Archived version: https://archive.ph/mNVst
This post was inspired by two things I saw recently:
- Jonny Price of WeFunder, sharing their newly designed raise page, featuring some giants of tech like Substack, Mercury and Levels.
- Xalavier Nelson Jr. of Strange Scaffold, commenting on the seemingly extreme success of Larian Studios, with the upcoming release of Baldur’s Gate, and imporing consumers that it not “raise the standard”.
The connection between these two items is not obvious, but it is interesting.
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The idea of starting off being ‘crowd funded’ to put out your first couple of releases until the big money investors decide you’re worth risking anything on is how almost all artists across mediums do things in a capitalist system. As someone from a music background, the parallels between a band scraping together enough money and time to self produce a demo or an EP vs. an indie studio working on a game after work hours is pretty strong.
Honestly, the patron model is probably the best solution that I’ve seen. The problem is that it’s become so tied into patrons receiving weekly updates or rewards that it’s hard to turn that viewpoint towards longer term projects that don’t necessarily lend themselves to those kinds of short term updates.
Xalavier’s post is correct here. This kind of game doesn’t come out of nowhere. Larian has been built expressly to do this one thing well . It certainly helps that the CEO Sven has a personal passion for the genre. There’s obviously been a great deal of long term planning to help the studio grow to this point. Developing tools, pipelines, staffing, and experience with your dev teams should be how this works.
I’ve heard cases of studios with no RPG experience think about making an RPG, and then look to Larian as a baseline…and it’s like where do you start with that? I can see some execs look at the game, and not the pipeline/long term business goal here. I’d put Supergiant in a similar category tbh. Each game they do is solid within a rough area, building on the tech of the last.
As for players, I certainly think you can see this as a high mark; but not a baseline. As always I think we should cut indies some slack. But it does kind of prove out the terrible way a lot of big studios run. Really building a studio up, treating the devs right, and supporting positive well run teams. Not kicking stuff out of the door as soon as a game is shipped, ignoring abuse etc.
I don’t know really if it’s specifically crowd funding here ( it can be risky), but rather a solid studio growth plan tbh.
Crowdfunding played a part, but there’s also the vision and the plan to attain that vision, as well as the community behind the crowdfunding and dedication to quality. My employer is employee-owned, and so it shares a lot of values with Larian and were successful without needing to be publicly traded. It really is down to core values and how well those values are upheld internally, money is just a means to an end.