Activision co-founder says everyone turned against his Kickstarter campaign as soon as they saw the price.
David Crane, co-founder of Activision and creator of Pitfall, set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund Jungle Adventure. He asked for $900,000 but so far only $21,629 has been pledged, and the campaign has eight days to run. Crane had hoped that Kickstarter was capable of putting “the same indie effort into larger game designs”, but now wonders whether “people won’t let go of what they think [crowdfunding] is.”
“They look at my project and say, you’re asking way too much money,” Crane said. He feels that “everyone turned against me as soon as they saw [the price].” The topic was a hot button issue in an Ask Me Anything Reddit session with fans and backers, in which one commenter asked how Crane could justify the budget when other people could put together indie games working part-time on nights and weekends. “Believe it or not, the Kickstarter budget is real,” replied Crane. “It is a simple matter of multiplying the number of professionals needed to make the game by the number of months they have to work.”
Professionals in this instance means people like David Bergantino, John vanSuchtelen and Bill Wentworth; all of them high profile names – former Viacom/Nickelodeon executives with decades of experience – but people like that don’t come cheap. It begs the question why Crane didn’t try to get venture capital funding, a question that Crane refused to answer when asked it in the AMA.
Another problem is the lack of any real information about Jungle Adventure. Beyond some art and the video seen here there isn’t much for pledgers to get to grips with, and the video hardly sells the concept. Crane claims that this information paucity was a deliberate strategy as the game was supposed to be developed with full backer participation, something that couldn’t happen until the Kickstarter concluded. However this does mean that people were being asked to pony up the dough pretty much on a whim, plunging on a project supported by David Crane’s reputation and not much else.
Source: Gamasutra
