Illustration by Alice Wilson

Crowdfunding websites such as kickstarter.com have created an interesting opportunity for game developers, both big and small, to produce games which otherwise might be considered “unpublishable” in direct response to fan’s wishes. Feargus Urquhart is the CEO of Obsidian Entertainment, developer of the recently Kickstarter-backed title Pillars of Eternity, which raised almost 4 million dollars in fan donations. Urquhart, in a career spanning twenty years in the games industry, has worked on games including Fallout 1 and 2, the Baldur’s Gate series, Planescape: Torment, Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and South Park: The Stick of Truth. Tn2 talks to Urquhart about Project Eternity, Kickstarter, and the state of the games industry.

 

Has the popularity of Kickstarter had an impact on the games industry?

In some parts of the industry, the impact has been pretty huge, while in other parts I don’t think it has been felt at all. The difference is mostly due to the budgets and types of games that Kickstarter has helped fund. When I look at the larger publishers (Activision, EA, 2K, and Ubisoft), they are making huge console games that can cost up to, if not more than $100m to develop. Budgets of that size just can’t be funded with crowdfunding — so the impact there is pretty much nonexistent. For independent developers looking at budgets up to $5m or $10m (if they are funding some of the game themselves), it means we can now get games funded that the publishers have not been interested in. And, we get to own what we create, which lets us build up on what we create the way we want to. I think that has helped all of us not only make great games, but set up to keep on doing that.

 

Why do you believe that projects like yours have received such unprecedented support from fans?

Over the last ten years (before Kickstarter), it has become increasingly harder to get games funded that live in this no man’s land of more than a couple million but less than twenty million. The idea is that you go big or go home when it comes to AAA console. On the other side of budgets, publishers have been funding smaller games that use licenses (Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, etc.). For gamers, that has meant that the niche or genre game that we used to make were just not being made. They weren’t being made because people didn’t want them; they just didn’t fit into the model that many publishers had created for themselves (budgets of less than $2m or budgets of more than $20m). That means there were all of these games that were not being made. Luckily a number of us stumbled into this and with the help of Kickstarter got these games funded.

 

How does the experience of working on a Kickstarter-backed game compare to the standard, publisher-controlled system, in terms of creative and practical freedom?

It has been great to have the freedom to work the way we want to work. When we need to change something about the game, we change it. More importantly, I think we have gotten better and better about how we make games. It is still many months before Pillars of Eternity comes out and we already coming close to being Alpha.

 

Why have so many of the most successful Kickstarter games been in old-school genres — such as point-and-click adventures or isometric RPGs — which have grown out of popularity?

I think it is mainly because that while they had fallen out of popularity for funding, they had not fallen out of popularity with gamers. The industry has changed a lot over the last ten years, and I think one of the biggest impacts was the “Death of the PC” that was heralded in the early 2000s. There was this rush for every developer to move over to the console, which meant certain types of games were left behind even if people still wanted them. Added to that for PC RPGs, after Black Isle, BioWare, and Troika moved on to console and went away — no one else took up the torch.

 

Is Kickstarter allowing these old styles to become relevant again, or are these titles simply playing off 90s gaming nostalgia?

I really feel that these games are still relevant, but then I’m a bit biased. What I can say is that I was asking myself that question a bit until I played Shadowrun Returns. I put a good twenty or so hours into it, had a lot of fun, and am looking forward to getting the expansion. While I am a fairly hardcore RPG player, I don’t think I’m the only one.

 

How do you feel the increased transparency and fan interaction brought about by Kickstarter has changed the way you make games?

Strangely enough it is like going back to the way we made games in the mid-90s. Back then we had forums and between us and BioWare we interacted with our fans a ton. What is different is that we do feel that we have a responsibility to keep our backers updated on what we are doing. So, we release an update pretty much every two weeks (earlier on it was once every week). A side effect of that, which I think is super interesting, is that anyone who goes to our website [eternity.obsidian.net] can go back through all the updates and get a history on how the game has been built. I don’t know if there has been that much written, filmed, and shown about a game posted publically before.

 

How do you see Kickstarter’s future and its future effect on the industry as a whole? Is Kickstarter simply a brief fad, yielding a few new games, or is this just the beginning of a new games industry?

I really hope it is not a fad. Kickstarter has really helped us realise our dream of making our own game and taking a lot more control of our own destiny, along with delivering a game that gamers are really looking forward to. I do think that Kickstarter will evolve like every new thing and that backers will expect even more transparency from us over time. As for the ultimate future of Kickstarter, I think people (like myself) want to help others out and help them directly. Kickstarter lets that happen and as long as the people who take advantage don’t ruin it for the rest of us — I think we’ll see it flourish.

 

Stretch goals have been a feature of many Kickstarter funded games. Do you feel that the additional promises made via these stretch goals could be too ambitious, or that they literally stretch the team past what they are capable of delivering on?

I think it is totally based upon the team. Some teams do a great job of understanding what the stretch goals mean when it comes to the work they have to do, while others might not have planned it out as well. When we looked at what stretch goals we could offer with Eternity, we worked to make sure we knew that we could create them. For us, we have a lot of experience (twenty years in my case alone) knowing what it takes to do things.

 

Some critics of the Stretch goal system have suggested that they are a method of blackmailing backers, withholding key features in order to squeeze more money out of the backer community. How would you respond to this?

That’s a hard one to answer in a black and white way. I think that it’s probably true to an extent, but I wouldn’t use the blackmailing term. It’s like anything in life – if you want the upgraded version then it costs more. For instance, I don’t think the Toyota dealer is blackmailing me by making me pay more for a GPS (which a lot of people would consider a necessity now). Now, when it comes to truly key features then I think backers need to look at what they are getting without the stretch goals being met – if that’s not compelling then they shouldn’t back it. If they want to see it succeed with the expanded feature set, then they should back it and help the campaign get there.