This behind-the-scenes interview with the brutal legend of video game design proves that listening to your customers can pay off in unexpected ways.
"We want playing our games to entertain people on many different levels. Deeper down, I want to make a connection with the player, and it’s the way, to me, of saying to the person playing the game that they’re not alone in the world."
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Hearing video game designer and Double Fine Productions founder Tim Schafer talk about his creative mission makes it clear that he puts his fans first. So who better to turn to when funding his latest project? Of course not even Schafer could have predicted the result of his recent crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. In just over a month, his pitch for an “old-school adventure game” raised over $3.3 million dollars, a Kickstarter record broken only by Pebble’s $10.2 million e-paper watch.
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Schafer is an industry vet. He's got a string of classic graphic adventure titles under his name, mostly produced for LucasArts in the 1990s. Yet publishers didn't think his vision for this yet-to-be-named adventure game would sell. So Schafer turned to the web, with a goal to raise $400,000--the goal was met in the first day. In this video he shares some advice for others who plan on following his Kickstarter path.
Schafer isn't the first creative visionary to have recognized that game designers shouldn’t rely on big publishers alone to back their projects. But it remains to be seen whether or not fan-funded video gaming is a viable alternative. "I think (crowdfunding) is not the thing that’s actually going to kill publishers," says Schafer, "but I think it’s going to make the whole industry healthier."