So if Blizzard does a Kickstarter and raises $10M in pre-sales for a new game, is that within the mission of the site? I was under the impression that it was a site for projects by people who otherwise wouldn't be able to fund them. This seems to be pushing that boundary.
I'd rather rephrase the question to ask generally what it would take to break the spirit of the site. A lot of projects already use it as a shop-like site.
And as far as big companies are concerned, Kickstarter and Amazon take a combined 7.9% cut, which is quite significant.
I'm also not entirely sure whether companies with DRM-encumbered games will manage to attract donours in a similar fashion to Double Fine who seem to be using the Steam platform, which is widely used and loved.
Blizzard could probably pull it off with their games (MMOs not included) because of Battle.net, but it would turn into a major shitstorm, if they funded something like Call of Duty, which is a magnet to controversy and uproar. Then there would be the ensuing hell of charge-backs and refunds.
With Kickstarter, you generally invest in an idea more so than a product. What but a product do you invest in by giving Blizzard money? With Double Fine, you revive the adventure genre, have a chance of disrupting the videogame industry and bring back some of the biggest videogame developer legends and give them free reins over their product without having to go hat in hand and pander to producers. With Blizzard, it would just be business as usual.
I don't know whether Kickstarter will ever lose its indie feel, but if it does, or some project starters do, they will be subjected to a level of scrutiny orders of magnitude higher than what we are used to.
I think Kickstarter projects depend more on goodwill than most of us imagine.
I didn't mean that as mutually exclusive but yes, Steam - obviously comes with DRM. Valve have so much goodwill that it isn't a problem with its users.
The Double Fine Kickstarter pitch video does a pretty good job of explaining why it can't fund an Adventure game, primarily because publishers generally won't fund anything that isn't a guaranteed success. The Double Fine kickstarter projects shows a shift in power from the publisher to the developers/players.
Ultimately it's a place where anyone can post a project and try to raise some money to make it happen. I don't think it's limited to only people who couldn't raise it otherwise.
Why can't Apple launch the iPad 3 on there? There's no reason they can't, except why would they give Kickstarter a cut of their profits when they've proven they can sell them directly with no middleman.
Comparing Double Fine to Blizzard is a little extreme. Although Double Fine has an experienced team with a long history in the industry, none of their games have been huge commercial successes, and they've had some spectacular commercial failures over the years. Most of their projects up until this one have been funded by traditional game publishers (Majesco, EA, Warner Bros., THQ, etc.) and this is a genre no one wants to touch, even at the small scale for download only titles on XBLA\PSN\Steam ($500K-$2 million range).
Afaik, Ron Gilbert has been trying to make a traditional adventure game for years and has been unable to get it funded until now.
I see your point, but I feel like the true success of any platform is achieved when people start using (in a positive way) for things you hadn't even thought of.
