Bueno, un día después del terremoto la industria no tiene otro tema de conversación. En este hilo se irán pegando las distintas reacciones sobre el rotundo éxito de Double Fine y toda la avalancha de artículos que están surgiendo al respecto.

Artículo sobre crowdfunding de EDGE del año pasado, http://www.edge-online.com/features/power-crowd-funding

Rockpapershotgun opina al respecto, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02 ... more-93540

Y gamasutra hace lo propio, http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanCrei ... ishing.php

EDGE plantea si Double Fine acaba de matar a las editoras, http://www.edge-online.com/opinion/opin ... -publisher


Reacciones de desarrolladores de la industria al respecto:

Markus ÔÇÿNotchÔÇÖ Persson

Mojang (Minecraft)

"Hopefully this will lead to a lowered need to use traditional publishers, meaning more of the power gets put back in the developers' hands. This will in turn lead to more creative games and less DRM nonsense.

"Double Fine wouldnÔÇÖt have been able to do this game without crowd sourcing, so they had a real need of the service. As a player, it's exactly the type of game I want to help fund."

--

"did you hear? the death-rattle of a million middle men."
ÔÇö Phil Fish (currently working on Fez) @PHIL_FISH

--
Cliff Harris

Positech Games (Gratuitous Space Battles)

"The optimist in me thinks this could apply some decent pressure to the big publishers to offer improved terms and autonomy for devs. At the back of their mind, they will know devs will be thinking, 'Well we could just crowdfund this, and get better terms...' That would be a nice change.

"But IÔÇÖm a bit nervous of it becoming the norm. Really good game design and vision comes from the sort of single-minded arrogance where one person can 'see' how the final product will look. When you crowdfund, you suddenly get thousands of people who legitimately feel that they own part of the design of the game.

As a way of enabling indie games to get made that otherwise could not have been, itÔÇÖs positive, but I suspect most indies who crowdfund a hit game would immediately move to self-financed when they have the means to do so."

--

"I like how apparently Double Fine has spent the last 10+ years working backwards from AAA to crowdfunded indie. The Benjamin Button of dev"
ÔÇö Steve Gaynor (game writer and designer - worked on BioShock 2) @fullbright

--
Simon Oliver

Hand Circus (Rolando)

"This is huge - it has the potential to turn the traditional funding model completely on its head. One of the most significant aspects for me is that it removes barriers for the development of titles that have a clear audience but that don't fit well into a publisher's view of the landscape. The enormous response (already $500k in half a day) sends a loud message to them: 'Your evaluation system doesn't work'.

"And itÔÇÖs working as a standard-bearer for the potential of crowd-sourced funding and energising the gaming community to take part in helping to get original games off the ground.

"On the other hand, Tim, Ron and Double Fine have an enormous fanbase and the demand for a new adventure game from such a talented team is huge. It would be a very different experience for an unknown team with a new IP. There's also the novelty factor in play here as this is a totally new phenomenon for such an established team, and a similar pattern to 'bundle-geddon' could occur as other developers try to replicate its success."

--

"The fact that this can happen is just amazeballs. kck.st/wEuJ8g @Timoflegend @gregricey My first game was a point and click!"
ÔÇö Cliff Bleszinski (design director, Epic Games) @therealcliffyb

--
David Amor

Relentless (Buzz!)

"I contributed $20 to the Double Fine project before I'd finished watching the promo video. Tim Schafer? Ron Gilbert? An old-school adventure game? Where do I sign? The amount of people who could invoke that kind of reaction from me could be counted on one hand.

"But for an unknown indie I would imagine raising Kickstarter funding would be about as hard as getting discovered on the App Store. I'm not discounting it, I'm just suggesting it would be difficult.

"Nonetheless, there's still a role for publishers, but some of the services they offer - such as manufacturing and distribution - are disappearing. They need to re-define what they offer the content creator."

--

"Double Fine managed to avoid about 57 meetings with publishing execs who would have told them that no one wants an adventure game anymore."

ÔÇö Jeff Green (PopCap's director of editorial and social media) @greenspeak

--
Dino Patti

PlayDead (Limbo)

"Right now many publishers have a person, or a board of people, who ÔÇÿgreen lightÔÇÖ games. While this seems innocent, it has some flaws which mainly come down to the fact that nobody can foresee the future (unless the board consists of very talented forture tellers). Having people put down money this early is a really good test of the potential market.

"If larger studios begin using Kickstarter to fund more projects, the challenge will be to get the trust of the consumer at an early stage, though. We donÔÇÖt have the right to judge who needs the money the most - I think great initiatives should be supported. But I would personally be putting my money in projects where I know personal pride and love for games are the main drivers, like in Tim's example."

Dan Marshall

Size Five Games (Ben There, Dan That, Time Gentleman Please!)

"I canÔÇÖt see the likes of Kickstarter becoming de facto any time soon. But it does show that thereÔÇÖs an appetite out there for new, smaller, riskier games. Grey corridor man-shooting has had a good run, but as the growing indie scene has shown, thereÔÇÖs definitely an appetite for different types of game.

YouÔÇÖre never going to fund the likes of BioShock Infinite or Half-Life 3 this way, and thereÔÇÖll always be a market for that sort of thing, so I canÔÇÖt imagine many publishers quaking in their boots. But maybe theyÔÇÖve sat up a little bit and taken notice of this. Hopefully at least one publisher fat cat spat coffee onto his morning paper on hearing the news.

"IÔÇÖd love for Id to say, ÔÇ£You know what? Rage took a million years and billions of dollars to make, whatÔÇÖs say we make a new Quake game with Shamblers?ÔÇØ And because of the new avenues open to them ÔÇô XBLA, Steam, Kickstarter - itÔÇÖs actually a genuine possibility.

"Gamers clamoring for risky properties can now put their money where their mouths are. Wing Commander fans chip in to get a new Wing Commander. Day Of The Tentacle fans chip in for a new Maniac Mansion. A Syndicate top-down strategy game. I know I would. Wouldn't you?"

--

"Congrats, @TimOfLegend and @Double_Fine -- Adventure Kickstarts $1M kck.st/yImh6l PROBLEM: SO MANY POSTERS TO SIGN!"
ÔÇö Tom Hall (game designer and founder of id) @thattomhall

--
Ricky Haggett

Honeyslug (Frobisher Says)

"If you're Tim Schafer and you made all those amazing games it isn't so surprising that you can raise $1.2 million on Kickstarter. If you're a tiny indie that no-one's ever heard of, you'll probably find it a bit harder. Indies have been raising money for projects on Kickstarter for a while now, with varying degrees of success.

"While the Kickstarter model can be a great way to fund projects, it doesn't necessarily work so great for all projects. Sometimes you want to start prototyping a game and just see where it goes - maybe in a completely different direction to where it started. Having a load of anonymous backers on the internet can then become baggage that weighs down a developer on the creative path.

"But I'm not into the idea that successful developers should avoid doing anything which might tred on the toes of less successful developers. Double Fine make lovely games. They've found a new way to make a new lovely game, directly involving fans of their lovely games. I don't see how that can possibly be a bad thing!

"If a company can use Kickstarter to fund something that otherwise wouldn't be made, that has to be positive because by definition something is being made which people want. But I suspect companies like Gameloft and EA have a somewhat different relationship to their 'fans' than Double Fine though."

--

"Congratulations to @TimOfLegend and all my friends at Double Fine on getting a million dollars in less than 24 hours! YOU GUYS ROCK"
ÔÇö Manveer Heir (senior designer on Mass Effect 3) @manveerheir

--

Andrew J Smith

Spilt Milk Studios (Hard Lines)

"If things like Kickstarter become more demonstrably reliable as a source of funding, mainstream publishing is going to have to have a real sit down and think (tea and biscuits optional). But the kind of fan base that has made the Double Fine attempt such a success - the legions of fans who've been clamouring for a point and click game for the past decade or more - is really hard to build. I'm not sure how many publishers would be confident of having that power over their fans.

"Activision et al would find it very hard to get this kind of thing to support the kinds of projects they are used to making, but I wouldn't bet against someone like Yoshinori Ono if he went and tried to crowd-source funds for a new project - even without the Street Fighter brand - and great 'dead' projects like Elite, maybe Jet Set Radio (and until recently XCom) seem perfectly placed to try it.

"The more I think about it, the more I see this maybe starting a trend where the creators and visionaries who guide these projects get as much credit and

power over the game industry (market, funding, whatever) as the great directors do in movies."

--

"See, adventure games aren't dead, they were just out back having a smoke (which, ironically, is going to kill them)."
ÔÇö Ron Gilbert (behind Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island - now working at Double Fine) @grumpygamer



--
Will Luton

Mobile Pie (My Star, Blossom Bristol)

"There's few with the pull of Schafer, so I don't see this as becoming the norm. My buddy James Parker has a point and click project called Byte The Hand, which is very good, and it's currently sat on Kickstarter at $0. Even I haven't put any cash in. That's bad, right? Crowd-funding campaigns seem to either fall in to obscurity or skyrocket.

"People don't wake up thinking, "I'm going to back an indie on Kickstarter today," go to the site and choose the indie they want to back. But Double Fine aren't taking food out the mouths of other indies; this is legitimising the process and I would expect to see more game projects getting more traction off the back of it as people better understand the process.

"I think it moves the industry a little more towards a meritocracy where a good story to be told can gain a lot of traction. If more good creative studios can fund their projects like this, fewer will be going under."

--



"It's the final countdooooooooooooooooown... $200K more and they'll have to change the name to Triple Fine."

ÔÇö Adrian Chmielarz (People Can Fly founder) @adrianchm

--
Jeremiah Slaczka

5th Cell (Scribblenauts)

"What Tim and Double Fine have done is increased awareness of how Kickstarter works as a potential new model to fund indie games. Because of their bold move many more companies and potential investors will look into the Kickstarter model on a smaller scale. I'm glad it paid off for him.

"But the numbers thrown around are just too small to impact mainstream publishing or large developers. Most good XBLA, PSN or Steam indie games cost multiple millions of dollars. So asking for $400,000 (even though that target has now been exceeded) isn't going to net you much. The title Tim wanted to fund made a lot of sense, it's a 2D labor of love based on a dying genre that Tim is known for and publishers wouldn't want to touch.

"The shift of power keeps slowly creeping back to the creative talent. It's a very similar analogue how the early days of the film industry worked."

--

Chris Avellone

Creative director of Obsidian Entertainment

"Hmmmm. I admit, IÔÇÖve got Kickstarter fever now. I feel like a bunch of doors suddenly appeared in game development."

Artículo de gameindustry.biz. Lo pongo a parte y no en un enlace puesto que hace falta estar registrado:

A little over ten years ago, the team running SETI - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - found a groundbreaking solution to an enormous problem. The team's efforts to secure data feeds from radio telescopes had been immensely successful - too successful, in fact, to the extent that SETI was inundated with vast amounts of radio data which it had no way to analyse. The organisation was running on a minimal budget, and the kind of computing power required to search that much data for potential signals would have been too expensive even for a much better funded effort.

The solution reached by the SETI team at the University of California, Berkeley, was SETI@home - a distributed computing effort which sent out packets of radio data over the Internet to volunteers who gave up the unused power of their home computers to the processing efforts. The result was that SETI was able to tap into hundreds of teraFLOPS of processing power (stop sniggering, that's how it's measured) at minimal cost - buying a supercomputer capable of that would have bankrupted the organisation.

SETI@home wasn't the first distributed computing effort of this type, nor is it the most successful, but it was the first to really capture the imagination of Internet users. As such, it's not a bad place to stick a flag in the dirt and say, "here was born the crowdsourcing idea".

Crowdsourcing has come a long way since then, and the concept is still difficult for many people. It's easy to understand how the computing power of tens of thousands of normal PCs can be combined to outperform a supercomputer using some clever software. What's not quite so easy to understand is the sheer power which can be brought to bear on an enormous range of problems by applying the same principles of distribution not to computers, but to the people sitting at them.

"Two pairs of eyes are better than one, people will say when they're offered help in searching for something - but what about 100,000 pairs of eyes?"

Two pairs of eyes are better than one, people will say when they're offered help in searching for something - but what about 100,000 pairs of eyes? The reCAPTCHA service asks web users logging into websites to identify two words taken from scanned documents, which computers have failed to recognise. The input of thousands of users generates startlingly accurate results. When Wikileaks released thousands of documents last year, the Guardian engaged internet volunteers in combing the documents for crucial information - a task that would have taken the paper's journalists months if not years, and was completely beyond the comprehension of even the most advanced computer software, but could be accomplished through crowdsourcing in hours.

These are simple examples. The extent to which crowdsourcing has impacted the world we live in is extraordinary, and growing. Each of us in the developed world walks around with an Internet connection, a surplus of computer power and a high resolution camera in our pockets. The leveraging of that power using the paradigms created for distributed computing has the potential to overturn entire industries - perhaps even to topple governments.

What I want to talk about more specifically, though, isn't toppling governments - but it might be something even more profound. It's a logical progression from crowdsourcing which, somehow, almost nobody seems to have foreseen - and whose eventual impact, I'd argue, still isn't fully understood.

Earlier this week, veteran developer Tim Schafer announced that his company, Double Fine, wanted to make an adventure game - a genre often lamented as being dead before its time - but that it wanted to secure funding for the game through unconventional means. Schafer launched an effort on Kickstarter, a funding site, aiming to raise $400,000 from the company's fans to fund development. At the time of writing, the effort has far exceeded that figure. Double Fine has the money to make its game, extracted entirely from the company's own fanbase without the slightest bit of involvement from traditional funding sources like publishers or venture capitalists.

This is crowdfunding - the logical evolution of crowdsourcing. What began as an effort to aggregate the spare computing power of volunteers and expanded into the aggregation of their spare brain power has posed a new question - can we aggregate the spare money in their bank accounts? The answer, it would seem, is yes.

Crowdfunding poses absolutely enormous questions not just for videogames, but for the entire structure of our economy - particularly our creative industries. Of course, Schafer's success is a fringe case, and it's worth noting that another equally ambitious crowdfunding effort, which hoped to raise $300,000 for the development of a sequel to the Nexus space combat game, recently failed to hit its targets by quite a significant margin. It's not time for game developers to burn their bridges with publishers and VCs just yet - but all the same, there's a seismic shift in the landscape occurring here which is important to consider.

"Crowdfunding asks the Internet audience to put their money where their mouth is and pay for the development of something they'd like to enjoy."

Publishers - and to a certain extent VCs - have different functions depending on which perspective you view them from. Financially, they are investors, picking projects which are likely to succeed and throwing backing (financial and otherwise) behind them in the hope of making a return from the project. Creatively, though, they are gatekeepers. They are, for better or worse, in the business of finding things which they believe they will be successful and permitting those things to be made - and thus, by act of omission, preventing other things from being made. In this, publishers rely on their own instincts and market research; no mechanism has existed up until now to effectively test what the market will actually pay for.

Crowdfunding approaches that from a novel perspective. Rather than putting a group of people into a room with some free biscuits and asking them if they'd theoretically spend some theoretical money on a theoretical game at some theoretical point in future, a scenario from which the only reliable data that can be extracted is related to the group's preference in free biscuits, crowdfunding asks the Internet audience to put their money where their mouth is and pay for the development of something they'd like to enjoy.

There are multiple ways to approach this. Kickstarter is the most popular at present, and simply says, "invest, and you'll get a copy of the finished product; invest a bit more and we'll give you some goodies as well". Capitalists have criticised this on the basis that the investors don't get any return on their investment - if the product does stunningly well, the people who funded it don't get anything back. (Crowdfunders would probably respond that capitalists might enjoy their lives more if they didn't measure every damned thing in coins, and observe that most of the history of human creativity has been funded by patrons using their wealth to pay for artists to create things for them, not by suited executives shepherding creative talent into building marketable "product".)

That's where the second crowdfunding model comes in - essentially crowd micro-funding, in which the crowd donates little or large amounts, with a view to taking home a share in any eventual profits from the venture. If this sounds like it's the stock market being reinvented, then that's because, in essence, it is - it's the emergence of a grass-roots stock market in creative projects, growing up in the shadow of the completely bastardised and arguably unfit for purpose stock market in corporate shares upon which our economy rests (and often, slips off).

Needless to say the latter model creates all manner of legal problems, because the laws governing funding and finance have been created to enshrine stock markets as the beating hearts of national economies, and it's going to take a long time for governments to twist their heads around the idea that individual people might want to take that power into their own hands on some scale. The legal problems, however, may not matter - people are going to do it anyway, and the law will have to sort itself out in the wake of progress, as usual.

What does this mean for game development? It means doors are opening. Few of those doors will be remotely as large and wide as the one through which Tim Schafer and his crew sailed this week, but the model which he has used is hugely illuminating - especially once you start to consider what else might legitimately be considered crowdfunding. Minecraft, for instance, started out selling 10 Euro copies of a very unpolished alpha to loyal fans in order to fund further development - if that's not crowdfunding, what is? If that's not a radical new business model (build something rough and see if people love it enough to pay for you to build a better version), then what is?

"What does this mean for game development? It means doors are opening."

Sure, Tim Schafer is famous and has a huge following - but Markus "Notch" Persson wasn't. Besides, not every developer needs to make $400,000 to build their game. Not every developer needs to raise funds before doing the groundwork for their game. Variations of this model can work for smaller amounts of money, for games at various stages of development (right up to being finished - lots of projects on Kickstarter have successfully sought money for physical publication of completed digital products), and with various incentives for investors, from the warm fuzzy feeling of being a patron of the creative arts up to the potential for a genuine financial return.

Think this is a flash in the pan? Think again. Consider the foundation of nation states - the world's most powerful entities in spending terms, built on the simple economic principle that if a whole lot of averagely wealthy people contribute a little bit, they can outspend the most wealthy elites without breaking a sweat. Now consider that principle applied to the free market economics which exist in the creative industries - and while you're at it, remember one more thing.

The success of effectively crowdfunded efforts like Minecraft and Double Fine's new game comes at a time when the world is in the throes of one of the toughest recessions in decades, when disposable income is at a premium for many. Consider a future, five years down the line, where the economy is growing again, disposable income levels are rising - and crowdfunding is well established and trusted as a way to patronise and influence the arts. In the long run, perhaps the 20th century will come to be seen as a difficult transition period for the arts - when for just a moment, the cold hand of capitalism had to be grasped, in the gap between the patronage of the wealthy and the patronage of the crowd.

No es una critica para nada, pero con este post solo me he dado cuenta de que a pesar de vivir en NZ, el ingles escrito sigue siendo jodido de cojones para mi...

Cita:No es una critica para nada, pero con este post solo me he dado cuenta de que a pesar de vivir en NZ, el ingles escrito sigue siendo jodido de cojones para mi...

¿Y allí que lees?
Puedo traducir alguna parte, pero todo no que es demasiado.

Perdonad mi ignorancia, pero ¿cuál es la noticia?

Cita:Perdonad mi ignorancia, pero ¿cuál es la noticia?

Double Fine acudió a Kickstarter para iniciar una campaña de donaciones para hacer una aventura gráfica porque ningún estudio se la paga. Querían recaudar 400.000$ para hacer la aventura y un documental de ellos haciendo la aventura. ¡Llevan recaudado un millón y medio de dólares! Y la gente ya se está preguntando que consecuencias tendrá esto para la industria y la financiación de juegos.

Todo hay que decirlo (y se menciona en los artículos) que muchísimos nos moríamos de ganas por una aventura gráfica de corte clásico hecha por Double Fine... Yo no dude ni un segundo en meter dinero en la iniciativa (a fin de cuentos, el juego era compra segura). De aquí pueden salir consecuencias muy interesantes, no creo que lo que ha sucedido en este caso vaya a repetirse con frecuencia, pero quien sabe. Podría ser una alternativa más que válida para proyectos con riesgos. Por ejemplo, un Deadly Premonition sin tiroteos, tal como lo quería originalmente su creador...

No creo que podamos financiar por esta vía un Shenmue 3, pero, pase lo que pase, lo que han hecho Tim Schafer y Double Fine es increíble...

Cita:[quote author="Tolo"]Perdonad mi ignorancia, pero ¿cuál es la noticia?

Double Fine acudió a Kickstarter para iniciar una campaña de donaciones para hacer una aventura gráfica porque ningún estudio se la paga. Querían recaudar 400.000$ para hacer la aventura y un documental de ellos haciendo la aventura. ¡Llevan recaudado un millón y medio de dólares! Y la gente ya se está preguntando que consecuencias tendrá esto para la industria y la financiación de juegos.[/quote]

Qué grande entonces. Esto viene a demostrar que se pueden hacer juegos menos comerciales porque van a tener su mercado, quizás no tanto que los AAA, pero sí son rentable.
A ver qué sale de todo esto.