Newell: big companies won’t survive Kickstarter-led revolution
By Alice Lynton on January 12, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Speaking in a podcast, Valve boss Gabe Newell has said many of the giants of the games industry are staring doom in the face now that fan-backed funding options like Kickstarter have shown creators they don’t need to use traditional publishing models.
“Philosophically I’m a big fan of what Kickstarter and other efforts like it are trying to do”,” he said. “There are a bunch of different ways that communities can drive what is going to happen, and one of the last pieces is to figure out how the community itself can drive the financing of projects. I actually think that’s going to happen regardless. The earlier [fans] start supporting a project, the greater the results are going to be.”
“Entertainment will get better, creators will do better, I think the percentage of control and the amount of money that goes to things like distribution and marketing will fall, and I think that’s a fine thing,” he added. “I doubt that a lot of the larger corporations will be able to make transitions into the new world.”
When asked by his hosts how corporations could weather the change, Newell was quite pessimistic about their chances.
“I don’t think the big companies will,” he said. “I think the rate of change is too fast for most of them to adapt.”
Source: The Nerdist via CVG
Kickstarter suspends Gmod (Update: Gmod issues statement)
Suspension irreversible, apparently.
Gambling Games: Why early access is not (always) worthwhile
James explains how early access can lead to things going horribly wrong.
Hands-on with Divinity: Original Sin – an impressively free-form RPG
With only a few days left on Kickstarter, we check out this impressive indie RPG.
You can use the following bbCode
[i], [b], [img], [quote], [url href="http://www.google.com/"]Google[/url]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
facebook
twitter
google+
rss
Hey, quit spoiling my Nerdist podcast.
How recent is that photo?
Please tell me he hasn’t shaved his beard.
Well if the big companies can’t weather it, then the next logical step once they realise, is to lawyer it to slow the transition. I’d be putting money on either kickstartered dev’s or Kickstarter themselves to come under legal duress in the next 6-12 months.
is Anyonelse sick of Gabe Newell talking out his arse and being wrong 75%+ of the time ?
tacitus42,
I’d say it’s an old pic. His hair hasn’t greyed in that pic.
spooler,
Leave Garry alone!
Except KS projects tend to include devs and designers in their teams and not business managers, accountants, legal and/or logistics managers, which is why A: a traditional publisher model exists and has done so well; and b: over 80% of the top KS projects have failed to meeting their self-imposed deadlines and/or shipping dates.
People have likened this to a band releasing their album on BandCamp but it is only close if your game is small and single payer only. Then you have all the technology you have intentionally or unintentionally used that needs to be appropriately licenced (even in the small titles) and then you also have the legal difficulties of releasing worldwide. Not to mention submission to censorship boards which needs to happen and should happen, otherwise it is very hard to appropriately reach a wider audience for your project.
KS is a bad idea because it supplies a corner cutter for aspiring devs and designers without the consequences of such actions only being apparent when they are in too deep…
I don’t see any worthwhile company going under because of it, if a kickstarter can compete with a normally funded game then the developer needs to get their shit together and stop wasting money.
It’s not like these kickstarters have massive budgets or anything, where is all the traditional development money being used if the end results are going to be the same from a $200,000 kickstarter?
Citation needed.
And now, where’s that damn editing button again ..
@wyld remeber when Gabe stated at E3 the PS3 was a waste of time and valve would never develop on it ?
There’s plenty of examples if you look.
Heh, reminds me of a certain Publisher who asked a certain dev team to start up a Kickstarter for fundraising of said project – because they didn’t want to foot the bill and/or are missing the point of Kickstarter entirely…
Ah well, back to throwing money away on my Kickstarter addiction….Oooh Video Game High School Season 2… :D
75% is the number you gave, yes? Oh no .. it was greater than 75%. Still waiting.
And what percentage of traditional publisher projects do the same?
83.5% of all statements on the internet are correct, when allowances are made for the cake variable.
Nebby_99,
Exactly, nearly every game lately has either been delayed until the next year (meaning they missed their deadlines and didn’t meet budget) or have been rushed out resulting in a buggy terrible mess of a game (see the latest MoH title).
In the end, consumers are getting fed up with the traditional model because its equally as risky as any kickstarter is. Eventually people will wake up and realize this, and we’ll hopefully see a bigger surge of people taking risks on the newer untested devs- I think this is the revolution Gabe speaks of where suddenly people have a lot more choice and don’t necessarily have to keep buying the same game every year (case in point every game now has a number in front of it).
My question is, can someone who used a crowdsource to fundraise for a game necessarily do so again on another project?.. Brian Fargo seems to think so, hence Torment’s kickstarter (whilst he’s doing Wasteland 2 at the same time). I’m interested to see how that goes, if the consumer reacts to it as being more convenient and less risky as the traditional model, we may in fact see people now start flocking to crowd sourcing.
Despite people always saying Kickstarter will be the only one that causes a revolution I’m skeptic of, I think there’s more potential there for Gabe to turn Greenlight into a kickstarter competitor.. plus in Australia we have Desura which is a kickstarter and steam competitor offering crowdsourced projects. Gamers Gate in Europe is also in competition with both Steam and Kickstarter as well, it also offers crowd sourcing. I think that it’ll be a unified push from all of these, not just Kickstarter which makes up only a small portion of developers in the world. Regardless.. Crowdsourcing is a revolution for this industry and it does certainly pose a threat to the traditional model.. even more so now that those traditional devs are trying to move out of hardcore AAA titles and more into Casual.
Wyld,
75% or not, I do believe he’s developing Molyneux Syndrome.
Of course, it will be hard to judge whether or not the first big generation of KS games are successful or not since Windows 8 has destroyed PC gaming.
The development companies aren’t the big companies, it’s the publishing companies, that control funds, advertising, production and the schedule. Those are the big companies that usually screw over the gamers as well as the developers, by pushing deadlines, and releasing quick dirty game sequels to cash-in on big names. If the dev companies can bypass the publishers and get funding elsewhere, we hopefully get to see the games the developers want to build, for the community that wants them.
However, what kickstarters or similar projects wont stop, is the ability for those large companies to buyout the small companies, to essentially take over their brand and shut them down. At the end of the day, money talks.
Im all for KS’s, the big co’s are getting greedy and fans are talking with their cash – in smaller amounts too.
oh gabe, stop whinging, and just focus on whatever you’re doing. He’s getting really annoying lately lol to me anyway.