Happy new year one and all 🙂 it’s 2013 and the human race and the planet have not been Mayaned out of existence so we can once again look into the future. One way is to dive into Kickstarter and crowdfund some interesting projects. If you haven’t looked at this before it is pretty much the same as pre-buying something you are interested in, though you are actually providing the funds to help a project that you think will work or has some merit.
One such project is Elite:Dangerous. Which if you are like me you grew up playing the free roaming ever changing vector based space game Elite. It is due a reboot and David Braben has got a Kickstarter campaign going. With these sorts of things you set a reserve price, the amount of money needed/pledged. If you don’t get the target the project doesn’t get the money.
This one has 61 hours remaining and has £1,186,093 of its £1,250,000 pledged. So there is already over a million pounds sitting wanting to be invested by 20,000 gamers, fans and interested parties. It just needs a little more. When you invest in these things you get various tiers of rewards, access to early beta’s, forums, or in this case your name used in the game 😉
Once you have pledged an interesting dynamic of wanting to be right kicks in. If it doesn’t get funded you haven’t lost anything but if you pick a project you feel part of it. This of course works better in small community ones, once you get up to this sort of level it is really a variation on a corporate machine. However…. This game needs to get funded so if you haven’t then go pledge something for the future. It is going to take a years of development at least with a 2014 release.
Who knows I might even try a kickstarter myself this year. We have some code and a working prototype, finding regular finance for something that is scientifically intriguing, socially intriguing and pushes social media and social games somewhere else is proving tricky, so what the heck. Come to think of it some of the TV shows should get done this way. It’s a good way to prove an audience, hone your message.
UPDATE Well they made the funding and exceeded it 🙂 Making it a record breaker
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