For those of you who don’t know, I have just launched my very first Kickstarter campaign for Guts N’ Glory Vol 1. I’m nervous and excited to show you guys more of what I’m working on now that my crunch period is over, but today I wanted to take the time to discuss my thoughts on the whole Kickstarter phenomenon. Kickstarter has been with us for 15 years and it has become absolutely essential to the upstart game designer looking to get their work out there. Hell, it’s become so ubiquitous that every major RPG publisher aside from Wizards of the Coast and Paizo uses Kickstarter to fund their books. What I find perplexing is that everyone seems to just be okay with this state of affairs. I for one am not, and it is ultimately a goal of mine to eventually move beyond needing Kickstarter to produce a book. From where I sit now, this seems like a lofty goal but it’s not an impossible one. After all, it was not that long ago that nobody used Kickstarter.
What’s the point of Kickstarter? This should be fairly obvious. It’s crowdsourcing production costs. For an RPG, that means paying for art, layout, writing, printing, shipping, and a myriad of other costs that I’m just now discovering. Customers pledge their money in exchange for advanced, and generally discounted, copies of books, exclusive covers, exclusive miniatures, etc. There’s nothing wrong with the model. It makes sense for companies that are just starting out. The emphasis though should be on companies just starting out. Unfortunately, this has been an issue on Kickstarter for a long time. Many bigger, established companies go to Kickstarter to raise money for new projects over and over again. Is this wrong? No, not necessarily, but I think it speaks to a problem in the gaming industry. Nobody is building sustainable businesses. Rather than building a model where revenue is built up over time to the point where it alone can pay for production costs, revenue is now farmed from crowdfunding campaigns. If crowdfunding fell apart tomorrow, many businesses would no longer be able to keep putting games out. I do not want that for Guts N’ Glory.
Crowdfunding is a product of big tech. It relies upon platforms that are controlled by Silicone Valley. Kickstarter has done things in the past to earn the ire of their user base, including disallowing certain creators to use their platform on political grounds. They will inevitably make changes to the platform that the creator community will be unsatisfied with because that is what tech companies do. Their mandate is constant change and constant progress for its own sake. You see this with every platform at some point or another. Kickstarter will not be immune from this and neither will IndieGoGo. At some point, the bottom will fall out. The owners will do something unpopular or the companies will be swallowed up by larger conglomerates who don’t care as much about the user experience or someone will pull off some kind of stunt that defrauds people of millions of dollars and shatters the trust in online crowdfunding. Frankly, it’s amazing that some of the bigger crowdfunding flops haven’t completely destroyed trust in the concept as a whole.
Beyond potential problems with the platform, I believe that a business should eventually be able to stand on its own revenue generation. Constantly going to crowdfunding to fund production is like being a startup that constantly seeks venture capital. It’s a business model of gathering funds, spending them all on one project, rinse and repeat. This isn’t a business model at all. A business cannot be successful until it can stand on its own. At the end of the day, that’s my goal. I want a business that stands on its own. I fully acknowledge that there’s a long road ahead of me to get there, but that’s what the future needs. Nobody will ever compete with the big dogs until they can be a sustainable business themselves.
For the foreseeable future, I will need to rely on Kickstarter. I have made peace with that fact. That being said, Kickstarter will not be my crutch. My goal is to become a successful game designer with a self sustaining business model based on revenue from product. It's not going to do me any good to constantly be in fund raising mode. There's a point at which I need to be able to cover my own production costs and thrive on the sales of my products.