Kicking Kickstarter: Publishers Trying To Abuse The System
- Written by xaraan on Wednesday, September 19 2012 and posted in Columns
Publishers accused of trying to take advantage of the Kickstarter system in a round-a-bout way to avoid clashing directly with their terms.
Source: Desctructoid
A recent success story for game maker Obsidian, who raised their targeted $1.1 million goal within 27 hours of starting their fundraiser, has earned them quite a bit of attention in the last few days. Still earning money steadily with nearly a month to go before their kickstarter project ends, the RPG game: Project Eternity they wanted to develop should come to fans in the spring of 2014. One of the reasons the turned to Kickstarter was problems in working with existing publishers and the types of games they wanted to stay focused on.
Feargus Urquhart of Obsidian recently revealed in a discussion about working with publishers:
'We were actually contacted by some publishers over the last few months that wanted to use us to do a Kickstarter.' I said to them 'So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for, using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don't get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits.'
"They said, 'Yes'."
So if you see existing publishers using Kickstarter to fund games, beware. Feargus would not give out details of which publishers he was referring to, but it's probably not the first or last time companies will try to exploit operations like Kickstarter to raise money instead of putting their own funds at risk.
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About the Author - xaraan
Xaraan (zah-ron), you can call him Jeremy if you prefer, but after twenty years of using xaraan online, he'll answer to that faster. When not doing photography, xaraan writes for us covering books, gaming, tv, movies, sometimes even comics, plus creating a weekly webcomic. If you look for him offline, start in the L.A. area; online start at www.xaraan.com.
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