"Free to play games are the most difficult to get funding for on Kickstarter." You really need that momentum going into the project’s launch,” he explains. Some people made some assumptions about what the game was going to be based on very little information and ended up judging the book by its cover.”īoth announcing and launching the Kickstarter at the same time also created problems for Fable Fortune.ĭoing both simultaneously is quite a challenging thing to do. We also had a hard time with the messaging around actually who we are, what we are doing and why we’re doing it. Obviously there’s a lot of people in the community looking for the next Fable RPG. Ultimately one of the complications around the Kickstarter was that it was a Fable title,” he says. While Flaming Fowl CEO Craig Oman does concede that this business model did present problems, he says that it was the messaging around the title that may have created some issues. The free-to-play model may not be the only reason for Fable Fortune’s struggles. I can see how that would be challenging.” He adds: Talking personally, you can see how it would be extra difficult to present a value proposition to players who are putting their money on the line for something that is essentially being built up to be free. Card games are probably one of the few exceptions.” It doesn’t seem like a compelling argument.”Īndy Robinson of Playtonic agrees: Anyone who considers themselves a crowdfunding expert will tell you that one of the most difficult genres to crowdfund is free-to-play,” he says. This game won’t get made, potentially, without this crowdfunding campaign, but anyone that waits is going to be able to play it for free, assuming it gets made.
You’re trying to say that there’s no cost of entry to this game. The perspective of the developer is equally hard. With free-to-play, making that value judgement is actually really challenging. you have an equation there your money equals something. You have no context to understand what you are really getting for your backing. Because there’s just a real hard value calculation that the backer has to do. Square Enix Collective boss Phil Elliott adds: Free-to-play is a big challenge. (Above left to right) Flaming Fowl’s Oman, Square Enix’s Elliott, Playtonic’s Robinson and Ico’s Bidaux We can count less than 20 successfully funded free-to-game games on Kickstarter, and I would certainly advise against trying to fund this type of game this way.” The most notable exception is probably Hex Shards of Fate, a free-to-play CCG, that raised more than $2m three years ago.
The game’s performance on Kickstarter may have a lot to do with its free-to-play business model – one that does not necessarily gel with crowdfunding.įree-to-play games are historically incredibly hard to get crowd funded,” says Ico Partners CEO Thomas Bidaux. Yet, for all the reasons why it should have succeeded, Flaming Fowl cancelled the Kickstarter after just 22 days, having raised only 23 per cent of its modest 250,000 funding goal. Second of all, it was a collectible card game (CCG), a genre that has risen to the fore in the last few years thanks to Blizzard’s Hearthstone.
0 kommentar(er)
