So how do you explain all the crowd-funded games which have been funded, developed, and released? And there are MANY of them.
In the classic funding model, the revenue of the one or two successful video game projects recoup the cost of other 8 or 9 failed ones (including ones canceled behind closed doors). This works well especially for consumers. There are too many failed video game projects, where customers not only ate all financial risk through crowdfunding, but also ended up with no product (game) at all. Giving money risking a 80+ % failure rate with happy accidents here and there is not a viable strategy for consumers. They also see nothing of the revenue if a projects succeeds, so it never evens out for them.
I enjoyed many games, which didn't recoup their development costs and still got finished and released, because some investor took the risk and recouped the cost with the another bestselling blockbuster, which made insane amounts of money instead. That's not possible with crowdfunding when the developer runs out of money and closes shop.
I'm a critic of video game crowdfunding now, because i learned my lesson. What MattBrady is afraid of already happened, at least in my case.
I disagree with what you are saying. Some of the best games have released were kickstarter/crowd funded games, and these games would not have ever existed if it wasn't for the crowdfunding.
I crowd funded
Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2
Divine Divinity Orginal Sin 1 and 2
Overload
Aqaunox Deep Descent
Bard's Tale IV
Star Citizen
Overload and Aquanox have been showing great progress and are going to be releasing early next year.
Pillars of Eternity 1 and Divinity Divinity 1 were both excellent games and there is no reason why the part 2's will not release, actually DOS 2 is releasing in 9 days.
Bard's Tale IV is being developed by inxile and they have a great record in releasing fantastic crowd funded games, so no worries there either.
Star Citizen is the only odd ball one here, for more than 1 reason, but I am not worried about that project. I might start to get a little worried when they reach year 8 from when the kickstarter ended, if they have not released one of the games, So late 2020 early 2021.
Anyways, Kickstarter/crowdfund have been a great thing for PC gaming. If anything it has only changed to the point where people are just going to crowd fund games from already trusted developers with a good history of releasing good games whether those games were crowdfunded or not, at least for the big amount of money funded games.
Without the crowdfunded games, I fear we would be left with the massive amount of garbage that the AAA market (which is easily 95% of AAA gaming) has been shoveling out for more than a decade, where they put creativity and innovation into the trunk, or with the massive amount of indie games where 95% of them are garbage, and even then the good ones have a low production values. The Crowdfunding games give a way for developers to be more into the AA market, where they can make great games with creativity and innovation in the drivers seat and have a much higher production value than indie games.
