Crowdgaming: The Role of Crowdsourcing in the Video Games Industry

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Francesco Ursino

CROWDGAMING: THE ROLE OF CROWDSOURCING IN THE VIDEO GAMES INDUSTRY

Original title: Crowdgaming. The Role of Crowdsourcing in the Video Games Industry Author: Francesco Ursino Year: 2016 All products or trademarks listed in this book belong to their respective owners. Every effort has been made to ensure that all the information presented is correct. If proper copyright acknowledgment has not been made, or for clarifications and

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UUID: eb4625a6-e008-11e5-94e4-0f7870795abd T h i s e b o o k w a s c r e a t e d w i t h S t r e e t L i b Wr i t e (h t t p : // w r i t e . s t r e e t l i b . c o m ) b y S i m p l i c i s s i m u s B o o k Fa r m

Table of contents

Introduction

Crowdsourcing. Everybody is a developer New ways of development What is the crowdsourcing? Pillars and examples of the crowdsourcing in gaming The use of collective intelligence: the development of mods Mass production of creative works: Steam Workshop Big Data organization: wikis and websites Nostalgic digression: how information changes our choices The importance of the community: Project C.A.R.S.

Crowdfunding. Everybody is a publisher ​Material digression: there is life beyond the shelf A further digression: the long tail of Minecraft New possibilities for developers A definition of crowdfunding How and why the crowdfunding can influence the price of games Economic digression: different strategies of pricing in the video game market Which platform? Punctual digression: why Kickstarter is one the most successful crowdfunding platform Behind every game, it has to be a great story Stylistic digression: indie, indie -ish, indie –er, more indie than you, and all that is left The importance of the video campaign Honest digression: miscommunication and honesty in videogames trailers What the creator wants: the choice of a right funding goal What the creator offers: the structure of rewards and tiers Crowdfunding campaign is communication campaign A much-needed digression: crowdfunding is just advertising after all Not too long, not too short The most important gaming projects funded through crowdfunding at January 2016 Quantitative, very significant, necessary digression: funding goals are Trojan horses

Brave new word: the Broken Age case The background Psychological digression: the continuous research of instant gratification Communicative, very large digression: how advertising changes over the years The great story of Double Fine Power and responsibilities Some numbers of the campaign Broken trust?

Epilogue Credits

INTRODUCTION I love a game series. It is called Football Manager. Every year it allows me to manage and coach a football club - which I can choose from thousands of teams - and more than 70.000 Italian players, coaches, athletic trainers, scouts, and so on. It is a series developed by an English studio called Sports Interactive, whose team has got less than 100 members. Considering that every iteration of the series has an annual release, the creation of such large and updated database would be tough for each of the 51 countries involved in the game. For this reason, every year, many months before the release of the new game, a whole team of chief researchers seeks the Internet to find people interested in becoming part of the title scouting team. Every soccer fan in the world can potentially be part of it, as long as they can get the information the chief researcher wants to. In return, every researcher earns the right to be part of the credits of the game, and some of them may have the chance to receive a copy of the title: there is no retribution, but just gratification. Therefore, the massive database of one of the nowadays most beloved gaming franchise is just formed by players becoming proper developers. This is gaming crowdsourcing - and this is what this book is about. The Internet has changed video games: publishers and developers can reach a wide audience while players possess a power of choice that has largely increased, especially if you look back at 15-20 years ago. Some of the most important dynamics of the internet, such as the word-of-mouth and the viral marketing, transform the players into consumers, developers, and publishers of a video game at the same time. This book will try to investigate these new forces, which shape a new market and put the player at its center. Among these forces, the crowdsourcing seems the strongest: this mechanism gives the player

the ability to influence developers and publishers in various ways. The relation is not unidirectional since the software houses themselves call to action users and fans as well. It can be the choice of a testimonial for a cover or the research for precious information that otherwise can be very hard (and certainly not cheap) to find out. This collaboration - as I wrote before - works in both directions: the software houses can release tools, or even software platforms, which can be used to customize games and levels, thanks to the cooperative collaboration of communities and forums; this dynamic was just unthinkable before the Internet era. Among the various ways of crowdsourcing, the crowdfunding seems to be the most important. Thanks to this mechanism, every developer can raise the proper amount of money to develop a project. The change is radical: even the smallest creator of the humblest, independent video game could have the possibility to create his own video game, thanks to the contribution of the players. However, this does not mean that every creator can earn from his games, but it could be the chance. We will face these topics through the book, which consists of three chapters: the first introduces the general concept of crowdsourcing and the primary processes this mechanism manifests itself through. The second chapter focuses on the crowdfunding and on the structure of this kind of fundraising campaigns. The final pages of this part look into the search for quantitative aspects that can bind together the most important projects that have been funded by players so far. It is important to say that this book is not about how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign, and it does not contain magical recipes: the purpose is to focus on how crowdsourcing and gaming coexist from an empirical point of view. The third chapter includes a brief analysis of the first significant

crowdfunding campaign in gaming, such as the Broken Age one. Again, it is not an in-depth analysis, but just a starting point, useful to underline some of the most important aspects of the relationship between crowdsourcing and video games. Every chapter includes digressions of different nature: these sections are not necessarily linked to the central theme of the book, but they help to better understand the video games market. We will talk about pricing strategies, the role and the evolution of information and communication tools and lots of other things. This book is the sum of my experience as an editor for specialized video games websites, and my academic formation as well. It is mostly addressed to whoever has a certain knowledge of video games, but also to those who are interested in the socio-economic dynamics determined by gaming and by the Internet. If you belong to the first category, this book can represent the occasion to look at video games from a different perspective; otherwise - if you belong to the second - it can be a compelling opportunity to investigate a new culture and an artistic world, which is worth your attention.

CROWDSOURCING. EVERYBODY IS A DEVELOPER Why on the green Earth of God should a guy spend a sleepless night of June on his own, in the middle of a hot summer, watching a monitor? A valid (and possibly not creepy at all) answer, if you are not American, can be video games. As a matter of fact, June is the month of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (so-called E3), one the most important event focused on video games. On this occasion, every major personality of the market participates to the event set in Los Angeles, ready to show what is coming next in the video games world. So, if you are not attending the several arenas of the conferences, but you are still interested in the matter, the only chance left is to take your PC, tablet, or smartphone, and watch the streaming of the several meetings that precede the event. Since the conferences take place in Los Angeles, it means that every gamer that belongs to the EMEA area has to stay up all night to follow them, thus this is the explanation for the creepy incipit of this chapter. On the night of June, 15th 2015, the big screen of the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena - the location of the Sony conference turned green and white, and drew the Kickstarter logo; the crowdfunding made its entrance in the temple of high-budget video games, thanks to the announce of the arrival of Shenmue 3, one of the most anticipated games of the last ten years. To develop the game, though, the developer Yu Suzuki was asking for the help of users and fans: “The destiny of Shenmue is in your hands,” said Suzuki, and his message was promptly received. Only 102 minutes after the initial announcement the crowdfunding campaign of Shenmue 3 was counting $ 1 million. Nine hours later, the count reached $ 2 million. What allowed a 15-year-old video game series to achieve such a great result in such a brief time? Moreover, what was the real role of the players? If you want to answer these questions, the starting point

is the introduction of the Internet. Indeed, all the mechanisms we are going to describe might be impossible, and even difficult to imagine, if there was no web connection. The Internet shaped a new form of collaboration between developers and players, thanks to different variables such as: - affordable internet connections - low budget production tools - the growing strength of communities These variables shape new ways to develop video games.

New ways of development Tim Schafer is a big name in the market, thanks to successful titles such as The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. In the documentary Minecraft: The History of Mojang he explained that, back in the 80s, developers felt isolated, since the opportunities to get in touch with other creators were scarce. When a game got to be published, the only possible feedback to receive came from magazines and journals. Before the Internet era, in other words, developers were isolated units and the video game itself was intended as a lonely hobby. This was the result of the presence of the available technologies of the time - such as television - that did not allow a better interaction between human players. After the massive crisis of 1983, and the arrival of Nintendo and SEGA, a huge change came in 2005, with the advent of the 7th generation consoles. These new machines allowed the players to utilize the Internet. This was a remarkable change, since before the introduction of Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii only PC gamers could surf the web (actually, SEGA tried to include a modem in the Dreamcast console, in 1999, but the machine had a short commercial life, so this feature had not a great impact). The PC scene was shocked as well two years before: indeed, in 2003 Valve introduced a digital delivery platform called Steam. The importance of this move was remarkable as well: in other words, every Windows, Linux, and Os X user was able to buy - legally and without difficulties - thousands of games through the Steam platform. In 1983, the market collapsed because of the massive number of bad games and consoles available; nowadays, however, the number of games is a positive factor, thanks to the limited number of platforms and to the rise of big publishers such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Activision, and Nintendo itself. In many cases, most of these publishers are both developers and editors of their own games. For instance, the release of Halo 3 happened in 2007 when Bungie

- a software house owned by Microsoft - developed it. The game ran on Xbox, a console created by Microsoft, and if you wanted to play online with your friends you had to use Xbox Live, a digital platform created by Microsoft. In addition to these big names, however, small developers have reached notoriety thanks to the diffusion of the internet, and the creation of several digital marketplaces. There are several examples of small studios achieving success thanks to a single game over the years. These are some: - Minecraft, published by Mojang in 2009 on PC. After five years, the game still earns € 300.000 daily on several platforms. - Braid, published by Jonathan Blow in 2008 on Xbox 360. During the first week of selling, the game sold 55.000 copies, becoming the second best-selling title of all time on Xbox Live. - Super Meat Boy, developed by Edmund McMillen e Tommy Refenes in 2010 on Xbox 360. The game has sold more than a million of copies so far. - Dear Esther, developed by The Chinese Room, published in 2012 on PC. The game sold 750.000 in a year in a half, between February 2012 and May 2013. Another topic of discussion is the price: if you take a look at the multiple factors that determine the final price of a video game, it is possible to understand the different actors that play a part in the creation and distribution of a game. Here there is a hypothesis of price composition based on the example of a $ 60 game, as suggested by Perlman: - $ 15: retailer and specialized store share

- $ 7: communications and marketing share - $ 4: distribution (print, delivery, logistic) share - $ 7: royalties - $ 27: publisher/developer share The presence of all of these different actors determines a rigidity that happens to be hard to manage even for the publishers. It also leads the developers into an uncomfortable position; in the negotiation between publishers and developers, the first ones usually happen to detain the power. On the contrary, independent titles show a more elastic structure, since any publisher does not support them and - above all - they do not have to sustain investments in retail communication. There are many ways for a small developer to promote games in the online setting: contacting specialized websites, being present on social networks, or even organizing an open beta phase to let the players try the game and give precious feedbacks. It seems legitimate to imagine a situation characterized by two opposite sides: on one hand there are the small developers and on the other there are the over exposed big productions, which are usually sold for $ 70 or more. Speaking of these titles, it is interesting to underline some mechanisms focused on the creation of loyalty and fidelity in the long term; these strategies rely on the downloadable content selling, mostly known as DLC. Back in 2000, fast and reliable Internet connections were scarce: for this reason, the post-release support for a game was usually inappropriate. The additional contents were released at full price through the traditional retail channel. For instance, Activision published Call of Duty in 2003, and it released the United Offensive expansion in 2004, with a very different storyline. The introduction

of consoles provided with an Internet connection changed everything since the players effortlessly managed to download new contents and levels through the digital channel. In 2008, for instance, Activision published Call of Duty: World at War. This new game could count on five DLCs, exclusively available for download. There are not just differences in the selling channel but also in the very nature of the contents. Most of the time, the downloadable contents have a strong connection with the contents of the original game: for example, many DLCs are focused on the introduction of new weapons or multiplayer levels. Sometimes, the base game includes from the beginning some of these new contents, which are blocked by the developer: in order to unlock the additional content, the players have to pay an extra amount. If you look at the technological side of these strategies, you can see that the idea of offering new contents via the Internet it is not entirely recent: in fact, back in 1999 SEGA suggested the same idea on the Dreamcast console, but the initiative failed for many reasons. First, the quality of connections at that time was low, and the console itself was a commercial failure, clashed by the success of PlayStation 2. New technologies, growing costs of production, and the rising interest of the audience in video games created a stiff competition between publishers; the aim of the game is not to make people buy a single game, but to make possible that a game can generate revenues in a medium period and loyalty and retention in the long term. Call of Duty: Black Ops II - published in 2012 - is an example of this strategy: the game included four DLCs, a bonus map for whoever preordered the title and 23 packs dedicated to the visual aspect of the virtual soldiers, sold at $ 2 each. Even Ubisoft followed this road by introducing Watch Dogs: published in 2014, this game counts on twelve different versions, which offer several changes in the contents. The game can also rely on a DLC, which is focused on a

new storyline. Even minor productions - such as Train Simulator 2015 - followed this strategy: the base game is sold for € 34.99, but the players can buy 247 DLCs for an overall amount of € 1.804,29. On the other hand, independent games are sold at a lower price, and usually do not offer a big amount of DLCs: the price flexibility reflects a flexibility in the development.

What is the crowdsourcing? There are thousands of definitions of crowdsourcing but the focus of this book - whose aim is not the complete explanation of the nature of this mechanism - is just to understand briefly what crowdsourcing is about, and how it changed the video games field. Jeff Howe was he first one to give the original definition of crowdsourcing. He said that the core of this new dynamic is the “crowd,” that is a group of person that use the Internet. Therefore, the crowdsourcing is a production and problem-solving model that relies on collective intelligence, and it has the aim to achieve specific goals. The crowd we just talked about can either consist of a few people or thousands: if you look at some of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns, such as the Broken Age one, it is possible to realize that the project was supported by almost 90,000 backers. The etymology of the word helps to go further a simple definition: crowdsourcing

is

the

combination

between

“crowd”

and

“outsourcing”; the term outsourcing represents the practice of delegating to a third party a given task. The difference between the classic outsourcing and the crowdsourcing is that in the outsourcing an enterprise charges a particular task to an external enterprise whereas in the crowdsourcing, it is up to the above-mentioned “crowd” to accomplish the task. For instance, if you look at the Madden 15 game cover, you will notice the figure of Richard Sherman, chosen by 9.600.000 fans through a vote ran on the Internet. The change is now evident: Electronic Arts chose to delegate the task to the crowd and it did not make use of the communication experts to determine the athlete that suited the cover the best. When we talk about crowdsourcing, we talk about people, and this is both an opportunity and a menace for publishers and developers. Nowadays, every user is a prosumer with tons of information at his disposal. Actually, when a player decides to participate in the choice

for a testimonial or to pledge a game on Kickstarter, it does not mean that he is part of the company that creates the game. If something does not fit the player’s idea of how the game should be, he would probably complain online about what is not right. In other words, if a publisher or a developer chooses to go through crowdsourcing, they might lose a bit of power because a fraction of the created value is in the hands of the crowd. It is important to understand that every single user that steps up for a given gaming project does not always want the money back. In crowdsourcing, the gear that makes the mechanism run can be the reputation, the emotions, or a simple “thank you” (as in the Football Manager case). When this type of retribution is lacking, the effects of the enterprise on the public image could be highly dangerous. For a successful crowdsourcing initiative, it is important that the task delegated to the crowd has small, individual assignments. This is a necessary point, since the members of the crowd will dedicate their spare time to the project and only a job judged as accessible and fun can result attractive. Small tasks lead to small individual goals, and that leads to the necessity to dispose of a huge crowd of people. It has to be a critical mass of person involved in small tasks that - once they are linked together - will complete a complex assignment. In order to do so, the presence of communication tools and the affinity of interests between fans are functional to creation of the project. Sometimes, publishers and developers give access to the communication tools to the players: every major production, nowadays, possesses several communication channels such as official websites, social network profiles, specialized portals, and personal blogs. Every channel can contribute to creating buzz, viral

messages, and word-of-mouth. This is a crucial aspect of the new dynamics between players, publishers, and developers: for instance, look at the case of Mass Effect 3, developed by Bioware and published by Electronic Arts in 2012. The female protagonist’s aesthetic emerged thanks to the collaboration between players and developers. The official Facebook page of the title, in fact, included a vote in which was possible to choose between five different aspects. It goes without saying that the final result of the vote generated buzz and polemics, contributing to raising the awareness months before the official launch of the game.

Pillars and examples of the crowdsourcing in gaming The crowdsourcing relies on some important features. In the last few years, thanks to the introduction of new technologies and the role of the web 2.0, new forces contributed to creating a modern type of crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe suggested four specific forces: - The use of collective intelligence - Mass production of creative works - Organization of big data - The importance of communities Let us see how these forces created new dynamics in gaming.

The use of collective intelligence: the development of mods To understand the concept of collective intelligence, it is necessary to quote some remarkable authors. Scoot E. Page wrote that a group of random problem solvers would overpower a single problem solver; a decision taken by a panel of people, in other words, will result better than the decision of a single individual. In his “The Wisdom of Crowds”, James Surowiecki tried to explain why a group of people, most of the time, is expected to take a better decision than a single person and why the collective intelligence is a model that does not suit every situation in the real world. If you ask a hundred people to run a 100 meters’ race - explains Surowiecki - the average time will be much worse than the time of professional athletes. If you ask the same hundred guys to take a decision, on the contrary, the quality of the choice will be as much as good as those of the most intelligent person in the same group. Long story short: in many situations an average value, or an average choice, represents mediocrity. When we talk about decision making, instead, the average can represent excellence. Before the internet era, collective intelligence had few ways to manifest itself, for instance through vote or elections. With the creation of online social networks - not to intend with the merely social network site, such as Facebook or Twitter, but as a real network of people sharing information and passions - collective intelligence finds new ways to express itself. There are various examples of forums, messaging services, video chat programs, and many other tools that provide what is necessary to create brainstorming sessions, or joint problem-solving exercises, or even collective predictions on a particular event. Unsurprisingly, video games represent an outstanding example of collective problem-solving processes, distribution of responsibility and, eventually, allocation of tasks. One of these examples is a mod, which is a modification for games created by players. Mods can have

different forms, such as new levels, new weapons, updates for existing contents, or even the introduction of new features, stories, and characters. Players create mods according to their goals: most of the time, it is all about passion, reputation, social recognition, and self-esteem. If these words sound familiar to you, it is because the same themes have been discussed a few pages ago, when it came the time to explain why the “crowd” of the crowdsourcing accepts to do the job that publishers and developers find hard (or impossible, inconvenient, expensive…the list could go on forever) to do. It is interesting to stress that the presence of mods is directly proportional to the presence of a consistent fan base. The most important implication of these empiric conclusions is that mods are present not only in the communities linked to high-budget games, but even in small productions, as long as the games are judged as fun and entertaining. Most of the time it is not just a case of “what” a community does, but what a community “can” do, due to the possible limitations introduced by developers or even publishers. In any case, the point here is that as long as a critical mass of people loves the game, mods are bound to be coming. Remember what we saw in the quantitative aspect of fan base in crowdsourcing: the larger it is, the more various jobs - done by fans and users - will be shared. Look at the Pro Cycling Manager series, for example: it is a small production developed by Cyanide, a French studio. The game does not attract the attention of a big audience because of its genre: it is focused on cycling, a discipline which is not so popular in video games. Nevertheless, the game has hardcore fans coming from different European nations (mostly from France, Italy, Belgium, and Netherlands). Every year PCMdaily.com - one of the most important portal linked to the game - publishes an expansion pack, which is a collection of graphic enhancements, adjustments to the database, and the introduction of new features to reshape the user experience. The members of the community are in charge for creating the package by sharing out the tasks according to the ability of each

user. It is important to consider that some of the tools utilized by the fans are freely distributed by Cyanide itself, which provides what is necessary to create new shirts, rosters, and so on. We can now recall what it has been said about collective intelligence: a group of people without particular experiences or specific abilities (such as the community of PCMdaily.com), can do an equal or better job than the original developer can do (or could do, considering copyright or licensing issues). For a better understanding, here there are the several tasks accomplished by the various members of the community of PCDdaily.com in 2011: - Shirts creators (67 members) - Stages creators (21 members) - Various modifications (18 members) - Database creators (13 members) The PCMdaily.com expansion pack 2011 for Pro Cycling Manager 2011 registered 25.000 downloads circa.

Mass production of creative works: Steam Workshop Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, Threadless, iStockphoto are excellent examples of websites based on the so-called user generated content. These sites represent the foundation of the Web 2.0. The nature of these type of contents is fully described in thousands of books and papers: however, what is necessary for our analysis is the fact that these type of creations can be shared and modified by users. Wikipedia, for example, allows every user to use and create contents. In these creative works, the concept of collaboration is not something brand new: as Clay Shirky wrote in “Here Comes Everybody”, there are many examples of collective works in art. If you consider the making of the Cappella Sistina, Michelangelo Buonarroti’s masterpiece, it is important to mention all the other artists that contributed, like Baccio Pontelli, il Perugino, Sandro Botticelli. The Internet, though, brings quantity to the production of creative and collaborative works. The presence of production tools and the possibility to meet other people that have the same passion (the example of Pro Cycling Manager suits well this description), make the massive creation of creative works possible. In video games, Steam Workshop is one of the best examples of the gathering of all the creative works produced by players. It is a platform included in Steam and focused on mods and creations for the games sold through digital delivery. When a player purchases a game that supports Steam Workshop, the platform itself highlights the presence of available downloads and mods, so that it is easy to discover new contents for the title. It goes without saying that players produce the majority of these creations. This opportunity was impossible before the Internet, and even before the creation of platforms and marketplaces such as Steam. Back to 15-20 years ago, if you were not lucky enough to have an Internet connection, the only occasion to try mods and new contents for existing games was to browse magazines and journals, since they used to attach a CD or

a DVD (or even a floppy disk) full of demos, mods, and utilities. Therefore, the first form of mods sharing was, even before the internet, the presence of these supports.

Big Data organization: wikis and websites There are possibly hundreds of games in the majority of Steam, Origin, Desura, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live accounts, and all of these games bring with them new information, tags, classifications, reviews, ratings, videos, and photos. In a word: data. When you think about digital platforms, every digital platform from Facebook to your local library website - it is all about data. At the end of 2013, the number of new games published on Steam was close to 600, in 2014 the numbers rose to almost 2.000. Every year, a flood of new information and data invade digital platforms, websites, blogs and, thus, players. The compulsion to organize this big amount of data is one of the pillars of the crowdsourcing, and one of the mechanisms that can involve large groups of people, even if the users are not aware of it. Think about it: a hundreds of videos are uploaded to the servers of Youtube every second, Steam introduces bunches of games every month, and even a website can publish more than 50 news and articles a day. Moreover, in 2015 Twitch - a streaming platform focused on gaming - streamed over 459.366 years of contents. The big question is how to find all of this data, and how to match what a user wants with what a platform offers. If I feel like purchasing a new hack ‘n’ slash on Steam, but I cannot find what I was looking for in the first research page, I will probably change my mind, and go back to something I already have. So, what is the way to organize all these information? On Steam, there are recommendations for that: every player is provided with a customized list of titles based on the popularity of the games, on their ratings and other variables. There is the mechanism: the platform records our preferences and it confronts them with what other users said about other games. A game included on my recommendation list because of its popularity will be included by Steam because other players rated positively the title, and thus they have collaborated to organize the data. The same mechanism is

recognizable on Youtube pages, on Facebook posts, and even in music services like Spotify. When a user launches a customized radio on Spotify, the platform asks if the suggestions proposed match our taste. We can choose whether the suggestion fits it or not, and the system will be able to determine through our decision which suggestions will be more suitable in the future to a user who is listening to the same song. Two main laws lie behind big data organization: - The Sturgeon’s Law, which declares that 90% percent of everything is pure “crap”. Therefore, it is necessary to make rise what is left, and that would be possible thanks to the Internet, through mechanisms like the ones have been described just before. The more people are involved in the indexing of data, the more precise will be the results. - The 1:10:89 law by Horowitz. According to this law, on a hundred of internet users, one of them will create something new, ten of them will judge this new content while the 89 left will maintain a passive position (so-called lurkers). In this model, it is important to focus on the effort on 10% that judges the contents (that is, 10% of users that write reviews on Steam, or press the “Like it” button on Facebook), to generate positive word-of-mouth. The aim of the game for a publisher launching a title, or even for an indie developer trying to promote his new creation is to reach the tipping point. Once a message reaches a critical mass of users who approves it, the very same users will freely spread it to all their contacts. Big data organization, in video games, means digital delivery platforms, blogs, wikis, and websites. Wikis, for instance, are sites in which users edit and update contents about a particular topic (in our case, a specific game). Just like the largest wiki in the Internet, that is Wikipedia, all the other specific wikis are free and they can be

modified and updated at any time. The main goal of this type of websites is to index information, otherwise lost in the thousands of small forums or communities around the web. If I need information about how many missions contains the primary campaign of Brutal Legend, for instance, and I type on Google “brutal legend campaign”, the first website listed on the SERP (search engine results page) will be http://brutallegend.wikia.com. This website contains all the information about the game, and next to every paragraph title an “edit” link is included, making possible to update almost every word wrote on the website. It cannot be forgotten, however, the important role of specialized websites, in charge of gathering and filtering of information. Think about the homepage of your favorite website: the articles represent what the editor of the website thinks are the most important things to say to the world, alas the most famous games/news/videos/images to show. If the information is not so important, it will not be published. So, this filtering mechanism helps people to find what they are searching for.

Nostalgic digression: how information changes our choices The role of the information in video games is so important that it is necessary to stop our analysis of crowdsourcing and to dedicate some words to the matter. We are going to try to imagine a hypothetical “career” of a player, starting from the pre-internet era in the 90s. As we have seen before, years ago one of the most reliable sources of information, for a video game fanatic, was the release of several magazines. A way to try a game, instead, was represented by public stands in malls or supermarkets. The entire universe of the video games published on the market, for our hypothetical player, was represented by these titles, which were the result of promotional agreements between distributors, publishers, and retailers. The arcade cabinets represented another way to try games, but the titles available to play were as scarce as those offered in malls and supermarket. Therefore, at this point, the career of our player was stuck in a situation in which the information is tiny, and the number of games available low. Everything changes when our player gets his first console: at this point, the number of games accessible is higher, and the player can start trying various games, from best-selling to small productions. There are some impediments too, though: our player is still a child, so he does not have enough money to spend in video games. Furthermore, the most important filter between the young player and the video games is the presence of his parents, who might not be so expert in video games genres, so that they are naturally pushed toward the most famous ones. We have to remember that - at this stage - our young player has not access to the internet, and thus the information is low, and the possibilities to try several games rare. Let us jump ahead of a few years: our player, now, has got a console, a PC with an Internet connection and a little amount of

money to spend. There are more alternatives, now: our young player can trade games with friends, purchase old games from magazines and journals, or try to buy some new titles from his local video games shop. Besides, after trying the game, he can go online and find a forum to talk about the games he likes (or dislikes) the most. At this moment, the information amount is high, and finally, the player has the possibility to explore his tastes, since he has got access to a larger number of games to purchase. The real change comes, though, in the new millennium with the release of consoles provided with an online connection, with the beginning of the digital delivery market and with the introduction of Steam. In these circumstances, our player benefits from every available game released on the market, from the big productions that stand out every year at the E3, to the updates for old classics. A video games enthusiast - who started his career with a minimum amount of information and a few games available to try - has been able, in fifteen years or so, to experience a complete change in his possibilities, thanks to the high amount of information that the Internet had offered. More information means more opportunities to explore our tastes, and this leads to a possible experimentation and to the success of some indie titles described in the first pages of this chapter. As written before, though, the presence of such a high volume of information is useless, or even dangerous, if it is not organized in a way that can be useful for users. Let us continue our example, and imagine that in the summer of 2015 our player is interested in Fallout 4, a role-playing game released in November 2015. Moreover, imagine that our player is keen on this particular genre and that he does not want to wait four months to try a new RPG. Keeping that in mind, our player starts Steam, clicks on the “RPG” tag on the Fallout 4 page, and discovers a list of games that are compatible with the genre. A game called Hero of the Kingdom II

attracts his attention: the positive reviews and a 35% discount (due to the flexibility of price we discussed before) convinces him to purchase the game. There is it the role of the information: our gamer starts with the intention to buy a best-selling (Fallout 4), but the presence of filters and the recommendation system of Steam drive him towards a small production that suits his tastes (Hero of the Kingdom II). This is the role of so-called “aggregator” like Steam, Metacritic, specialized websites, or even the personal blog of a simple gamer. Their role is to gather information and filter what is worth and what is useless (that is: bad games). Thanks to this mechanism, players can explore the market. If Steam had not been filled with links on every page to titles played by our friends or the majority of the other players, our gamer would not have been able to discover the existence of a lot of games he could have possibly liked. At the same time, if the player’s favorite website would not offer the possibility to comment and confront his ideas with those of the other users, the hypothetical player could have been purchasing the flop of the year, and that would have been very frustrating for him. It is useful to remember this same mechanism when we will talk about crowdfunding: the high quantity of information that has to be found in every fundraising campaign is one of the key factors that convince players to pledge. The last step in the evolution of our player it is not directly linked to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, but it can help to understand how the Internet can change the dynamics between developers and players. Let us go back in 2013: our player just finished the game Mass Effect 3, but the ending does not encounter his taste. He does the only thing a player can do, that is to go online, find the official forum of the game, and start complaining with other disappointed players. When he finds out that there is a petition online that wants to push the developers to change the ending, he agrees without a

single doubt. A few weeks later, he finds out that Bioware - the developer of Mass Effect 3 - published a free DLC that tries to explain in depth the ending of Mass Effect 3. The information online leads to one specific implication: a group of players, in fact, was capable of forcing a developer to publish new contents to explain better its game. It does not matter whether Bioware has been successful in explaining its intentions. What matters the most is the players’ initiative because any of this would have been possible without our hypothetical player and his “career”.

The importance of the community: Project C.A.R.S. Alvin Toffler first used the word “Prosumer”. It is commonly used to describe the evolution of the role of consumers, which are becoming an important factor in the creative process of enterprises that brings new ideas, products, and services. Nowadays, this is a consolidated reality, and video games offer various examples. Seems legit to highlight the case of the PlayStation 4 official blog and its section Blog.Share. Thanks to this service, indeed, players can submit ideas and solutions that enhance the overall user experience. Every member of the forum can judge every single idea published on the blog, and the most viewed and appreciated are submitted to the developers of the console. In January 2015, ten ideas proposed by users had been implemented, such as the introduction of new languages, technical features, and updated UI (user interface). Back in the time, physical and geographical boundaries limited groups of video games enthusiasts, but today, as we have realized, everybody can be part of a community. This is possible not just because of the mere presence of the internet, but also thanks to other standard features: - Communities do not present a control system based on the presence of managers and subordinates. Every idea, if judged as valuable, emerges naturally from the mass of other proposals, just as we saw in PlayStation 4 blog case. - The members of a community do not follow instructions imposed by a “boss” or a chief. It is all about collaboration and personal motivations: this enhances the quality of ideas and creative works. - Communities can afford to create complex works, such as the Expansion Pack for Pro Cycling Manager we have seen before, because of the high number of members. In this production model,

every user - who always has a little time to dedicate to these amateur projects - has small tasks to accomplish, and this makes possible the development of mods and patches. - In a traditional work setting, money is the main incentive that pushes an employee to work hard. In a community, instead, the currencies that value the most are respect, knowledge, awareness, self-esteem, and the social recognition of abilities and skills. This is the so-called economy of reputation. Keep in mind, though, that reputation can lead to real money as the video games market taught us. Portal and Counterstrike, two of the most played on beloved franchises available on the market, actually were born as mods created by players, hired then by Valve. The communities represent the foundation of all the initiatives described before, such as mods, wikis, and all the contents included in Steam Workshop. An example of integration between the rising importance

of

these

social

networks,

crowdsourcing,

and

crowdfunding, is represented by the development of the game Project C.A.R.S., published in May 2015 on PC and consoles. Let us start with the economic side of the matter: to raise the necessary funds to develop the game, at first, the developer Slightly Mad Studios did ran a crowdfunding campaign on a platform called World Mass Development. Players from all over the world backed the project for a limited time, financing the game with different levels of contribution (from € 10 to € 10.000). Every backer had the opportunity to try different builds of the game and to write a feedback on the official forum of the title. This means facing the crowdsourcing context, since the continuous exchange of opinions and ideas between fans and developers determine essential features of the game, such as the implementation of a particular anti-piracy system, or the actual final price and the presence of future DLCs. Besides, thanks to the forum, backers had the possibility to post

creations and free mods, such as new liveries for the cars included in the game, or new audio effects. The crowdfunding campaign of Project C.A.R.S. ended in May 2014, with € 2.273.245 backed from 80.000 users circa, and € 1.500.000 invested by Slightly Mad Studios. In order to make an analysis that keeps this chapter linked to what comes along the next pages, it is possible to say that, in Project C.A.R.S., players have become both developers and publishers. Developers, because of the constant relationship between Slightly Mad Studios and the users of the official forum, that provided a crucial feedback. Publishers, because the realization of the game was possible thanks to the € 2 million rose by players.

CROWDFUNDING. EVERYBODY IS A PUBLISHER There is a force, out there, capable of driving feelings and money something like $ 1 million raised in just 102 minutes. It is the particular form of crowdsourcing called crowdfunding, which is constantly changing the video games world and the role of players. We saw in the last chapter that the collective intelligence is a phenomenon that involves both significant production (like Madden NFL 15) and smaller projects (Pro Cycling Manager), as long as there are users ready to spend their spare time to improve a game. The crowdsourcing applied to video games is a transversal mechanism, which is not necessarily linked to the budget, or to the genre or the demographic target of the game involved. It is a dynamic that has roots in the period in which the Internet began to be an affordable, reliable and relatively fast tool of communication and production. For example, in Italy the diffusion of the Internet started between the second half of the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium, with the introduction of ADSL lines and fiber optic solutions. The consequences of the arrival of the Web were immediate if you look at the creation of communities and mods online. For example, we saw that more than a hundred fans created the Pro Cycling Manager 2011 expansion pack, whereas some of the first Italian mods for FIFA 2001 - one of the first soccer games published in the new millennium - were created by no more than a bunch of people. The second pillar of crowdsourcing, which is the importance of amateur creations, represents a good occasion to analyze the role of independent developers, which is the result of the massive presence of open source software and new development tools. To explain why these developers are so important nowadays, it is useful to think about the market of video games as a long tail market. As written by Chris Anderson, in a long tail market, the supply curve follows the parameters of a power law distribution - in which there is a head

ruled by a few best-selling products - and a long tail, constituted by several products capable of selling a few units. In this kind of markets, the assumption is that the products that shape the long tail of the supply curve trade an equal - or similar- number of units comparing to the ones sold by the best-selling products. The aim of this chapter it is not to determine whether the video games market is a long tail market or not. What it is useful in our analysis is to talk about the forces that shape a long tail market, since this type of dynamics is recognizable in the case of the video games market. In a long tail market, accessibility is one of the most important features of creation tools, which makes possible to a wide audience to create new products and services. This condition appeared in the video games market since the ’80, when developers used to create games individually thanks to their skills. What has changed today? With the increasing complexity reached by video games, the financial aspect is more and more significant, and even if a single developer possesses what it takes to create a video game, it is possible that he is lacking of the necessary amount of money to create an appealing video game. For instance, he has to build (or maybe pay someone to create) visuals, a soundtrack, even the localization in other languages. Thus, accessibility of creation tools not only means open source software but also new ways to finance projects, such as crowdfunding. The Internet, however, is responsible also for a massive change in the distribution, which allows the creation of independent developers to reach the market: think about how music was broadcasted before the iPod and iTunes, and translate the same type of change into video games. We talked about this kind of mechanism in the digression about the role of the information in video games: players, today, can choose from a complete catalog of video games ever created solely from their computers, thanks to

digital delivery. This is so crucial that we have to explain how the distribution changed thanks to the Internet.

​Material digression: there is life beyond the shelf Let us imagine a typical situation: a new bestseller is coming out, and our hypothetical player is not sure about it. He does not know where to buy this new masterpiece. Months of rumors, anticipations, and hype (all products of the Internet advertising) are ready to explode in a burst of expectations, but our player is hesitant whether to get the game from the local video games store or the digital delivery. Every choice has its pros: physical copies of video games, for instance, still have an unbelievable appeal, especially for players grown up in the 80s and 90s. Digital delivery, however, it is easier, handy, and often convenient. Let us keep the example as simple as possible, and imagine that pre-orders are not feasible: the only way to buy the game is either to take the car and go to the local store or to click on the Steam icon. Since our hypothetical player is a nostalgic one, he choices to go to the local store. A physical video games store - like any other physical store - has to obey some rules: their shelves, for instance, can contain just a limited number of products. It is like a zero-sum game: if you want to include some new games, you have to eliminate some others. When it comes for our player to face the shelves of the local store, the video games universe is limited to what the shelves can offer. Since every single spot on a shelf has a cost, and since our local store is not in the charity business, every game has to repay the cost of being on the shelf. Thus, only the games that can register a reasonable margin find a place on shelves. The end of this mechanism is clear: in local stores, shelves can represent just a fraction of video games market, and blockbuster games form this portion. Why? Because they can guarantee profits, and repay the cost of being on shelves even for months. In other words, this is the head of the long tail. From the player’s point of view, the most important consequence of this mechanism is that, in the physical

universe, the customers’ choices are forced to remain within the boundaries of the shelves. Even if our player has doubts about whether to purchase the new blockbuster or not, the lack of alternative leaves him without choice: he will buy the best-selling one. What if he choices to buy it online? Every digital delivery platform has a catalog filled with every sort of games: there are so many titles available; in fact, some of the most important platforms are specialized in very specific niches. For instance, Desura is one of the most notable examples of platform that mostly sells independent games. When it comes to the player to enter a digital platform catalog, his universe is filled with thousands of games. The reason behind this is simple: once a store is online, it has no shelves to refill, and the zero-sum game does not exist anymore. It is like there is one, endless shelf, which can be occupied by every sort of game since one title does not remove space to other games. For this reason - and thanks to the information he can acquire from the Internet, as we have seen before - our player can start to experiment. Let us just leave our hypothetical player back in order to stay focused on a little developer on Steam: his game shares the same space of blockbusters, since for the retailer is now convenient to sell every possible game, and he has the same chances to attract attention. All of this is possible without the support of a publisher, or an editor, or a distributor: hence, this is the democratization of distribution, and it is the main reason that pushes the indie games towards players and, possibly, success. In the physical world, instead, the little developer is simply too small to emerge: without the support of a publisher, he cannot afford to print DVDs or promotional materials, and he simply cannot get close to retailers like GameStop or GAME without the help of a distributor. Moreover, even if he could, probably his game would sell a few copies so that the retailer will not find convenient to

place it on a shelf.

A further digression: the long tail of Minecraft The idea that the video games market is a long tail market is useful for the analysis of some games that, starting from the bottom of the tail, reached the head in a short time. The comprehension of these mechanisms is also suitable for our analysis of the crowdsourcing in video games since the dynamics described before (as well as those described in the next pages), can help games to gain success. The history of Minecraft is an excellent example: it is a game originally developed by no more than four persons, which was sold in more than 22 million copies on PC. Markus “Notch” Persson and Jakob Forsér developed the first version of the game in 2009: at that moment, Minecraft was one of the thousands of games that populate the long tail. It was independent from any publisher, it used to have a small budget, it was sold in digital channels, and even if it was not in its final version, it was already marketed in its beta phase. Then, something happened, and the game started to sell 10.000 copies daily. The reason behind this success lies in the distribution of the title, that even in beta phase was capable of reaching a wide audience thanks to the positive word-of-mouth generated by blogs, social networks, websites, and - most of all - youtubers and streamers. Persson founded the study Mojang with the money he gained: at that time, in 2010, the game started to climb the tail, leaving behind all those productions that were not capable of selling more. Why was that? Because the essential communication tools of the long tail, that are filters and aggregators of information, sent to the players the message that the game was good. This is, in fact, the most important implication of the long tail for producers and, in our case, developers: if your product is good, in other words, no matter how big or significantly it is, there is a chance that the communication mechanism of the internet can make emerge you from the crowd of other products. However, it is important to stress how this is not a synonym of profits and revenues: the long tail model does not

guarantee that every small developer will earn tons of money, but that this very developer has the chance to emerge. This can mean money, but also notoriety or personal gratification. Still, in 2011 Minecraft reached its final version, and in the same year, the game was a protagonist of the E3, the biggest celebration of high budget games. In 2014, the game was available on PC, iOS, Android, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Windows Phone. The game, in 2015, registered 54 million (and counting) of units sold on all platforms, just as any other big budget productions that populate the head of the long tail curve.

New possibilities for developers Another factor that increased the importance of independent developers is information. Nowadays, the Internet is accessible from a broad range of devices, which include tablets, smartphones, computers, but also cars, televisions, and watches. Once a game is created and published, the developer has to use every communication channel he can, such as blogs, websites, and giveaways (that is: giving away copies of the game so that the community can try it and talk about it). Let us make a recap, referring to the case of a small developer. He wants to create a game, but he has not some skills required to do it and, besides, he does not know how to publish it and distribute it. These are some initiatives our developer can execute to develop a game: - Development: the Unity engine is one of the most utilized tools for creating graphics and visuals. The Personal Edition of the software is free, and it includes all the core features. Other aspects of the game, such as the audio, can be created in partnership with artists. Every kind of platform is indicated to contact possible collaborators, even the comments section on Steam, or personal blogs. Once the partner is chosen, it is not necessary the physical presence of developers and partners, since all the work can be followed through the web via e-mail, Skype, social networks, and tons of other services. - Publication: the presence of a publisher can change the initial vision of a developer. You have to think about a publisher as a stakeholder that invests money in a project and wants some return on investment (ROI). To do that, publishers can push developers to encounter the tastes of the masses. This type of situation can lead to games that have a low level of innovation, or “sure” contents, that is already-known contents and appreciated by the audience. Players, though, are more and more aware of what the presence of a

publisher can lead to, especially in the case of series that proposes almost an annual release, such as Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed: this can result in a negative word-of-mouth. However, these dynamics does not seem to afflict selling results, at least not in the short term. Moreover, independence is nonsense, until it is not specified “who” is independent of “what”: in the case of a video game, the independence of “indie” developers is mostly from publishers. This is the main reason for the high level of freedom, mostly on the gameplay side, that is proper of indie developers. - Distribution: the digital channel is responsible for the majority of the units sold on most platforms, especially on PC. Besides, as we have seen, the presence of online marketplaces provides the necessary space for indie titles to emerge. - Communication: there are many ways to communicate with the fans, and most of them are free: a social network official page, an official website full of videos, photos and descriptions, giveaways, or even an open alpha or beta phase, so that the players can try the game and release a useful feedback before the final publication. One of the most important channels of communication is represented by specialized websites that, as we have seen before, act as a filter for information. Long story short: our small developer can count on innovative ways to develop - free from a partnership with publishers - and on a simplified distribution, thanks to the digital delivery platforms. A question has remained without a complete answer, though: what if our developer has no money to create his game?

A definition of crowdfunding The crowdfunding is a peculiar form of crowdsourcing in which the effort required to the crowd consists in raising a certain amount of money, not the execution of a given task. It is a collective effort from a crowd that gathers energies and money to back projects, organizations or even a single person, thanks to the Internet. When we talk about crowdfunding, we are talking about a subject (a developer, in our case) looking for money that it is not (entirely of partly) possible to raise in other ways. This is, again, a change in dynamics due to the Internet, since every entrepreneur has now the opportunity to get money without getting close to banks or family loans. With the crowdfunding, besides, the promoter of a project can get in touch with his backers continuously. In exchange for money, in fact, supporters receive several bonuses and rewards, instead of shares or stakes of any kind. The property of the enterprise behind the project - it could be a software house but even a single developer - remains in the hands of the promoter. This is another crack compared to the usual dynamic of financing, in which a venture capitalist decides to step in and to support a given project at the disposal of some shares of the company. In this case, the main difference lies in motivations: the venture capitalist usually invests money with the reasonable expectancy to get a ROI, while passion and admiration move the video games enthusiasts who back a project. These differences create a recoil on the creative freedom of developers, as we have seen before; the crowdfunding allows the creators to maintain absolute control over their games while the presence of a subject that has economic goals (a publisher, a venture capitalist, and so on) can influence it in several ways. This type of crowdsourcing has its downsides too, but in the last years it has been more and more used: in 2014, for instance, $ 1 billion was raised in different projects on Kickstarter, thanks to the donation of 5.7 million users. If you are wondering how strong the

impact of this new way of financing can be in video games, here there is an interesting statistic: in 2015, “games” is the category of projects that registered the most significant result in terms of money raised on Kickstarter (that, it goes without saying, includes video games too). Let us see, then, which are the most important elements in a crowdfunding campaign focused on a video game. We will talk about video games that have been already published in January 2016 or the ones that are still in development, in order to make the analysis more useful.

How and why the crowdfunding can influence the price of games Star Citizen is an ambitious video game: in January 2016, its fundraising campaign reached $ 105 million backed by the platform Robert Space Industries.com and Kickstarter. The incredible success of this campaign helps to understand how the crowdfunding can influence the final price of a video game. As we have seen before, the price of a video game is the sum of different factors: the shares of publishers, retailers, distributors, developers,

the

various

expenses

for

sales

promotion,

communication and PR. A game developed through crowdfunding, instead, usually presents a simpler price structure, since the shares of publishers and retailers are missing. Chris Roberts - one of the creators of the project - shared on his blog a comparison between the structures of price of a $ 60 video game developed through a traditional model, and the crowdfunding. Let us see what these differences are: - Development costs: in the traditional model, the return on the developer is 20%, which corresponds to $ 12. In this share, however, it could also be included the royalties of the producers of consoles such as Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. In the crowdfunding model, according to Roberts, the share equals 85%, and the developer absorbs it all. - Marketing/PR: in the traditional model, an average of $ 9 contributes to determining the final price of the game. The share is inferior in the crowdfunding, with $ 6. - Sales promotion: this category includes costs that are proper of the physical channel, such as banners and posters, which can count on an average of $ 9 on the final price of the game. In the crowdfunding game, however, this category of cost is absent, since

in most of the cases the games will be promoted exclusively through the digital channel. - Retail margin: in the traditional model, the contractual power of retailers determines 20% of the final price, with an average of $ 12. This category is absent in the crowdfunding model. - Publisher margin: we have already explained the editor’s role and how it can influence the development of a game. From a quantitative perspective, this category of costs is responsible, in the traditional model, for 30% of the final price, which is $ 18. That is the highest percentage of the entire price composition. In the crowdfunding model, the publisher is often absent, so this category of costs is null. - Platform margin: this is the only category of costs that is present only in the crowdfunding model since it is about the share of the crowdfunding platform. Every platform has its policy: we will face this topic later on. In this case, the assumption of this comparison states that without marketing and sales promotion costs, and with the lack of distribution on publishing margins, developers can count on a higher amount of resources. However, even assuming that this model would be right, the price of a video game can also be chosen by just looking at what the competitors do: here, it is a matter of perception. For an indie game, for example, it is hard to go over a certain price (say $ 25), because the perception of players towards this type of game sends a clear message. If an indie game is overpriced, no matter how good the game is, the players will think that it just costs more than what it offers, because the tag “indie” reminds the players of a certain type of game (that is: a game without an outstanding graphic, mostly without localization, or support, and so on). So, apart from the production factors, the price

of a game can be determined by the different price ranges. It can be a small indie from $ 0,01 to $ 2,99, a big indie from $ 3 to $ 24,99, a medium production from $ 25 to $ 36,99, a big game from $ 37 to $ 49,99, or a AAA production from $ 50 to $ 80, and so on. This is a point that needs a digression, mostly about Rolex watches.

Economic digression: different strategies of pricing in the video game market As in every other market, even in gaming the price has a central function, which is communication. Setting the right price is an operation that allows sending a specific message to the desired target. It is basic marketing: setting a low price for a luxury product will send the message that something is going on with the product itself. A person does not simply want to buy a Rolex, but wants to buy an expensive Rolex, not because of the watch itself, but for the social messages that this kind of purchase represents. It is useless to significantly lower the price of such a product because the utility a customer extracts from it does not lie in its function (that is to know what time it is), but in the social recognition – and thus, admiration – that he or she has enough money to afford it. What about the games, then? A video game is not a luxury product, but the social recognition factor is always important. For instance, buying a particular type of games - such as those who belong to big franchises like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed - is perceived by many players like too much “mainstream”, or “casual”. This message implies that who buys these games buys the name of them since the games themselves are not so good from a gameplay perspective. Who buys an indie game, on the other hand, can be handled as “alternative,” let alone “hipster”. Every publisher or developer, then, has to know what the target of its game is, and the choice of the price has to be a consequence of these types of decisions. Moreover, it is important to remember that a price plan can also push developers and publishers to sell a product even if the price chosen does not cover entirely the production costs. The typical example of this dynamic is the console market: at its launch, PlayStation 4 was sold at a $ 60 loss on every $ 399 console sold. In this case the strategy is clear: the factor that drives profit is not the

machine but the games. So the aim is to create a user base thanks to an aggressive price, and then sell as many games as possible. Scott Brodie is a talented developer who described four primary strategies of pricing in games. Let us have a look, then, at what are the factors that can determine the price policy of a video game: - Scenario 1: games that are particular known, or highly expected by players, can be sold at full price at launch (for example $ 70) since the players are not so price-sensitive. This is the case of big budget productions. In the medium term, the game can be put periodically for sale through retail and digital channels. In the long term (even years after the original launch), the game can be offered at a high discount rate (75% or even more). - Scenario 2: the launch price can be maintained even in the long term, without discounts or special offers. In this case, it is important that players judge the price as fair, so the publisher and the developer have to know how players perceive the game (mainstream, indie, alternative, casual, and so on). It goes without saying that without discounts, the game will lose all the attractiveness given by special events like the Steam seasonal sales, in which a lot of games gain the home page of the platform. - Scenario 3: sell the game at a price that is below the fair value perceived by the developer or publisher. In the short-medium term, this move can create a good image, and communicate that the game is a quality product sold at a superb price. Still, it is to consider the loss of profits in the long term, while the possibly mixed message sent by a low price does not seem to be a great danger, especially because we are talking about a scenario that involves mostly indie low budget games. - Scenario 4: go through the early access model. In this type of business model, the developer sells partial versions of its game at a

convenient price; in other words, players pay for incomplete games, that eventually – but not necessarily – will be finished. As long as the developer continues to create the game, the initial price keeps on increasing until the final launch of the game, when it reaches its high. This is a model that is encountering several flaws since many early access games seem to be stuck in this sort of limbo, in which the game is enough developed to be sold, but not enough completed to be judged as a full product worth of money. Choosing the right price is, as we have seen, a strategic choice, which has its repercussion even on crowdfunding projects. Once the game is finished, setting a low price will attire the anger of original backers, who happened to pay more for an incomplete game. However, setting a high price may not encounter the approval of new users, who think the game is worth less. In this case, the developer might not register enough profits to gain money, nor to cover the costs the raised funds have not managed to cover during the crowdfunding campaign.

Which platform? Star Citizen is one the most backed project in the history of crowdfunding but, as we have seen before, its fundraising campaign is not entirely based on a crowdfunding platform. The idea is that it is not always necessary to take advantage of one of the several crowdfunding platforms widespread on the internet to be successful: in the Star Citizen case, the Kickstarter campaign raised only $ 2 million, while the rest of the fund was gathered by the website Robert Space Industries.com. What is interesting for our analysis, though, is the different nature of the several platforms entirely dedicated to crowdfunding. Here there is a small, brief, and certainly not complete list of crowdfunding websites utilized for the fundraising: - Kickstarter: it can be utilized to back creative projects through donations. It is not allowed to fundraise money in projects that involve the creation of a new enterprise, charities, or a single-person need. - Indiegogo: a platform utilized for the fundraising of creative projects, such as video games, but also for individual needs, or charities. - Appbackr: a platform focused on the support of developers of mobile applications. - Crowdfunder: a platform that allows backing startup and enterprises projects, social activities. - Crowdrise: it is used for charity campaigns and personal causes. In the video games case, there are three privileged options: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and an official website.

Punctual digression: why Kickstarter is one the most successful crowdfunding platform Most of the time, we will discuss on the examples about Kickstarter campaigns. Historically, this was not the first platform of crowdfunding on the Internet, but today it is surely one the most important, at least for video games projects. It is interesting to understand why Kickstarter is so popular, and which the reasons for this success are. Among other factors, the so-called “all or nothing” mechanism seems to have a crucial importance; according to this mechanism, the effective transfer of money from backers to promoters happens only if the campaign reaches its funding goal. From the single backer point of view, this particular dynamic is an advantage, because the effective transfer of money happens just towards projects that prove themselves successful since they reached their objectives. The final quality of the funded product is always unforeseeable, but the fact that the project is funded is, at least, a first assurance that the project will be finished. Besides, Kickstarter does not operate as a judge or a referee, but just as an intermediate. If the project does not meet the quality level promised during the campaign, in other words, backers can complain only about promoters without judging the fundraising platform. For this reason, the all or nothing mechanism decreases the risk level of supporters: if a project is so bad that does not manage to reach its target, in fact, the backers do not have to spend a cent. In the platforms that do not offer this type of mechanism, once a user backs a project, the money is gone for good, even if the product does not reach any of its objectives. The all or nothing mechanism is also good for promoters and creators because it forces them to create catching and effective communication campaigns. This can discourage all of those who are searching for easy money without actually working on projects or products. If creators do not show their work, in other words, it is

difficult that people will back them. Despite these precautions, though, there is the real danger of backing something that reveals itself as an utterly crap. For this reason, more than one commentator warns against the so-called Kickstarter bubble. The presence of these projects, in other words, may be extremely dangerous without information, but even with all the news and updates needed, it is possible for some successful campaign projects to turn out to be insufficient (we will return on the Kickstarter bubble later in the book). Bubble or not, at this time, the reason behind the Kickstarter’s success lies in numbers: the user base, in 2015, counts up to 10 million, with more than 99.000 projects funded. All these figures are connections between people who want money and people who hope to give their money. Imagine Kickstarter like a big network in which every node is a backer or a promoter, and every connection is a single donation to a project. In this vision, Kickstarter can be considered as an example of the Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network - for every single user - is equal to the squared number of the users of the network itself. Practically speaking, every new user of Kickstarter will have the chance to find an interesting game to back on Kickstarter because of the high numbers of projects, which are the consequence of a vast number of connections between backers and promoters.

Behind every game, it has to be a great story The crowdfunding campaign of Mighty No. 9 was a success: it started on Kickstarter on September 2nd, 2013, and reached its funding goal of $ 900.000 after two days. A month later, the counter was up to $ 3 million, allowing the developers to add new stretch goals, such as new levels, and versions of the game. It is obvious that not every campaign can count on such results, but it is as much as true that the campaigns that have reliable results are the ones that show a strong historical background. In the Mighty No. 9 case, the element that pushes the players to back the project was the history of the game, that is the presence of Keiji Inafune. Inafune is the creator of the original Mega Man, a title that, starting from 1987, created a franchise capable of sold 30 million copies in almost 30 years. Mighty No. 9 was proposed to the players like the spiritual successor of Mega Man, and this was the trigger that captured the passion of the enthusiasts. The importance of the narrative in a crowdfunding campaign, especially in a video game campaign, requests a study of people who is working on the game because it represents the element that can hook the player’s interest. Actually, the main page of the Kickstarter campaign of Mighty No. 9 claimed: “Every aspect of development - art, level design, music, programming, etc. - is being handled by veteran Japanese game creators with extensive experience in the genre, and with Mega Man, in particular, all the way up to including the project’s leader, Keiji Inafune himself!” In a common development situation, players do not have the chance to personally help the developers they love and respect. This is a very much influential factor because a regular purchase cannot offer this opportunity to a player. Time is another important topic in the narrative of a crowdfunding campaign: we will see later on that the average length of a campaign is almost 34 days, and in this range of time available

the project promoter has to do everything possible to achieve the final target. For this reason, in many campaigns it is possible to find a pressing call to action, which is usually associated with a sense of urgency. In the Mighty No. 9 page on Kickstarter, for instance, it is possible to read phrases like: “We need your help! Let’s make something amazing, and let’s do it together!”. It was this urgency, and the history behind Keiji Inafune, that allowed the campaign of Mighty No. 9 to reach 11 stretch goals (that is: goals that go beyond the original funding goal), with 1696 average backers per day.

Stylistic digression: indie, indie -ish, indie –er, more indie than you, and all that is left We have seen before what the term “independence” means in gaming: if you are an indie developer, in other words, you have no boundaries represented by publishers, shareholders, advisory boards, and so on. Indie does not necessarily mean a single person producing a game, but that the economic and creative direction of the production - as well as its artistic and narrative targets - are totally in the hands of the developers. Of course, these productions can count on crowdsourcing and, most likely, on outsourcing too, especially for the creation of graphic and audio assets. So, independent does not mean individual or isolated. That said, it is also true that there are different kinds of indie games, and this difference lies in the perception the players have about these productions. Let us look at Journey, a game developed by thatgamecompany and published on PlayStation 3 in 2012. It is known as an indie game capable of great success since it became the fastest-selling game on European and American PlayStation Store. It also won the award as “Best Indie Game” at the Video Game Awards 2012, one the most prestigious award in the industry. Moreover, if you search for Journey on Google, and click on its Wikipedia page link, the first line states that the Journey is an indie game. So, the perception is clear: Journey is an indie game. However, this is not entirely correct, because the role of Sony as publisher was crucial. Assuming that thatgamecompany had artistic freedom (and this was likely to be true), it is without any doubt that Sony had a major role since the Japanese company owned the majority of the profits and the royalties of the game. It was so true that thatgamecompany had to wait almost a year and a half before gaining some money from the game. The initial profits, in fact, represented the return on the

investment

of

Sony,

and

this

was

confirmed

by

the

thatgamecompany founder, Jenova Chen, who clarified that the money Journey made was used to pay back who primarily invested in the game (that is Sony). So, maybe Journey it is an indie game from an artistic point of view, but it is not an entire independent game, because of the important role of Sony. It is an indie- ish game, perceived as indie by players, but not entirely indie. This is an important point because being considered as an indie game can be a huge advantage since the “indie” label can bring an image of purity and honesty, especially in comparison with big budget games produced by big publishers (big publishers like Sony itself, for instance). Let us look now at the “Best indie game” of the Spike Video Game Awards 2013 (that was the new name of the Video Games Awards in 2013). The winner was Gone Home, a game developed and published by The Fullbright Company. This is the first difference with Journey: while Sony published the game of thatgamecompany, Gone Home found its way to the market thanks its developers. Moreover, the history of the game shows how difficult it was for the developers to find the necessary funds to create the game. The Fullbright Company that created Gone Home was built up by three members that - to restrain the development costs - decided to move into a house and to transform it into an operative base. Since the funds were scarce, they decided to adapt the game to their resources, creating a title in which the only character on screen was the main protagonist. This title was mostly built without external resources, by a small team, which had so much control on its game that decided to cut every other character but the main protagonist. This work is definitely characterized by artistic, narrative, and economic freedom. This is, in another word, an independent game. All these games seem natural indie at first sight, but the differences in their development will come out easily when it will be time to

explain the role of the funding goal in crowdfunding, since this peculiar type of crowdsourcing appears to be an evolution in the way developers and publishers communicate with players and with their perception. We will see how we can find the traditional models (developer plus publisher, or developer with its funds), next to new hybrid schemes in which the developer is backed by not just a publisher, but also by players, at the same time.

The importance of the video campaign Crowdfunding is not a game: it involves real money, real enterprises, and projects that can represent the fortune of a business, or the nail in the coffin of new technologies. For all of these reasons, backers do not want to throw away their money on projects that do not have a rich narrative to read, but also a strong video factor to see. In exchange for their money, players want to see the product, they want to know who is making it, and how. The presence of video has a crucial importance, especially in projects like video games, but it is also important to understand what type of video has to be shared. There is, even from this point of view, a difference between the traditional development, and the crowdfunding development. Publishers, most of the time, share a video to create buzz and awareness around a game. Trailers are usually the responsible for creating “hype”, so that the players will talk about the game through social networks, both digital and physical. Let us make some examples: Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V is one the most successful titles of all time, with nearly 54 million copies sold between 2013 and 2015. The first trailer of the game was released on November 2nd, 2011, almost two years before the official launch of the game, in September 2013. In January 2016, the overall views of the video were 43 million. The second trailer of the game, instead, was released a year later, November 11th, 2012, and it counts 22 million views. It is interesting to compare some statistics of the views: it is true that the first trailer was released one year before the second one, but it is also true that the original trailer had a much stronger effect than the second. From 2011 to 2015, for instance, the first trailer generated 90.100 new users subscription to the official Rockstar Youtube Channel. The same statistic from the second trailer, from 2012 to 2015, reveals that the video was responsible for 36.435 new subscription, which is less than the half of what the first trailer did, with only less than a year of exposition.

The sharing statistic, though, shows an impressive figure, since there is a draw, with 48.787 sharing of the first trailer vs. 42.257 of the second. The first video creates awareness while the second confirmed the interest of a type of user that is willing to share the trailer. Therefore, the role of the first trailer is likely to create interest in the project and to create awareness around a game, or a project, that was unknown until the first live video. The following videos, instead, have to consolidate this interest, calling to action all those users that are willing to share, comment, and create contents about it. These players, it goes without saying, are the real ambassadors of the game. They can generate word-of-mouth and viral messages and spread them around social networks, again both digital and physical. The role of the videos in a video game launch, as we have seen, it is important: it is right for a big budget production like Grand Theft Auto V, and it is even more important for an unknown project that comes up on Kickstarter. It is the first and more powerful way to communicate the vision of the promoter of the project because a good trailer helps to get the players close to the game, but also to the developers. The trailers of games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed does not have necessarily to show who create the game. In these games, the presence of authors and developers in trailers is often secondary or, on the contrary, it is worth the creation of unique contents, like “making of” videos that are shared across the entire lifespan of the game. In a crowdfunding campaign, though, players do not want to know just the game they are going to back, but also who is making the game since we saw how strong the relation between developers and players could be in a fundraising initiative. The nature of the video can change according to the type of project and its audience: think about the case of a new film, which is trying to emerge thanks to the crowdfunding. It is likely that a trailer

created in a professional way, with a good acting and a strong directing, will attract a possible backer. There is an example of this even in the case of video games, especially if you look at Indie Game: The Movie. Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky created this documentary to describe the development of three indie games, which are Fez, Braid and Super Meat Boy. The game went through a Kickstarter campaign, which raised more than $ 23.000 (the funding goal was $ 15.000). The first section of the main page of the campaign was dedicated - it is not a coincidence - to the video. The promoters of the project choose not to show the video directly on Kickstarter, sharing instead a simple link that redirected the players to a Vimeo page. The nature of the attached video deserves a brief analysis: first of all, it is more than 4 minutes long, which means that it exceeds the average duration of a traditional trailer (in a crowdfunding campaign the promoters have to provide a larger amount of information). As written before, the trailer of an artistic creation has to show a certain level of technical quality, and this was the case of Indie Game: The Movie since its video was shot in a professional way. This element finds a match if you look at the comment section of the trailer: a fan interested in knowing the type of equipment used to shot the trailer wrote one of the first posts. This is the point: if the fundraising is intended for creative projects, such as video games or even a documentary about video games, it is important to show a particular taste, not only in the development of the final product but also in the presentation. What about the campaigns focusing mostly on technological projects? Let us introduce, here, the Oculus Rift case. When the aim of a campaign is to promote a game, or film about a video game, or even a book focused on this topic, the most important question for a backer seems to be: “How is it?” In these cases, the type of product is clear, and there is not so much to say. A

video game is a video game, and so in this type of artistic creations, the focus goes on “how” the game/movie/book delivers its message (through its genre, gameplay, style, and thousands of other variables). However, when a potential backer goes on Indiegogo or Kickstarter and finds out that Oculus Rift is “the first truly immersive virtual reality headset for video games,” the first question to ask seems to be: “What the heck is this thing?” In our case, Oculus Rift is a headset that allows living virtual reality experiences, in which the movements of heads and hands are translated into a digital environment. The device went through a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $ 2 million, and it ended with the acquisition of Oculus VR, the developer of the device, by Facebook. We are not interested in other aspects of the development of this product, here: what is important for our analysis is the type of video that Oculus VR choose to propose to its future backers. The video was a bit more than 4 minutes long, like the one we saw on the Indie Game: The Movie project. Nevertheless, its nature was different. It is shot in a professional way too, but the communication was based on two goals: let the people know what Oculus Rift was, and who was making it. The first person participating in the video was Palmer Luckey - founder of Oculus VR: in the first seconds of the video, it was possible to catch Luckey’s background and his passion for games and technology, which started at his parents’ house in Long Beach, California. This first sequence had the aim to create a bond between Luckey, and the mass of enthusiasts that have been dreaming of these types of devices since they were children; perhaps, some of them tried one of these products, like the Virtual Boy of Nintendo, commercialized in 1995. The narrative is clear: a boy wants to go over the traditional experience given by video games and start to craft and experiment in his parent’s garage. The rest of the trailer continued with an alternation between images of the device, and interviews of other testimonials. Among these, the figure of John Carmack, the creator of massive successes like Doom

and Quake, represented a sort of endorsement, a clear signal to the players who could have trust Luckey, because even Carmack himself seemed to believe in the project.

Honest

digression:

miscommunication

and

honesty

in

videogames trailers Trailers are - as we have seen - one of the most important ways to communicate with players and backers. From time to time, though, trailers can cause miscommunication and negative word-of-mouth. This is a dynamic that belongs to high budget games, most of the time caused by poor communication between developers and PR. Players seem to understand this mechanism since the awareness against dishonest trailers is usually high. One of the brightest examples of this potential downside of the vast power of trailers is the Watch Dogs case. The first trailer of the title was shown at the E3 2012, and it proposed a stunning graphic quality. A year later, though, the developer (and publisher) Ubisoft showed a new trailer, which presented a massive downgrade in graphic. The fact that the game was intended to run on PC and consoles that belonged to two different generations (such as PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, for example), generated buzz and all kinds of speculations about the real nature of the game. Did the final graphic of that game appear in the first trailer or in the second? Besides, what was the real difference between the various versions of the game? The PlayStation 4 version, for example, was good enough, or was it just like the PlayStation 3 one? You can notice that such a communication mistake can generate a huge number of issues, and indeed, it did. Players started to question the honesty of Ubisoft by making jokes about the quality of the game and by creating a negative word-ofmouth that lasted for months. When the game came out, one of the most important questions the press had to answer was not about the quality of the gameplay, but the quality of the graphic. Nonetheless, the game had a positive impact on the market, but what happened because of the trailers was something that spoiled the image of the game somehow. The cause of the trailer miscommunication, again, was an internal

misunderstanding between those who developed the game, and those who had the task to communicate with the players. At least, this was the justification of Ubisoft, which explained how sometimes many people working on the same project could alter communications issues. Again, players are aware that a bias between what is shown in trailers and the real game graphic is possible; this is mostly true for high budget games, in which graphic has a significant role. This type of game, on the other hand, most of the time can stand against negative word-of-mouth since in the majority of the cases the impact on the market (regarding distribution and selling) will be good nonetheless. In games funded through crowdfunding, trailers have a different role: most of the time, these type of games do not have a high budget for graphic, so the possible deception that could come from a trailer could belong to what the game can offer regarding gameplay, narrative, and so on. However, dishonesty is not a good choice for small productions that try to stand up through crowdfunding. Players can believe in the honesty of a small developer backing a project that reveals itself a disaster once but not twice. This is a significant difference that stands between a small developer and a big studio supported by a publisher: negative word-of-mouth and miscommunication will overpower an independent developer while a big software house is able to survive, and to sell a lot of copies.

What the creator wants: the choice of a right funding goal The aim of the game, in a crowdfunding campaign, is to convince a crowd to pledge a given amount of money: this quantitative target is known as funding goal. It is a critical parameter, the only sacrifice that the project promoter asks for. Think about it: every crowdfunding campaign present pages full of videos, captivating texts and great narratives, but if the contribution level required is too high – that is, the price asked to support the project – even the most fascinating game will not receive its funds. This is even more important in campaigns based on the already cited “all or nothing” mechanism. Long story short: if the goal is set too high, the campaign might fail. What makes “right” a right funding goal, then? Let us start with the first hypothesis, which is the setting of a small funding goal. From the promoter’s point of view, that might be an easy choice because it can make believe that the goal will be easier to achieve, and it might send the message that the project it is not made to earn easy money. The backers, though, may have another mindset, and it is also true that the presence of a small or high funding goal seems to be less important than the presence of a right structure of rewards and tiers. The funding goal, in other words, appears to be an important signal, but from an overall perspective. If the game is fascinating and the backer can afford to pledge the tier he believes more appropriated, the decision to pledge will not be particularly influenced by the overall funding goal. Besides, most of the time backers and users are aware that the estimated cost of a project might rise unforeseeably. Let us come back to the Indie Game: The Movie case: there could have been dozens of issues and troubles that could have pushed up the overall cost of the project. It might have been the substitution of some technical equipment or even the failure of the car used to drive to the developers that would have been interviewed. It is important

that the promoters of the projects include even these unpredictable costs in the overall funding goal: backers will not judge it as a cynical move and, on the contrary, it will create a more positive image. What about a high funding goal case? We have seen that the overall cost of the project is less important, from the backer’s point of view, than the individual cost of single tiers. However, a funding goal judged as too high might send negative signals, in the immediate term and in the medium-long period as well. A crowdfunding campaign can fail for thousands of reasons, like the unattractiveness of the product, or the lack of information. Once a first try fails, though, the promoters can attempt to launch a new campaign but, if you consider the importance of the economy of reputation on the Internet, there could be a problem of public image. Backers can think that the project has a low level of quality since the founding goal is lowering, or just can lose trust in the promoters. There are examples, though, that show how lowering the funding goal can be the right move: consider the crowdfunding campaign of the game Consortium. The first campaign had a funding goal of $ 200.000 and it ended with just $ 9.000 raised. The same title, though, went through another Kickstarter campaign a few months later with a funding goal if $ 50.000, and it reached the success, thanks to the $ 70.000 funds raised. That said, how could a promoter be sure that the funding set is right? Obviously, there is not a magic recipe, but only different approaches. A smart move is to observe other campaigns focused on video games, just to see how others developers and promoters worked. Later in this chapter, to this end, we will concentrate on the most important gaming campaigns in January 2016: the average funding goal in these initiatives was $ 920.000. Besides, we have seen that that funding goal has to include comprehensive categories of costs, such as:

- Development costs - Rewards costs (those linked to the rewards promised to backers, such as exclusive contents, tour guides, etc. etc.) - Shipment costs - PR and communication costs (these costs include advertising, press campaigns, and the possible work of PR, video producers of video designers) - Thousands of other types of development costs related (such as salaries, rent, health care, PC and devices needed to work, taxes, food, software licenses, electricity, transports, outsourcing, time, and so on) - Platform fees The last entry in the list changes according to the platforms used; Indiegogo, for instance, has a 5% fee on the entire funds rose, plus another fee linked to PayPal. The total fee is close to 10%.

What the creator offers: the structure of rewards and tiers September 19th, 2014 was a good day for RPG lovers thanks to the launch of Wasteland 2, the sequel of the original Wasteland, published in 1988. The game went through a more than successful Kickstarter campaign, with the original funding goal of $ 900.000 outnumbered, considered the $ 2.933.252 rose in just 35 days, between March and April 2012. Those who were satisfied the most were probably the twelve enthusiasts who had the honor to take part in the launch party hosted by Brian Fargo, Alan Pavlish and other developers in Newport Beach, California. Moreover, in honor to these enthusiasts, the developers inserted into the game twelve special zones - called “shrines” - which had special features. Again, each one of these fans received 50 copies of the game, a medal, and an action figure with the catch phrase of the game: “Explodes like a blood sausage.” All of these rewards were worth a price: $ 10.000. This was, in fact, the last reward tier of the crowdfunding campaign of Wasteland 2. One the most important elements in a crowdfunding campaign is the structure of the rewards and tiers. The developers ask this only sacrifice to players, so it is important to make sure that every level is well calibrated since each tier is linked with a particular award that can go beyond the product the campaign is focused on. From a quantitative point of view, for instance, the most used tier of contribution on Kickstarter is $ 25, followed by $ 50, $ 10, and $ 100. What seems to be important is the nature of the rewards. Most of the backers are looking for elements capable of making them unique and different from the rest of the crowd of other backers, and for something that makes them close with developers. The overall strategy seems clear: the more the contribution level rises, the more the nature of the reward is immaterial and offers unique and unrepeatable experiences. It is for this reason, for instance, that the most generous backers have the chance to appear in the comic

books they financed, or in the credits of the films they pledged, or to be part of a video game they followed on Kickstarter, as we have seen in Wasteland 2. The value proposition of the several contribution level follows a clear path: the first tiers grant material rewards, such as the game itself, but also posters, action figures, a copy of the soundtrack, or special editions of novels. As the contribution level grows, the only way to offer more value is to separate the physical dimension of the game (both in digital and in retail versions), from the experiential dimension. Let us take a brief look at the contribution level structure of Wasteland 2, and to the number of backers for each tier: - $ 15: a digital copy of the game (32.781 backers) - $ 30: a digital copy of the game and an art book (8.828 backers) - $ 50: a physical copy of the game, and the first episode of a special episodic novel (7.968) - $ 55: a digital copy of the game, the first two episodes of the novel, and the access to the first playable version of the game (2.274 backers) - $ 75: same of the $ 50 tier, plus premier access to the beta on Steam and to the episodic novel (1.131 backers) - $ 100: previous rewards plus the Collector’s Edition of the game, with action figures (5.218 backers) - $ 150: the $ 100 reward plus an exclusive t-shirt of the game (776 backers) - $ 250: the $ 150 reward plus a physical copy of the game signed by its authors (1.200 backers) - $ 500: previous rewards plus a special Wasteland survival kit (172 backers) - $ 1.000: previous rewards plus the chance to be part of the game.

The name of the backer was given to a weapon, a location or a nonplayable character (147 backers) - $ 2.000: the creation of a particular in-game object, with a backstory inspired by the backers (2 backers) - $ 2.500: the $ 1.000 and $ 2.500 rewards, plus the Collector’s Edition signed by developers, and ten digital copies of the game (13 backers) - $ 5.000: previous rewards, 30 digital copies of the game, and the creation of a statue with the resemblance of the backers placed in the game (9 backers) - $ 10.000: previous rewards, and the participation in the launch party hosted by the developers (12 backers) Starting from the $ 1.000 tier, we can see how the rewards are focused on the personal experience of the players, which can satisfy their need for auto realization and social recognition. It is not a coincidence that the description of the $ 5000 tier stressed that: “with 30 digital copies of Wasteland 2, you will be a hit with your friends”.

Crowdfunding campaign is communication campaign The attractiveness of crowdfunding rose over the past years. For instance, Kickstarter registered seven projects backed in its first day of activity (April 28th, 2009) with $ 1.804 raised. Four years later, backers rose to 54.187, who pledged 1.985 projects with $ 4.029.585. The increase of attention towards this type of crowdsourcing generated interest in a large number of players, which often reach the main page of a crowdfunding campaign thanks to links found on websites and blogs (once again, this is the filter function of these types of media). Every promoter has to organize a communication campaign along with the crowdfunding one: we just saw how important the narrative and the videos are, but these are just part of a strategy that has to be as more organic as possible. All of these actions should be planned before the beginning of the campaign, follow the development of the game and, most of all, stabilize the level of awareness throughout the duration of the fundraising initiative. The presence of a communication plan has not a strategic importance, but even an organizational one: during the days of the campaign, in fact, the promoter (intended as a single developer or a software house) has very little time to think about what to communicate. He has to follow the community feedback, the level of the pledges, the relations with websites and blogs but, above all, he has to develop the game he is promoting. It is a circle: if the developer does not continue to develop his game during the campaign, he cannot communicate to his backers that the creation of the title is going well, but if he does not communicate it because of his engagement in the development, supporters will start to think that the game will not be finished. It is also important to act before the starting of the campaign so that the project can count on the support of some fans from the beginning of the fundraising initiative. It is a common mechanism:

if a player is not sure whether to back a project or not, the presence of other people who already pledged the game can be crucial. In other words, the big “0” on the counter of the fund raised has to disappear as soon as the campaign starts. This mechanism is important at the beginning in all the crowdfunding initiatives, but it is also important during the final phases of the campaigns with the “all or nothing” mechanism, especially if the funding goal is almost reached. In this type of campaigns, the fact that the project could not have been fully developed because of the lack of funds pushes the potential backers to pledge the project. Analyzing the number of pledges, it comes out that the most important phases in a crowdfunding campaign are the starting one and the ending one, because the call to action given by the all or nothing mechanism seems to be higher at the very beginning and at the end. Here there are two possible, unconscious thoughts of a potential backer: - At the start of the campaign: “If I don’t pledge now, nobody will start talking about this project, and then it won’t be fully developed.” - At the end: “If I don’t pledge in these final hours, the campaign will not reach its targets, and so the game won’t be fully developed.” So, which are the possible actions that a developer can take to raise the awareness towards its game? Here there is a list: - Distribution of press sheets: this activity is necessary to get the attention of websites, blogs, and influencers. Generally, this type of initiative has to be done at the beginning of the campaign, so that the website can publish the news in time, and the players can visit the campaign page and start backing (as written before, at this time it

would be better to own some funds that have already been pledged). - Images and videos: we have seen how important trailers are, and which their functions are. The first trailer has to tease the audience, but it also has to explain clearly what the game is, and above all “how it is” (how the story is going to be structured, which genre is going to be used, ecc.ecc.). It is important to include the trailer in the first press sheets so that websites can include it in the news. For the images, it goes without saying that the preparation of a press kit with a bunch of screenshots is a must. Attention to the logo: it has to be readable and, preferably, it should not change during the campaign. - Social network: the game could be present on every major social network,

especially

Facebook.

The

management

of

this

communication channel must follow the game every day, so it is essential to create updated content and to answer quickly to every possible feedback. Before the beginning of the campaign, a Facebook page needs to be created, so the game can already count on a critical mass of fans. - Pay-per-click advertising: it is not a popular option, but it can help in some cases, for example in the mobile games one, or in any case in which the game is linked to strong keywords. - Alpha or beta versions: it is important to take advantage of partial versions of the game throughout the entire campaign, and especially in the last phase. Sharing a demonstrative version within blogs and websites can help the game to reach a new level of awareness, which can push the last wave of pledges. Time is a factor, here: the promoters have to calculate when to send the game to editors and journalists, giving them the time they need to analyze the game, write about it, and eventually publish the article. For these reasons, this action must not have been prepared too much late, but even not much early. -Embargoes: going forward - once the campaign is done and the

game is developed - it is important to set an embargo date, so that the majority of media cannot write about the game until a specific date. This allows the game to have a crucial exposition the moment it comes out on the market. This is the path: players surf the websites they like, read about the game, then visit a digital delivery platform (or a retailer), and buy the game. If the embargo is not respected, this circle can be broken and it would be a risk for the game as well. However, it seems that these kind of communicational dynamics are mostly good for games that can already count on some passionate fans. Crowdfunding, in other words, is a model that seems to work better with projects that players are already aware of, before the starting of the campaign. We will clarify this argument in the next paragraphs.

A much-needed digression: crowdfunding is just advertising after all A

project

promoter

can

start

an

endless

number

of

communication actions. As we have seen, most of the actions involve the Internet, considering that the web is the privileged channel for the developers who choose the way of crowdfunding. It is the campaign, then, the subject of advertising, while the communication is the way to raise the awareness towards the game and the fundraising initiative itself. Let us imagine an upside-down situation, though: can the crowdfunding campaign transform itself in a communication tool, instead of being the message to communicate? The answer seems to be “yes” if you consider the two following examples. The first case is the development of Shenmue 3. This game was capable of raising $ 1 million in 102 minutes just after its presentation at the E3. The initial funding goal of the game on Kickstarter, though, was $ 2 million - a non-sufficient amount of money to develop such a game. In other words, there is no way that the third chapter of a best-selling needed just $ 2 million for its creation. The first Shenmue, for instance, had (at least) a $ 45 million budget, which is much more than the amount required from the developer Ys Net through Kickstarter. So, what is the trick here? Traditional high-budget games do not need crowdfunding: Grand Theft Auto V, which is the most expensive game ever produced with $ 256 million - it was developed with traditional solutions and sold at full price. Even the most successful crowdfunding campaign for a video game - the Star Citizen one - in January 2016 raised “just” $ 105 million, so the comparison between the funding of traditional blockbuster games and crowdfunded games is not thinkable yet.

However, it is interesting to underline the role of Sony, the producer of the console that Shenmue 3 will run on. The company confirmed its help in the development of the game. This support is focused on various aspects, mostly marketing and investment. Think about Sony as the biggest and strongest backer of Shenmue 3. A kind of backer that can allow the game to catch the attention of the audience during one the greatest event of the year, which is E3. What matters the most, though, is that Sony openly confirmed its PR support to Shenmue 3. Think about it: what Sony announced at the E3 was not the arrival of Shenmue 3, but the beginning of its crowdfunding campaign. The spotlight was on the campaign, and this is the reason why players thrown their money on the screen monitors, or smart phones or tablets, straight to the Kickstarter game page. It is not clear, in January 2016, what is the real role of Sony in the development of Shenmue, neither the role of the Japanese publisher SEGA, which has confirmed its support as well. Still, the essential question is: was the crowdfunding strictly necessary for the development of the game, or was it just a way to gain immediate awareness? The use of crowdfunding as a communication tool can damage projects too, though: this is the case of Project C.A.R.S. 2. On June 22nd, 2015, the developer Slightly Mad Studios announced the beginning of the relative crowdfunding campaign, which had a £ 7.000.000 funding goal (the first one for Project C.A.R.S. was £ 3.000.000). The time of the announcement represents the real problem here: the first Project C.A.R.S. was launched in May 2015. Just a month later - players noticed - Slightly Mad Studios launched a new fundraising initiative for a second title, so the users started to ask about the developers’ real intentions. It is all about perception: the Project C.A.R.S. development took four years, and the crowdfunding campaign for this title lasts, at least, two years (from 2012 to 2014). In

2015, the beginning of the second crowdfunding campaign meant that the new game would have probably come at least two years after. This is a typical time lapse in a video game series. Technically, starting a crowdfunding campaign is not a wrong move now, but it might sound like the developers are abandoning the original Project C.A.R.S. they launched just a few months ago. So, it happened that the distance between the starting of the fundraising campaign and the beginning of the development of the new game was not perceived, and this represented a potential damage to the production. The

crowdfunding

can

assume

the

role

of

a

proper

communication tool then. One of the most important consequences of this dynamic is that even big publishers can take advantage of it. Most of the time, when a prominent developer of the past launches a new crowdfunding campaign with a small funding goal required (we will talk about this later in the book), it is nothing more than a market test to verify if the players (the backers here are the actors of a focus group) want the game or not. It does not matter how much Sony is involved in the proper development of Shenmue 3, since it is clear that the Japanese company contributed in PR and advertising, and that the game will run on its console (and on PC). For this reason, Sony included the announcement of Shenmue 3 during the E3 conference: the aim was not to confirm that the game is on its way, but to start a proper market test, and it was a great idea since the game raised tons of money in minutes. In other words: “the actors of the focus group want the game, let’s do it!” Big publishers and developers use crowdfunding this way. That said, it is important to think that, as well as every other communication tool, crowdfunding can have a potential downside, and the Project C.A.R.S. 2 taught us how to.

Not too long, not too short It took 47 days to raise the $ 2.080 amount needed for the development of the point-and-click adventure Resonance. The funding goal was very small - $ 150: however, in a month and a half, the project raised almost 14 times the amount requested by the developers. To raise the $ 900.000 needed by inXile Entertainment for the development of Torment: Tides of Numenera, on the contrary, took just six hours. In the 29 days of the campaign left, the amount rose to $ 3.100.000. We could make thousands of comparison like this, but the question remains the same: how many days a crowdfunding campaign must last? A first answer can be: “as long as possible”. It is possible to think that a long campaign can attract more backers and funds, but the empiric experience does not confirm this assumption. The ten campaigns that succeeded the most in January 2016 show an average length of 34 days, whereas the most frequent value is 30 days. One of the reasons of these values lies in the nature of the projects we are discussing about. Video games are capable of moving passion. Think of the Torment: Tides of Numenera as the sequel of Planescape: Torment, a successful title launched in 1999. It is too easy to emphasize that the majority of the backers was the crowd of players who, back in ’99, played at the first game. Every grown-up player who spent his youth playing the game, then, was more than happy to back the project. This psychological mechanism lies beyond many of the crowdfunding campaigns based on video games. If you look at the day-by-day dynamic of the fund raised, it is possible to create a sort of cycle in the pledges of a crowdfunding campaign. Most of the time, there is an initial peak in the pledges,

thanks to a high participation from the backers. In this time-lapse, websites and blogs start to introduce the projects, the first trailers come up, and the awareness is generally high. Then the level of attention decreases, until the last days of the campaign. Here, the “all or nothing” mechanism, as we have seen before, can be crucial, and it pushes the game towards its goals. The role of the communication tools is essential as well, as we have seen before. In the campaign of Torment: Tides of Numenera, for instance, 63% of the total amount ($ 3.100.000) was raised in just two days, and 25% in the last three days. During the 25 median days, on the contrary, the amount raised was equal to 12% of the total.

The

most

important

gaming

projects

funded

through

crowdfunding at January 2016 It is important to look at the quantitative aspects of the dynamics we have considered so far, to understand the real importance of crowdfunding in video games. These are the first ten gaming projects funded through crowdfunding regarding funds raised in January 2016: 1) Star Citizen, with $ 105.764.643 and counting, raised through Kickstarter and the platform Robert Space Industries.com, against a funding goal (on Kickstarter) of $ 500.000. The game is currently unreleased. 2) Ouya, with $ 8.596.474 raised through Kickstarter, against a funding goal of $ 950.000. The console was launched in July 2013. 3) Shenmue 3, with $ 6.547.180 and counting, raised through Kickstarter and the official site of the game, against a funding goal (on Kickstarter) of $ 2.000.000. The game is currently unreleased, expected in late 2017. 4) Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, with $ 5.545.991 and counting raised through Kickstarter and Fangamer.com, against a funding goal (on Kickstarter) of $ 500.000. The game is currently unreleased, expected in 2017. 5) Torment: Tides of Numenera, with $ 5.002.634 and counting raised through Kickstarter and the official website, against a funding goal (on Kickstarter) of $ 900.000. The game is currently unreleased, expected in late 2016. 6) Mighty No. 9, with $ 4.000.000 circa raised through Kickstarter the official website, against a funding goal (on Kickstarter) of $ 900.000. The game is currently unreleased. 7) Yooka-Laylee, with more than $ 3.889.830 raised through

Kickstarter and the official website, against a funding goal (on Kickstarter) of $ 250.000 circa. The game is currently unreleased, expected in 2016. 8) Pillars of Eternity, with $ 3.986.929 rose through Kickstarter, against a funding goal of $ 1.100.000. The game was released in 2015. 9) Psychonauts 2, with $ 3.829.024 and counting raised through Fig.co, against a funding goal of $ 3.300.000. The game is currently unreleased. 10) Broken Age, with $ 3.336.371 raised through Kickstarter, against a funding goal of $ 400.000. The game was released in its final form in April 2015. Obviously, this is a very unstable chart, since new projects come out every day and many positions may change at any moment. However, there are some interesting thoughts that may emerge from the analysis of these projects. First of all, the platform: as we have seen before, Kickstarter is the primary choice, but in more than one projects the end of the campaign on Kickstarter did not represent the end of the fundraising, which continued through the official websites, especially with PayPal donations. Speaking of the nature of the projects, Ouya shines as a unique case, since it is not a video game, but a console. However, the other nine spots are occupied by very different games: Star Citizen is a space simulation, Broken Age a point-and-click adventure, Pillars of Eternity a role-playing game. The genre, in other words, does not seem a factor that can influence the fundraising initiative, especially when a catching narrative sustains the campaign. This is the real factor that pushed all of these games to the top of the chart. Every game, in fact, is either a sequel to a great success in the past, or the new project of a developer known for a game launched some years

before. This is the case, for instance, of Broken Age and Psychonauts 2, both promoted by Double Fine. Broken Age, in fact, is the first point-and-click adventure in years written by Tim Schafer, one of the big names in this particular genre, whereas Psychonauts 2 is the sequel to a beloved game launched in 2005. Moreover, YookaLaylee is the spiritual sequel of Banjo-Kazooie, a platform launched in 1998, whereas Shenmue 3 is the third installment of the series started in 2000; Torment: Tides of Numenera is the spiritual successor of Planescape: Torment, while the already cited Mighty No. 9 is known as the new creation of the Megaman creator, Keiji Inafune. Even the overfunded Star Citizen itself can count on Chris Robert, a developer known as “legendary,” as the Kickstarter page of the project says. It seems quite trustworthy to say that crowdfunding is the ideal solution for productions that are smaller than high budget titles, but not particularly low. This is the same point we stressed in a precedent digression: there are different types of independent titles, and not every kind of game can have the same return from crowdfunding. In other words, titles that cannot count on the nostalgia factor do not seem to have the right elements to climb the charts of most successful projects because they lack attractive for the most important target for this type of initiatives, such as gamers grown up during the 80s and the early 90s. These types of players, instead, are looking for crowdfunding projects capable of making them revive their childhood games. Apparently, this not means that crowdfunding is not working for tiny projects with very small budgets, but it is much difficult to stand up from the crowd of games with a strong background looking for backers. Let us have a look, then, at average values: it is hard to say what the average length of the campaigns is because most of them continue even after the end of the “official” campaign on Kickstarter or other platforms. However, if we consider just the Kickstarter campaigns,

the majority of them lasted 34.4 days. The average value of funding goals is $ 1 million circa.

Quantitative, very significant, necessary digression: funding goals are Trojan horses An entire paragraph has been dedicated to the right setting of the funding goal, but we have to stress this matter again now that we have talked about the different kinds of indie games, and most of all the fact that, for the biggest titles, crowdfunding is nothing more than a marketing tool. Katie Chironis’ precious analysis introduces the case of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a game that has the standard identikit of an announced success on Kickstarter (nonetheless, it occupies the fourth spot on the chart we have seen in the last paragraph). It is the spiritual successor of a great success of the past (that is the Castlevania series), developed by another “legendary” creator (that is Koji Igarashi), whose initial funding has been goal outnumbered by the effective funds raised ($ 500.000 asked vs. more than $ 5 million raised). So, what is going on here? The funding goal is below the average of $ 1 million circa, and this is where our analysis starts. Setting a right funding goal is not straightforward, in theory: as we have said before, both high and low funding goals can send misleading messages, and this can make the campaign fail. However, some funding goals are so low because they have a specific function: they are, in other words, Trojan horses. Their job is to get close the game with the first bunch of players (the backers), to see if the project has some chances to be successful on the market. According to an interview released by Igarashi, 90% of the funds needed for the development of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was secured before the starting of Kickstarter campaign. This money comes from publishers, just like in the traditional way of development. However, the crowdfunding campaign proved that people wanted a similar game, and plus it provided other funds. Let us have a look at what

numbers are telling us here: if the original funding goal was just $ 500.000, which has always been considered as 10% of the budget of the game, this means that crowdfunding has never been considered as the primary source of fundraising. It would have been nonsense to propose such a small funding goal, in other words, if the Kickstarter campaign had been thought as the main resource for the development of the game. Again, let us come back to our first assumption: most of the time, the most important projects based on crowdfunding are not using it for its principal fundraising role, but for communication. That said, if you start a project with $ 5 million secured and then you manage to count on $ 5 million more raised by players, of course, you could do a much greater job. There is nothing wrong in these types of initiatives, let us be clear: big productions found this new, appealing way to get close to the fans. If you are a big game produced by a big publisher, the crowd will look at you in a certain way: for example, just think about how players consider every new iteration in the Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed series, and how much irony and hatred surround these big franchises. This does not mean that these titles do not manage to sell a lot of copies, but their perception is undoubtedly different in comparison with an indie title - at least, perceived as indie - that is funded by players on Kickstarter (again, at least is thought to be funded by players). What is even most interesting, though, is that using Kickstarter as a communication tool creates some dynamics that may damage titles that are not supported (for real) by any publisher. The average funding goal required by the current most successful projects in crowdfunding is $ 1 million, but seven projects out of 10 require less. Let us come back to Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. The analysis of Chironis hypothesizes that 15 employees form the team behind the development of the game. Estimating a monthly cost of $ 10.000 per person for a middle-sized development team

and a production cycle of two years (the game is indeed expected in 2017), it is easy to see that the result is $ 3.6 million. Then, there is outsourcing, which means that PRs teams, designers, actors, and other people are involved in the production. In the Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night case, the Kickstarter page lists at least 20 extra staff. The count rises up to $ 7.2 million. So, if our very basic and hypothetical math is right, the production budget rose to $ 10.5 million circa ($ 5 million from publishers and $ 5.5 from crowdfunding), against $ 7.2 million costs, and this works properly because the game has some extra budget needed for its development. The thing is that small funding goals can influence all the other minor projects. If the Kickstarter goal had been $ 2.2 million rather than $ 500,000 (gathering all the employees’ costs not covered by the publisher, for example), probably players would have reacted differently, because proposing a significant funding goal is always risky. In our top ten chart, in fact, only Psychonauts 2 offered a high funding goal ($ 3 million circa), but it managed to reach it thanks to the strong background of the game (and also because of the experience of Double Fine with the crowdfunding, as we will see later on the third chapter). This tendency to lower the funding goals started with these indiebut-not-so-indie productions. It means that, in order to raise funds, the funding goals of real small productions have to be at least as low as the big indies ones. The motivation is simple: a player will be less likely available to back an unknown project that requires $ 2 million, in comparison to a $ 500,000 great remake. Nevertheless, the $ 2 million amount is supposed to be enough to cover almost every cost of the small production, whereas the $ 500,000 amount might be an expensive Trojan horse. So, a potential reason for a Kickstarter bubble does not lie in the high number of potential crap proposed by promoters and creators, but in the fact that, sooner or later, the firm effectiveness of this

platform as a communication tool may force small independent developers to ask less and less until a reached funding goal will not mean almost anything, economically speaking. Then, Kickstarter will be occupied just by big indies that are already backed by publishers or other capitalists. Of course, this can be the end of crowdfunding for small developers, but not for players: as long as they want to back their favorite games, the mechanism can carry on. Perhaps, there is nothing wrong about it, and after all it is nothing more than a hyphotetical scenario.

BRAVE NEW WORD: THE BROKEN AGE CASE Before 2012, crowdfunding was responsible for few successes in gaming. The funds raised in that period were way lower than the ones we have seen in the previous chapters. Two of the most important projects backed in 2011 and 2012, for instance, were the documentary Minecraft: The History of Mojang (March 2011, $ 210.297 raised), and the movie Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie (February 2012, $ 325.327). It took a particular project to get players close to the crowdfunding. Actually, it took a game promoted by a specific kind of creator that led the way to the other projects we have talked about. In other words, it took Broken Age. Back at the beginning of 2000, the crisis of point-and-click adventures reached its highest point with the abandon of LucasArts, the publisher who invested the most in this genre and who achieved success with titles like The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. Tim Schafer was the trait d’union between these titles; he was in charge of creating dialogues, screenplays, and general direction. Both players and critics consider Grim Fandango one of the best adventure games ever made. Still, the launch of the game, in 1998, was a commercial failure, not just because of the game itself, but also because of the changing in the video game market. In that period, 3D graphic showed its real potential, and so the attention of the audience went towards more dynamic genres, strongly linked to new technological aspects. This situation led to the separation between LucasArts and Schafer, who created a new software house, called Double Fine. In the next years, Schafer developed and supervised several games for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Android and iOS. It is important to state that all these games developed or not by Schafer - were not point-and-click adventures. Brütal Legend (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, 2009), for instance, was

a sort of action-adventure; Stacking (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, Linux, OS X, 2011) was a puzzle game; Costume Quest (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android, 2010) a role-playing game. However, in 2012 Schafer decided to take advantage of crowdfunding to raise funds for his new point-and-click adventure, the first since 1998, initially called Double Fine Adventure (and then renamed Broken Age). Schafer acted like this for one simple reason: nowadays, the point-and-click genre is not so popular, so it is hard to find the support of a publisher. These days, small and independent software houses and European publishers dominate the genre. This is the reason that pushes Double Fine towards crowdfunding, and it was clarified by the pressing call to action addressed to players, who were invited to participate in the creation of the project like never before. The first lines that a player had the chance to read on the Kickstarter page of campaign, in fact, were “An adventure game from Tim Schafer, Double Fine, and YOU!”

The background This chapter does not want to recall the entire crowdfunding campaign of Broken Age, since there are more than complete sources than ours. The aim, here, is to underline some important aspects of this crowdfunding campaign, which was the first project capable of raising millions not only in gaming, but also in the entire history of Kickstarter. As we have seen before, one of the factors that are capable of moving players’ money is nostalgia: in the Broken Age case, the “nostalgia factor” was the presence of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert (considered as the father of the point-and-click genre). The experience promised by the game was nothing new, though: it was just a good, old-fashioned point-and-click game. So, why so many people were willing to back a game that belonged to a niche genre? The answer is: timeline. Back in 1998, when Grim Fandango was released, critics considered the title as a huge success. It won several prizes and awards, and it was listed as one of the greatest game of all time. Despite this, the game was a commercial failure. In the short term, this dynamic led to the abandon of the genre by Schafer, and it is not difficult to imagine why: if the most appreciated point-and-click adventure was capable of selling just a few copies, it meant that there was no room for that genre anymore. This led to the creation of Double Fine and the development of titles that belonged to other genres. However, in the long term, the commercial failure of Grim Fandango had a silver lining: it created a sort of cult around the title, sustained by a small group of hardcore fans. Think about time and opportunity: those who played Grim Fandango in 1998 were probably teens or teenagers. We saw in a previous digression how the age is a significant factor in the “career” of a player, mostly because it is linked to economic independence (that is: the more you

grow up, the more you have money to spend the way you like it hopefully). This means that in 2012 they were all “young” adults, with money to spend. When the developer that delighted their childhood stood up, asking for help, the more reasonable thing to do was to help him. Again, here, it is basic marketing: the backers gave their money to Double Fine not only for playing a game (they could have picked one of the thousands point-and-click adventures on Steam), but also for what it represented. It reminded a time in which maybe they were thoughtless, undoubtedly younger, without problems or responsibility. It is unconscious thinking, but it is what pushes all the players towards crowdfunding campaigns promoted by famous developers.

Psychological digression: the continuous research of instant gratification Crowdfunding is a matter of perception. If a gamer perceives that the game promoted is interesting, or that the reward tiers are fair, he will back it. This is an important point, because perception is what creates our reality, and thus it influences our behavior. It is interesting to see how players’ consuming behavior changes by observing TV advertisings. Let us look at the example of Xbox One the last Microsoft console - launched in November 2013. One of the commercials of the launch campaign was called “The Perfect Girlfriend?” and showed several interesting elements. The main characters form a young couple, most likely Generation Y (born between 1980 and 2000). They live in a modern house and they are creative, brilliant people; as a matter of fact, the spot gives us a hint by showing a cello on the background. At first, the boy is engaged in one of the strongest franchise on the market, which is FIFA by Electronic Arts, but then the girl arrives, and the console welcomes her by saying “Hi Jennifer”. The girl sits on the couch next to the boy and talks to the console, ordering it to change the game. Then, she takes the pad and starts to play. The first thing to notice is that the commercial is apparently referred to a male target (as the title says), but there is also a lot of room for the female protagonist since the female segment of the video games market rose in importance. The second thing is the age: the protagonists are not children, nor teenagers, and this goes against the perception of video games rooted in some countries (particularly in Europe). The third thing is technology: it is important to say that this particular advertising employed features proper of Kinect 2, a device which is rarely used today by Xbox One, but it is also crucial to stress how the innovation leads us toward instant gratification. Think about how it was to play with a Sega Genesis, back in the first ‘90: most of the time you could not save, and if you wanted to

change game you had to stand up, search for the game in your library, then put the cartridge in the console, and eventually play. With a modern console, on the contrary, it is possible to save almost in every title (so you can come back and play exactly where you left), and if you want to change game, most of the time, it is not necessary to move at all, since they are already stored in the memory of the console. Switching between games is a matter of pressing buttons, and most of the time it can be done in blink of an eye. Technology is able to give us what we want in less and less time, mostly because it reduces the physical dimension of products: just think about how different is to listen to an album on vinyl and then through an online streaming service. In the second case, you can jump instantly between thousands of songs effortlessly, choosing to listen to the song you like the most. It is possible to do so even with a vinyl, but it costs time (you have to search for the album, and then treat it carefully), and it cannot be as precise as the operation offered by streaming services. It is interesting to think whether the crowdfunding brings this type of gratification or not. The answer cannot be entirely positive, because most of the time, it could take months or even years from the moment a player backs a game to the moment that the player could start the game. There is, though, a partial gratification, given by the fact that the player recognizes that he did the right thing by backing the game.

Communicative, very large digression: how advertising changes over the years Gaming advertising is interesting because it clearly shows what target publishers and developers tried to persuade over the years. It is also interesting because it shows how the role of video games has changed over the years: these dynamics, in some ways, led to the success of crowdfunding nowadays. It is a bit surprisingly how video games were presented back in 1972, for instance, in the Magnavox Odyssey commercials. The machine was intended as a device useful for all the components of the family, not just for the kids. According to this vision, the Odyssey was addressed to a particular target, which is family. It was considered as a competitor of traditional television channels, something to use when parents and children would have been reunited under the lights of the small screen. In this first phase of the video game market, it seemed that the most important targets were adults and parents, rather than kids. In one of the Atari 2600 advertising from 1977, for instance, there was not a single child on screen through all the 30 seconds of the commercial: the main character is a middle age man shopping in a mall, instead. Jumping through the years of the big crisis of video games, we enter in the big SEGA-Nintendo challenge. Here there is a first, substantial difference with the 70s commercials dedicated to video games: the targets of the message are younger people, and the commercials address directly to them (a bright example of the “pester power” strategy - which consists in convincing children to ask their parents to buy a given product). For instance, Nintendo used to show children, and the so-called tweens (9-12 years old) most of the time. The use of teenagers (12-19 years old) is limited because, in this particular period, Nintendo was focused on younger segments. Then, there was SEGA with a different strategy, which addressed to

teenagers and twentysomething (20-29 years old). Between 80s and 90s, SEGA was the underdog of the market, and its offensive against Nintendo was built on few points: in its narration, SEGA described Nintendo as gray, boring, slow, and provided with an expensive console (especially when both the Super Nintendo and the SEGA Genesis came on the market). Therefore, SEGA found every commercial as the perfect occasion to explain why the Genesis was better, and this led to continuous comparison between the two consoles (SEGA was always the winner, of course), and between their two main characters, that is Sonic and Super Mario. Nowadays it is likely to see something similar in the US telephone carriers and Internet services competition, but in video games it is something relegated to that given period. Nevertheless, there is a factor that keeps together the commercials of this first period, which ends with the arrival of the PlayStation. From the 70s to the early 90s, the majority of the commercials have focused entirely on the technical characteristics of the consoles. If you look at the commercials of Magnavox Odyssey, Mattel Intellivision, Atari 2600, Atari Jaguar, Super Nintendo, or SEGA Genesis, it is clear that the emphasis of the communication lies in the games, but mostly on the technical features of the machines. Initially, SEGA based its communication on the fact that its consoles proposed a 16-bit graphics experience; on the other hand, Nintendo utilized commercials to inform players that the NES was sold with R.O.B. the robot, and other devices. This emphasis was necessary because the audience was not aware of these technologies before. In a commercial of the Magnavox Odyssey, for example, it is possible to see the correct instruction for the setting of the device on the TV. In the second half of ’90 Sony introduced a huge change: the first PlayStation. In the commercials of the console, the emphasis is all on games and slogans, not on the technical features of the machine. The console itself, in fact, is barely visible throughout the

commercials. The comparison with several commercials of the same generation consoles, such as Nintendo 64, showed the same dynamic - although Sega initially continued the strategy against Nintendo even with PlayStation. The PlayStation, however, was one of the first consoles that showed an unusual commercial campaign, which was not based on the presence of the console, nor on the games: the clear example is the commercial “Alien Girl”, aired in 1999. Going forward, this mechanism seemed to be stronger than ever with the sixth generation consoles (starting from 1998), which are remembered for some creepy commercials and abstract campaigns. Again, in these commercials the console merely fits in the narration, in fact the emphasis is all on the slogan. Even the games – that have always represented an irreplaceable element - tend to fade away. This is because at this time the audience was exposed enough to brands like Nintendo, SEGA, and Sony PlayStation (we are not even talking about Microsoft, with Xbox, launched in 2001). This is a significant difference because, at that time, the consoles finally represented brands stronger enough to be advertised without the support of first or third party games (that is: external publishers). This opportunity allows further elaborations for creating campaigns with an artistic value, like the ones Sony did with some of the PlayStation 2 commercials. David Lynch filmed one of them and, as you expect, it is quite weird, mysterious, and does not quote the console at all. Even Microsoft entered in the market with a thoughtprovoking campaign, through the commercial “Life is short. Play more”, which was censored in some countries. In this particular period, the primary function of the commercials is not to explain “what” the console is, but to clarify “how” it is, what kind of experiences it proposes and which the most important topics are. This is the same dynamic we suggested before, during the analysis of the functions of trailers and videos in a crowdfunding campaigns, and that lies in the difference between the presentations of a new device, instead of a new game.

The same “creepy” trend in commercials is confirmed with the next generation of consoles by Sony and Microsoft, and partially by Nintendo. However, in 2006 the Japanese company launched Wii, which was a console with a revolutionary control system, based on the controller Wiimote. One of the most important features of the commercials of Wii is that, for the first time since the 70s, the family keeps coming back in a gaming commercial. Now, the game is addressed to a wide range of segments, from children to the gray market (that is: senior customers). Thanks to the precise nature of the controller, in fact, Wii was able to create experiences that suit players of every age, promoting physical activity and playing with other people. Let us go back to our days and face the commercials of the last generation of console. Sony and Microsoft choose again to apply the same strategy. This time, though, the aim is not to propose creepy and cryptic commercials. Actually, the focus is on the reproduction of some of the dynamics of many launch games (so the presence of third party titles shows up again in the advertising), or to emphasize particular feature of the consoles, bounded to the social aspects of these new machines. Now, let us combine all the aspects of this analysis with what we saw in the digression about the “career” of our players born in the 80s, and we can have a more profound and deep background of the average player. This is important, because this is the kind of player interested in crowdfunding today, and it is because of him if Broken Age, and the other titles we saw in the previous pages, have the possibility to go on sale.

The great story of Double Fine Let us go back to crowdfunding: assuming that what we have written before is correct, the Broken Age campaign possessed three common conditions in all the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in our times. Firstly, the promoter of the project, Tim Schafer, is a “legendary” developer, known by a wide audience. Secondly, the game follows the footsteps of the previous works of Schafer; it is not linked to the other titles of the developer, nor is a sequel, but it belongs to the same genre, which is a point-and-click adventure. Thirdly, the catching funding goal represents a crucial condition. The initial amount required was $ 400.000; $ 300.000 were directed to the development of the game and $ 100.000 to the cost of the documentary “Double Fine Adventure!”, which enumerated all the phases of development. In 2012, a funding goal of this proportion sounded remarkable, especially for a video game. Nowadays, these conditions are recognizable in the majority of the most prominent crowdfunding campaign in gaming but, back in 2012, Double Fine was the first developer to propose something so impressive. The combination of these factors led to the astonishing result of the campaign, which raised its funding goal in just nine hours, and it closed the operation with more than $ 3 million. Furthermore, it is important to understand why the campaign had so much success, and how the development of the game proceeded after the campaign: Broken Age was the first, big gaming project backed on Kickstarter. It was the game that led the way to other developers and productions, and that get players closer to crowdfunding. The first interesting point to analyze is the presence of the documentary: we have seen before how important is to create video contents, and how this type of creations has to be part of an organic communication action. The Broken Age case shows these two

conditions: the videos communicate with players and are thoroughly planned since the beginning. Actually, it was 2 Player Productions to shoot the film thanks to its huge experience in gaming documentary, since it was the studio that shot films like Mojang - The History of Minecraft. The video campaign, though, was available only for backers at first, and this created a serious discrepancy between the public opinion on the backers: we will see later why. However, the documentary represented an exceptional way for the backers to bind with the developers, to know their difficulties and their problems. It is something that a single trailer cannot create, nor an updated blog. Remember when we said that, in a video game campaign, the function of the video should be describing: “how is it”? This is a perfect example, because the players knew from the beginning the kind of the project (that is a point-and-click adventure), but they did not know how this game was meant to be. In the 20 episodes of the documentary, every backer had the opportunity to get in touch with the game on so many levels, that the moment the game came out there was already a special connection with it. It is not possible to reach such thing with a traditional purchase. Besides, since the documentary was initially available just for the backers, it represented another special reward for those who fund the game. The documentary, however, embodies another function, that is narrative. Behind every game there has to be a great story, and the Broken Age one was a great story to tell. It was because it showed how difficult is to create a game, and how much pressure Schafer and its team had to face.

Power and responsibilities The moment the campaign of Broken Age ended, the project entered in a new dimension. The initial funding goal of $ 300.000 was outnumbered, and this ironically created some difficulties. In fact, the game itself was completely built from the scratch, so that it was thought to be a point-and-click adventure from the beginning. Since any publisher did not support the company, the budget was formed just by the funds raised in the campaign, and this factor completely changed the nature of the project. According to what Schafer said in the documentary, in fact, the company was ready to develop a game of $ 300.000: even a mobile game with a small team should have been good. However, a month later, the game raised more than $ 3 million, thanks to the motivations we described before, and this changed everything. One of the most interesting things is that the documentary shows how difficult it was to manage the funds: provided with a budget that was gigantic in comparison with the original funding goal - but still not so big for making a modern video game - the company had to make hard choices, like delaying the launch of the game in the first place, and then splitting the game in two. This is the price to pay for the total freedom given by crowdfunding: the total control of a project, impossible with the presence of a publisher, can lead to situations in which a project expands so much from the initial form, that the money raised is not enough anymore. In this case, the pressure is higher, because time does not burn the money of a publisher, but the funds rose by simple fans and enthusiasts. So, crowdfunding gives a great power over the economic management and the artistic direction, but it comes with huge responsibilities. Besides, in the Broken Age case, the time was a crucial factor, as always. The project, in fact, was the first big crowdfunding campaign in gaming, so it was perceived like an experiment. The entire narrative created by Double Fine - that is: “We can create the games

we want thanks to the players, and without the oppressive presence of a publisher” - was in danger every time the team had to face financial difficulties. It was not just Broken Age and Double Fine, but also the confirmation of the success or the failure of an entire way to make video games.

Some numbers of the campaign It is interesting to notice some numbers of the project, and to try to find some intersection with what we saw in the previous chapters. Apart from the level of the funding goal, other numbers deserve an analysis. Firstly, the reward tiers structure. The campaign proposed nine levels of contribution, starting from $ 15 and ending to $ 10.000. As the contribution level rose, backers had the opportunity to purchase physical and digital versions of the game, as well as art books and soundtracks. There was the possibility to have access to the beta of the game and to the private community as well. Four backers sustained the project with $ 10.000, and this granted them a lunch with Tim Schafer and a guided tour of Double Fine studies. So, what we have seen before with the rewards of Wasteland 2 seems to be partially confirmed: as long as the contribution level rises, the nature of the reward is more and more bonded to an experiential dimension, rather than a substantial one. For example, in the first six tiers of the Broken Age campaign, all the backers receive the same reward: the soundtracks, the art book, even the signed poster is equal to every player who backed the project. Each one of them will have a different experience with the rewards, but the social recognition given by this type of bonuses is inferior to the one offered by two of the last rewards. In fact, the backer receives a “mini portrait of YOU” (as the Kickstarter page claimed), painted by the artists of the game, by offering $ 1.000. So, it is not a simple picture of some game characters, or some poster signed, but it is something unique, special and personal. It was something that could elevate a backer among the others. With $ 10.000, as we said before, there was the opportunity to lunch with Schafer himself, and that represented a personal, spiritual experience not necessarily bounded with the game (that four different backers might have disliked Broken Age

once the game came out, but they will surely remember their trip to Double Fine). Secondly, the length of the campaign. The crowdfunding initiative lasted 35 days, which is almost identical to the average duration of the ten campaigns listed in the previous chapter (which was 34.4 days). The dynamic of the amount of money raised in this period follows what we saw in Wasteland 2 case: in the first three days, the amount of money raised was $ 1.5 million, 45% of the entire amount raised. In the last two days, the campaign raised another 12%. Therefore, the opening and closing five days of the campaign raised more than 50% of the entire amount of money pledged.

Broken trust? According to what we wrote in a previous digression, the presence of funded games supported by big notorieties can damage small developers, or it could even lead to a Kickstarter bubble. It sounds right, though, to explore the other possible side of this situation: big projects on Kickstarter can help small developers too. If you look at what numbers say, you can get a confirmation. Before the Broken Age campaign - on Kickstarter - the average pledges for week in the video games category were 629. After the launch of the campaign, the number rose to an astonishing 9.755 per week. This led to an increment in the overall funds raised in the video games category. During the two years before Broken Age launch, the overall amount was $ 1.776.372, but six months after the campaign, it rose up to $ 2.890.704. According to these numbers, Broken Age brought benefits to everyone: to the developers, who could bypass the presence of publishers; to the players, who can bring back to life their favorite projects, and to Kickstarter, which earns fees on every funded project. There is a downside, though, because as we have seen before, crowdfunding brings many responsibilities and a lot of strain to developers. Once the campaign starts, it seems as if the developer could find himself on the bull’s-eye of websites, social networks, communities, forums, and blogs. Every action is amplified, and every error can lead to a dangerous amount of negative word-ofmouth. This was the case of Broken Age: the expansion of the project, in fact, resulted in the decision to delay the game, and then to the decision of splitting the projects in two parts. An economic trouble had to be faced: since the designed game was too much, and that was not possible to ask for more money, nor to ask a publisher for it (it would have crashed all the narration of the campaign), Double Fine was forced to split the game in two. However, this was a

very dangerous move for many reasons, because it went against the original backers and it confused other players. The supporters, in fact, paid for a complete game, that was supposed to be launched in October 2012. Not just they witnessed the delay of several months (the first act of the game was launched in January 2014), but they also saw the game they pledged was just a half game, purchasable by every other non-backer player through Steam and other digital platforms. It was like they pledged just the first half of the game, since the second part was funded thanks to the profit of Act 1. The troubled development of the game, however, had an impact even on the press and on the players who had not backed the game. The reactions were reasonable, above all for someone unaware of the internal dynamic of the development (that is: non-backers that had not got the possibility to view the documentary and to participate in the community). Someone just complained about Double Fine cheating with players’ money and spoke about betrayed trust and grief. However, the documentary allowed the backers to understand the reason of the delay, and this move confirmed how important it is to communicate with the players who support the project. They were the only ones who can judge whether the delay of the project was a good move or not, since they knew why Double Fine did the splitting. Again, they did not just read why Double Fine split the game: thanks to the documentary, they realized why and they heard what was the ultimate motivation of this move directly from Schafer. This is the real difference between the communication with a backer and the one with a normal player. Speaking of that, delaying a game is not a surprise in gaming nowadays: on the contrary, there are so many delays that a game launched in the announced period represents a surprisingly rare occasion. This confirms how difficult it is to create and to develop such products.

In the first days of January 2016, for instance, several titles were delayed, like Mighty No. 9. Scalebound, Overkill’s The Walking Dead, Dead or Alive Xtreme. The already mentioned Mighty No. 9 can count three delays up to now. However, a delay is much worse for a crowdfunded game, because of the much stronger relationship between developers and backers. It is not just a matter of economic support anymore, since the emotional dimension that crowdfunding brings. Again, every delay can be seen as a broken vow, and since Kickstarter does not allow refunds, it is all in the developers’ hands, who must be able to handle this type of situations both from a production schedule and from a communication point of view. Sometimes, though, it happens the exact opposite, which is the launch of games that are not ready to be released. This means bugs, glitches, crashes, and all of the others technical problems that could have been resolved with a delayed release. This can happen when several actors are present in the production chain of a game, usually consisting of developers, marketing divisions, distributors, and so on. It goes without saying that the launch can represent a big trouble - both for publishers and developers - if the game turns to be bugged and full of technical problems. In some cases, then, developers and publishers can be stuck at a point in which the game should be launched on the market, due to economic reasons, but it is not ready yet. So, from an “ethic” point of view, the right thing to do in these cases is to delay the release, taking the risk to send a lot of mixed and negative messages, mostly to the fans of the game (of course, things may go worse in the case of a crowdfunded game, just like Broken Age and the “broken trust” issues). On the other hand, release an uncompleted game can be troublesome too because, even in this case, players could find themselves disappointed. Think about Batman: Arkham Knight. It is a game developed by Rocksteady, but the PC version of the title was in the hands of Iron Galaxy Studios. When the game came on the

market, the PC version was so incorrect that players could not run it, sometimes neither on high-end configurations, so this particular version happened to be suspended from sales for four months. However, the press revealed that Warner Bros - the publisher of the game - knew from the beginning the existence of these problems on the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight, but it launched the game anyway, because it believed the game was good enough. This is an example of what we wrote before: quality problems may rise when there are several actors involved in the development of a game, which must be present on multiple platforms (then, it could be developed or modified by more than a developer at the same time). Easy to say, these are very delicate situations to manage. Obviously, in the case of games funded entirely on crowdfunding, the publisher is absent and it is all in the hands of the developers who could be in partnership with distributors and other actors. So, it is vital to make sure that everyone involved in the project is sufficiently satisfied with the development of the game. The second act of Broken Age went public in April 2015: it took three years to develop the game, which was welcomed by press and players with mixed feelings. It is obvious its troubled development influenced someone’s judgment, but we are not here to say whether the game is good or not. What matters the most, for our analysis, is that just a month after the beginning of the Broken Age campaign, inXile Entertainment started its campaign for Wasteland 2, reaching almost $ 3 million; plus, just four months later Ouya - the ambitious Android console - made its entrance with a campaign of $ 8 million raised. In other words, the crowdfunding made its stable entrance in gaming in this very occasion.

EPILOGUE Fig hosted the crowdfunding campaign of Psychonauts 2. It is a new crowdfunding platform founded by Justin Bailey (also COO at Double Fine), and it is all focused on video games. Tim Schafer is part of its advisory board, as well as other leading developers. The interesting feature of this platform lies in its mechanism: the backers, in fact, have the chance to earn from the projects backed, as long as the projects turn to be profitable. This is not an entirely new way to do crowdfunding (Slightly Mad Studios did something similar with Project C.A.R.S.), but on a much larger scale, it can continue to make crowdfunding appealing to the players. After the first magic moment a large part of the press, and even of the players, expressed skepticism on this particular form of crowdsourcing. Most of the time, the reasons behind these complaints were more than reasonable, since after the conclusion of campaigns it is never certain when a game (or a console, like in the Ouya case) will come out - or how it will come out, like the Broken Age projects taught us. The importance to have a detailed business plan and a precise production schedule the very moment the campaign ends goes against the incredible complexity that involves the creation of a video game; in every case, the amount of the funds raised can change everything. The case of Broken Age is a perfect example: the first idea was to create a small game with a small budget ($ 300.000), but then everything changed because of the $ 3.4 million raised. Developing a little game it would have been wrong as well, because most of the money would have been unused (a typical reaction to this might have been: “Wait, we gave you almost $ 4 million, and you came out with this little thing?”). Resize the project was the right move, but this brought a lot of new troubles. Relying entirely on the funds raised with crowdfunding can be dangerous as well, especially with studios that are in the middle of the AAA productions and the true indies, just like Double Fine is. If you look at the campaign of Psychonauts 2, you can notice how Double Fine seems now to be

more aware of the danger of crowdfunding. The funding goal was higher ($ 3.3 million) and, most of all, it did not cover all the development costs. The funds raised thanks to the campaign, in fact, represented just a third of the entire budget of the game, which is formed by Double Fine funds, and external investors. So, the crowdfunding campaign is used to get “more” funds, not all of them, and this seems to be the right path to follow for these types of projects. Still, small projects can rely entirely on crowdfunding, but as we described in a digression, sometimes the use of modest funding goals from “fake indies” productions can create difficulties. Production-wise, in fact, it is important to remember that for the projects that are already covered by some publisher, crowdfunding can represent nothing more than a communication tool, or even a market test. There are tons of possible combinations, but here we present four production models that can involve crowdfunding: - The funding goal represents, at least, half of the budget for the game: this is the case of small-medium indie games, such as Broken Age. - The funding goal represents a good part of the budget for the game, which is backed then by a publisher: in these cases, a project starts as independent, and then it secures the support of a publisher for further funds. This is the case of Mighty No. 9, which will be published by Deep Silver. - The funding goal represents a small part of the budget for the game, which is integrated with external investors: this is the case of projects that tend to have the same budget for a medium-big production backed by a publisher. An example is Psychonauts 2. - The funding goal represents a small part of the budget for the game, within a project already backed from a publisher: in these cases, the function of the funding goal is to test the interest of

players towards a given project, thus, the funding goal serves as Trojan horse. This is the case of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Before closing the crowdfunding analysis and trying to get a sum of what has been discussed about crowdsourcing along these pages, I reckon that the big question to explicit is to understand what crowdfunding means for a single player. From a general point of view, crowdsourcing is a matter of reputation and social recognition, but when we talk about crowdfunding we refer to money as well, and thus things get more serious. In general crowdsourcing currency is absolutely involved, but in these cases, what the developers ask their players is time. The modders of Pro Cycling Manager, for example, sacrifice their time to get a better game. In crowdfunding, however, we talk about real money and all the players who give away money want something tangible back, not just social retribution. This is why backers can perceive crowdfunding from different perspectives: - It can be considered as an investment that pays us back with the game itself: crowdfunding can be considered as an alternative way to invest money. For instance, rather than putting money in a bank account, it could be an innovative idea to back some interesting startup. Obviously, this is not the case of video games, but even players can consider video game crowdfunding as an investment with a medium-high degree of risk. This happens because every time a project is funded, there is always the chance that something might go wrong (the game turns to be awful, or is not developed at all). Remember: in most crowdfunding platforms, there are no refunds, so once the money is taken, is gone for good. Besides, for a single player is also a question of timing and opportunity costs. Every potential backer could think: “If I spend this money backing this game, I will see the result of my investment hopefully in some

months (most likely in two or three years). Should I do this, or should I buy the last blockbuster game that just came on the market and play it now?” - It can be an investment that has an economic return: the description we just made can be changed enough to include the possibility that, thanks to the game, a backer can receive some ROI through the crowdfunding. This is the case of Project C.A.R.S. and the platform Fig. - It can be a donation: we talked a lot about nostalgia, remembering childhood and so on. So, backing a project can be seen as a mere donation. It can be considered a donation the moment the player thinks that the price he pays for the game is less than what he will receive once the game is completed (again, it could be by the joy to play for the sake of the game, but it could also involve an emotional dimension). - It can be a simple purchase: as every online transaction that involves money, backing a project can be seen as mere purchase. - It can be a trend: as every other phenomenon that involves the Internet, crowdfunding can be considered as a fancy trend, which eventually will fade away. Therefore, backing a project can be considered “cool” or “fancy”. Still, it is worth asking if the crowdsourcing pushes the power into the hands of players. Before the Internet era, the choice was whether to buy a game or not. Nowadays, players had plenty of options: they can support the games they like through forums, blogs, websites, social network sites, and they can even participate in the development of it, both as a developer (through general crowdsourcing) and as a publisher (through crowdfunding). It is a freedom of choice that could not be possible to think just ten years ago, and it must be used carefully and with a hint of wisdom.

Nevertheless, it is worth saying that, despite all the information filters and all the communication initiatives listed in this book, supporting a game through these type of mechanisms remains a leap of faith and, as every leap of faith, you never know exactly what is going to be like. It could be just a waste of time and money after all, but also the unique occasion to participate in the creation of something truly beloved. This is the ultimate user and product experience. Keep on playing the games you like.

SPECIAL THANKS I would like to thank my parents. They bought me a Sega Genesis when I was just a little boy, allowing me to enter in the fantastic world of video games. Thanks to my sister for all her support, and to GUS, a friend and an irreplaceable gaming buddy. Special thanks to Katie Chironis, Scott Brodie, and Daniela Longo, who helped me a lot with the proofreading and the editing.