A Fine Millionaire

There once was a man named George Lucas. He created Star Wars. Wait...wrong person...sorry.

There once (and still is) a man named Tim Schafer. He founded Double Fine Productions, a video game developer, in the year 2000. He is mostly known for his specific flavor of storytelling, seen in his previous work at LucasArts with the Monkey Island games and some of his more recent work such as Brütal Legend and Psychonauts.

Recently, if you've been reading the far-off corner of the internet that is video game news, you would know that recently Mr. Schafer started a fundraiser on Kickstarter, asking fans and anyone else for $400,000 to fund the company's newest adventure game. A bold favor to ask, but a timer of 30+ days would be a fair amount of time.

Now, you probably know what happens next, but let's put this into perspective for a second. A video game developer is openly asking for funds to make a game. That's not wrong at all, but you'd think that at the very least the full 30+ days would be taken up, if they even make their goal in the first place.

Well, as of right now, he has nearly $1.8 million, with 27 days remaining.

Holy hell. Either Tim Schafer knows something we don't, or Double Fine has a very dedicated fanbase.

Still, is it possible for game developers to learn from this? If the fans are loyal enough I suppose, and the game developer has a reputation for staying true to their roots and listening to their fans. It would obviously be more difficult for, say, Activision, to do something like this compared to a smaller developer, but what would happen if a larger company tried something like this? Sure they have more than enough money to fund it themselves, but imagine the following: What if Activision trusted their fans and were closer to communicate with them? Would they still crank out AAA titles like they do now? Would each title be beautiful and perform amazingly as usual, but still be extremely similar to last year's title?

For such a unique and young medium, video games are special in that the user themselves are controlling their experience and pleasure. To have technology interacting significantly closer like this compared to movies or television requires the developers of said technology to pay closer attention to how we use it, which implies that they are required to be that much closer to their consumers. Having a customer play your video game is a lot different than having them sit back and watch a TV show.

With that in mind, what if major companies today were closer to their customers? What would happen if they were able to listen to all of their customers instead of just a majority? What if they acted on what their fans wanted the most instead of the best logical business decision?

Perhaps there would be less homogenization of game genres, less expansion-pack like sequels, and more surprise hit games that are rooted in deep innovation.