’s about the community. Focus on developing a relationship and trust with a niche community first. The community itself must also not be composed entirely of other developer enthusiasts, but consumers, as you need to widen the scope of your potential capital raising base for this to succeed. The next step would then be to make sure the project scope is kept small for the sake of ensuring delivery. After all, this model is based entirely on reputation, and nothing hurts more than failing to deliver on your word.
There are certainly other ways that this can work, but this is how I imagine the perfect candidate for this initial tranche. Do I expect this model to take off? To be quite frank, not really. The concept is born from a noble place, but given the fact that we’re talking about a considerably smaller population to work with at a higher risk, I cannot imagine this to supplant kickstarter any time soon. What I do expect is a fairly high failure rate in most cases. However, for the few that DOES succeed, it will be wondrous.
After all, for those that succeed, the end result is a game that is now free for all to play, and one that could potentially add to the sum of the human experience.
