Brian Fargo on Kickstarter

[Humodour]

[...]

 

And speaking of goodwill it occurs to me that we can harness the power of Kickstarter in a more meaningful way. Fan funding is bigger than me or Wasteland 2 as I have remarked before. The development community has come together to support us in ways that I didn't think possible and our power as developers will ultimately come from us sticking together. Both gamers and developers have so much more strength than they realize. But in order to help facilitate the power of crowd funding I am going to suggest that all of us that do utilize this form of financing agree to kickback 5% of our profits made from such projects to other Kickstarter developers. I am not suggesting taking a backers money and moving it to another project.. I mean once a game has shipped and created profit that we funnel that back into the community of developers to fund their dreams. I am tentatively calling this "Kick It Forward" and I will be the first to agree to it. In fact, I will have our artists create a badge that goes on all Kickstarter projects that agree to support this initiative. Imagine the potential if another Minecraft comes along via Kickstarter and produces millions of dollars of investment into other developers. This economic payback will continue to grow the movement way beyond the current system. I hope others will join me with this idea and make this a true shakeup.

 

Let's get the power shifted around a bit!

 

Brian Fargo

 

Sometimes humanity makes me smile pretty hard.

 

Source: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2/posts/193810

Edited March 22, 2012 by Krezack

[mkreku]

Brian Fargo is a pretty great guy.

[greylord]

That's a nice idea. Would it actually work in practice though?

[Oblarg]

Yes, if implemented properly.

 

I'm hoping with the rise in fan-funding the whole AAA game trend dies a horrible, painful death. It certainly has the potential to go that way if enough people catch on...

[Gorth]

Not likely to happen soon, unless they start doing fan funded console games...

 

Now, how about a kickstarter publisher? Lets raise money to start publishing games

[entrerix]

AAA games keep getting worse, im glad to see smaller, better games on the horizon

 

was fallout a big budget title? it was so long ago i can't remember

[Tigranes]

FO1 was 3 million, and that's 1997 rates.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Pretty nice of him, two thumbs up from me.

Edited March 22, 2012 by Drowsy Emperor

[WorstUsernameEver]

Fallout had such a painfully drawn out developing cycle (it took them a lot of time to finalize things, and they had problems such as with the GURPS license) plus stuff like cutscenes, voice acting with expensive actors and talking heads that inflated the costs. It wouldn't have been as expensive without that stuff.

[entrerix]

i wonder how much it would cost today to make fallout 1 exactly as it is, completely from scratch

[Humodour]

i wonder how much it would cost today to make fallout 1 exactly as it is, completely from scratch

FO1 was 3 million, and that's 1997 rates.

 

The US dollar has inflated 41.8% since 1997, thus it would cost $4,255,383.18 USD today. That said, other aspects of development might be more, or less, expensive today. I'm going to go with the programming side of things being LESS expensive today.

[WDeranged]

People forget that technology has moved on, the creative software we have at our disposal now is mind shattering compared to the late 90's, not to mention the power of our modern day interwebs, an artist could use Zbrush to knock out a talking head in a day, compare this to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it took to sculpt actual clay heads and have them laser scanned, then the beastly computer (by 90's standards) required to handle that data.

[molarBear]

the kickstarter indie development can be a real alternative to current style making of games once DFA and wasteland 2 are released and satisfy the backers or exceed their expectations.

[Humodour]

Brian Fargo has now created a website for the 'kicking it forward' concept:

 

http://www.kickingitforward.org/

 

The Banner Saga devs have pledged to 'kick it forward'. Hopefully Double Fine does too.

Edited March 23, 2012 by Krezack