WORDS Hugo Fitzpatrick
You’re sick of mass appeal media. What you really want will never see the green light, as risk-conscience executives refuse to fund projects that aren’t guaranteed to turn a profit. A solution has been proposed in the form of “crowd-funding”: you provide the funding for the creative endeavours you are interested in. Crowd-funding hopes to solve the stagnation that is especially apparent in film and video game media, as production costs continue to rise. A personal direction or creative vision is rarely allowed to flourish, as design by committee and focus-group testing dampens out any sense of personality or originality. It then falls to the independent scenes to innovate where the big productions cannot. The issue that they face is money — and crowd-funding aims to provide it for them. Crowd-funding has been heralded as the wave of the future, but it has drawbacks of its own which are often ignored.
The popular stance is that crowd-funding is a flawless new method to fund creativity, but it is not without its shortcomings. Websites that aggregate and publicise crowd-funded projects like Indiegogo and Kickstarter both require a minimum goal to be reached before you can receive your money. If you say your project needs €10,000 and you only get €8,000 you receive none of the money. Some funding is better than no funding at all and a failed Kickstarter can leave you worse off than if you had not attempted it in the first place, with many weeks wasted on the campaign and your brand sullied.
Aggregate websites also require a lot of information about the product to be presented up front, and that limits the evolution of your vision. Creative works change over time as certain ideas don’t work, or better ones emerge. Assassin’s Creed famously started out as a sequel to Prince of Persia. If Ubisoft had run a Kickstarter for a Prince of Persia sequel there would have been no room for Assassin’s Creed to evolve from it; the people funded a sequel to Prince of Persia. Getting funding from the people who love your product can also prove problematic. They are fans, of course, and can act fanatical indeed. Notch, the developer of Minecraft received thousands comments and emails bemoaning changes he made, or complaining about not updating fast enough, throughout the development of the game. While you can phase these people out, it is them you are trying to please in the first place, and it is only natural to feel some sense of apprehension about your approach when inundated with messages vilifying it. Self doubt can ruin any personal endeavour.
Crowd-funding remains unproven. It is wonderful to see a change but unhelpful to ignore the drawbacks of the new approach. As the number of crowd-funded projects grows, so too does the number that reach fruition. As more and more products made on its back are released, this coming year will be a proving ground for the method.
