This post is not about the phenomenon of the Kickstarter website, which allows artists and other content creators to directly fund their projects by offering incentives for their donors to fund projects, much like Public Broadcasting pledge drives. This posting is about a few insanely over-funded projects that sprung up this year, which highlight the “hardcore fan” business model, as opposed to the “pablum for the masses” approach of the Hollywood machine.
The first project I became aware of being overfunded was the Order of the Stick reprinting, which as of this posting had raised over $750,000. The original goal was $57,750 to allow the webcomic artist to reprint all of his books and have them in stores. There is still a week to go on this drive, and the score is currently at about 1300% of being funded. As he writes in one of his updates, however, at least $200,000 of the funds will be going to postage in sending out all of the items purchased, still making this one of the top five Kickstarter projects.
And it looked to be well on the way to being the largest amount of money raised by the website…until a video game company led by Tim Schafer sought to raise money to create a new adventure game. This is the mind behind such awesome (and under-rated) games such as Brutal Legend, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, and Full Throttle. Oh, and he co-created Day of the Tentacle and The Secret of Monkey Island. Not a bad creative resume, if one likes adventure games. And I do. Oh, how I do.
Double Fine’s goal was higher than the Order of the Stick, but they still raised $400,000 in eight hours. And again, with 27 days to go, their project will be incredibly overfunded. They’ve only raised 400% of the goal, but that is still nearly $1.8 million dollars. In less than a week. They hit one million dollars in around 24 hours.
This gives me hope. And encourages me to scrounge up $15 to pledge for the game when it comes out, even if they are releasing it through the Steam engine.